7:29 p.m. EDT September 3, 2014
ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. — Veterans are still in the dark when it comes to the future of a Veterans Affairs clinic in St. Johns County.
This week county staff and VA officials had a phone meeting. However, County Administrator Jerry Cameron said he left the meeting feeling the VA is not fully aware of the options available, even after extensive communication.
Cameron said St. Johns County has offered space inside its news county Health Center on San Sebastian View to the Department of Veterans Affairs for a VA Clinic. Cameron said the VA declined it.
Seven months away from the deadline to move from its current location, there’s still no word on where the new VA clinic will go.
“I have never seen anything that makes less sense than this,” Cameron said Wednesday.
Three years ago, St. Johns County sold the property where the county’s health and human services offices and the VA clinic are currently located. Lowe’s Hardware bought the property. The idea was that all the offices would move to a new building on San Sebastian View a few miles north.
However, the VA isn’t moving to the new building.
“They’ve essentially — for all practical purposes — have done nothing,” Cameron said.
Cameron said the county has offered land on Inman Road to the VA for a temporary clinic.
“They seem to be favoring that site,” Cameron noted, “even though the county thinks that the least desirable of everything offered.”
That is because the VA would have to build an entirely new building there and it would be further away from the other county services offered in the new Health Center.
In a letter obtained by First Coast News, the VA told St. Johns County a couple weeks ago that it’s trying to find a temporary clinic location but said, “If VA is unable to move into interim space by March 31, 2015, VA is interested in continuing its occupancy of the U.S. 1 South space on a month-to month basis, until VA’s interim space is operational.”
Essentially, that delays the construction of Lowe’s.
The county replied, saying: “The VA has the care of St. Johns County’s 20,000 veterans and the community’s economic recovery compromised by this process. It is well past the time for an emergency decision.”
First Coast News has contact the VA for comment, but we have not heard back.
Cameron said it has nothing to gain by offering the VA locations for the clinic, but that the county’s veterans have a lot to lose if the VA doesn’t act soon.
“The way this is headed, the veterans themselves are going to get less than an optimal result,” he said.
A representative from the Dept. of Veterans Affairs will be in town Thursday for a town hall meeting. It will be at the Elks Lodge in St. Augustine from 1 to 2 p.m.
