For ailing veterans, endless government delays

Wayne Scott, a World War II Navy veteran and Culver City schoolteacher, began falling apart after his wife died. First it was meningitis and then Parkinson’s and dementia. His daughter, Kim Richards, kept hoping she would be notified that a bed was finally available for her father at CalVet’s West Los Angeles Veterans Home, where Scott had been on a waiting list since early 2012.

That never happened, and Scott — who spent his war years searching for enemy submarines off the coast of South America —died at home in March 2013 after his family had borrowed $125,000 to pay for his care. Then, in May, Richards got a call from the CalVet admissions office.

“They said they were calling to see if my father still wanted to be on the waiting list to get into the home. I told them he had been deceased for over a year, and they could take him off the list,” Richards said. “I wonder how many other vets have died waiting to get in.”

As I reported in my Wednesday column, the $253-million Veterans Home opened in 2010, but remains half-empty.

The official explanations are obtuse and convoluted; the bureaucracy is exasperating.

As of Sept. 5, only 196 vets were living in a home with a capacity of 396 due to long-running issues that involve licensing, permitting, funding and staffing.

And then there’s the fact that the home — designed for assisted living, skilled nursing, memory loss treatment and transitional housing — was built without a kitchen.

That is correct. No kitchen.

The state and federal departments dealing with veterans affairs had an agreement in which the feds were supposed to be responsible for the kitchen, but the deal broke down prior to completion of the building because “billing cycles” didn’t line up, in the words of a CalVet official.

That item in my Wednesday column got the attention of a reader named Betty Cooper, who got hold of me because her husband is on a waiting list to get into the home.

“When I read that, I was so livid,” said Cooper, whose husband, Paul, served aboard a Navy destroyer in the Pacific during World War II and now suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s. “I can’t believe our government would be so stupid as to build a place that’s supposed to be a home to veterans, and it doesn’t have a kitchen.”

Cooper now lives in a retirement home, but she and her daughter greeted me at the family home where Paul still lives with his daughter Vernette caring for him. When Vernette is at work, the family pays caretakers to be with him — an expense that would be covered by his VA benefits if he were admitted to the West Los Angeles Veterans Home.

Paul Cooper, a retired engineer, was wearing a USS Philip cap and he gave me a warm smile and firm handshake, but he wasn’t able to engage in conversation. Framed on his living room wall were several of his service medals and a commendation from his postwar employer, Hughes Aircraft Corp., for his work in the “development of the very successful Surveyor spacecraft which soft-landed on the moon.”

The Coopers said the family first visited the West Los Angeles home in 2012, when they realized Paul would soon need assisted living. They say they began the application process the next year, and were placed on a waiting list early this year. Vernette said she got a letter from the home a few months ago asking if she wanted her father to remain on the list, but there was no indication of when there might be an opening.

“I will never cease to be amazed at how the people who gave so much for their country are treated,” Betty Cooper wrote in an email when she first saw my column. “Medals are good, but a kitchenless ‘home’ shows no appreciation for their sacrifice.”

In the words of a CalVet spokesperson, “the home cannot increase licensed beds without a sufficient kitchen to serve additional veterans.” But you have to wonder:

Can’t anyone in Sacramento expedite a temporary waiver to at least increase the number of meals now being delivered by a food contractor?

At the very least, readers suggested, why not a caravan of food trucks?

But what remains more unfathomable is CalVet’s timetable for building a kitchen, and I kept pressing for answers after my column ran. Although the department has known about this problem since 2010, the state won’t begin the bidding process until 2015, and the earliest a kitchen can be installed is early 2016, according to CalVet spokesman Paul Sullivan.

“It is important to note that the kitchen construction is a major capital outlay public works project, which requires meeting a number of state and federal regulatory requirements” as well as approval from licensing agencies, Sullivan said Friday by email.

It is important to note that this is insane, and I hereby challenge someone in a position of authority — CalVet Secretary Peter James Gravett, Gov. Jerry Brown, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, Rep. Henry Waxman or anyone else — to wake up and do something about it.

Thousands of veterans are homeless in Los Angeles, countless more are on waiting lists to get into the West L.A. building, 200 rooms built for their care are empty, and only in the byzantine world of government bureaucracy can it be acceptable for a kitchen installation to take six years.

steve.lopez@latimes.com