Effort to Build Smaller Vets Home Criticized

Veterans in Ventura County expressed outrage Tuesday over a state decision to build a smaller veterans home in Saticoy, while politicians involved in the project said they were satisfied with the compromise.

Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties are home to 134,000 veterans, but the new nursing home scheduled to be built on donated land along the Santa Clara River will be large enough to serve only 100 veterans at a time.

“We feel like we’ve been shafted,” said Eugene Peterson, 64, a Korean War veteran who lives in Ojai. “I think it’s outrageous that these politicians can push something through like that. This is really bad.”

The Ventura County home and another proposed for Lancaster were originally supposed to house up to 400 veterans, but their sizes were scaled down to allow for construction of a large home in West Los Angeles, where thousands more veterans live, officials said.

Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson (D-Culver City), whose district includes West Los Angeles, sponsored the bill that calls for building the three homes. It earmarks funds from a $50-million bond approved by California voters last year to pay for the state’s portion of construction costs. The entire project is expected to cost about $86 million.

With about 300,000 veterans living within a 30-mile radius of Lancaster and an additional 482,000 veterans in the rest of Los Angeles County, the Commission on California Veterans Homes appointed by Gov. Gray Davis preferred the West Los Angeles location for the larger nursing home. The commission will hold its next meeting Monday at Ventura City Hall and will tour the Saticoy site.

Ventura County veterans said they will show up in force to express their displeasure with Wesson’s bill, which is expected to be approved by the Assembly today.

“We don’t understand the logic to it,” said Chuck Bennett, chairman of the Tri-County Veterans Home Coalition, which represents 12 veterans organizations. “It’s politics of the worst kind because it’s playing with veterans and with what veterans want. This really looks like we’re being shunted off into the corner.”

Politicians who have been working to get a veterans home built in Saticoy were more circumspect.

“It’s a compromise and not the bill we wanted to see, but we could have done worse,” said Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara). “Our veterans have been waiting and waiting for many years to get what is significantly less than what we wanted and what we can accommodate.”

Ventura County Supervisor John Flynn said he was glad a home would be built in Saticoy, no matter the size.

“That’s good, I support that,” Flynn said by telephone from New York, where he is tending to county business.

Consultant Dawn Dyer, who represents Archstone Communities, the Irvine firm donating the land for the home, said a smaller center is better than none at all.

“A hundred beds and the ability to have 50 day-care spaces is a good starting point,” said Dyer, adding that she believes that many veterans from the San Fernando Valley will travel to Ventura County for health-care services rather than navigate the traffic-choked freeways of Los Angeles.

“I think 100 beds is not worth the effort,” said 78-year-old Willis Wolfe of Oxnard, who served in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. “This L.A. stuff is all politics as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know why our voice isn’t heard up there” in Sacramento.

At the urging of Jackson and state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), the Wesson package will contain a provision allowing for the expansion of the Saticoy and Lancaster nursing homes if they fill to capacity, a Wesson spokesman said.

But veteran Peterson said he will believe it when he sees it. He travels 2 1/2 hours by bus every other month to the VA Medical Center in West Los Angeles for treatment of his emphysema and the lingering effects of two heart attacks.

“What guarantee is there?” he said. “We won’t get the other 300 rooms in probably another 20 years.”

The 500-bed home in West Los Angeles will be built on the grounds of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center and will offer critically needed care for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, Wesson said.

The homes are designed to provide more nursing care and assisted living housing to veterans under an initiative sponsored by Congress, which will pay two-thirds of the construction costs, officials said.

California operates veterans homes in Barstow, Chula Vista and Yountville in Northern California. Political infighting in the Legislature has stalled progress over where to build additional homes.

Wesson’s plan stirred debate from the beginning because he introduced the idea for a nursing home in West Los Angeles well after the other projects had been proposed. The home would be financed, in part, from savings that would result from scaling back the Lancaster and Saticoy proposals.