ODVA reconsiders Talihina closing amid appeals to ‘do the right thing’

Just when it looked as if it was simply a matter of time until veterans would be forced to vacate the aging — and financially strapped — Talihina Veterans Home by Oct. 1 and find temporary residence while awaiting the projected January 2025 opening of the Sallisaw Veterans Center, Oklahoma Senator Warren Hamilton and his legislative colleagues said with one voice, not so fast. This is America, and we take care of our veterans. We do the right thing.

That’s why Hamilton, R-McCurtain, announced last week that the decision to close the Talihina facility has been put on indefinite hold.

Senator Warren Hamilton

“The Legislature, in the person of me and some o ther legislators up there, were unhappy with that decision, and so they said, ‘Hey, we’ll come up with a different plan. We’ll put this plan on hold. We’ll work more closely with you guys and come up with a different plan that everybody can be happy with. And so that’s where we are right now,” Hamilton said in an exclusive interview following last week’s Sallisaw Chamber of Commerce Legislative Luncheon.

Citing operational challenges and financial strain that had gotten to the point of negatively impacting the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs (ODVA), the Oklahoma Veterans Commission on June 22 voted unanimously to close the Talihina Veterans Home, imposing an Oct. 1deadline for veterans to vacate the Latimer County facility.

Jennifer Bloomfield, communications director for the ODVA, said the vote to close the home was in response to a report that the facility is running at a huge deficit. Bloomfield said the agency is losing approximately half a million dollars monthly at Talihina due to low occupancy and high contract employee costs.

While closing the home by Oct. 1 would have quelled the monthly deficit, cost of shuttering the facility was expected to carry a hefty price tag itself — about $3.9 million for employee severance pay and other expenses related to workforce reduction. Keeping the facility open until the Sallisaw center opens is expected to cost the ODVA $5.4 million.

“ODVA, they did a forensic audit after Admiral [Greg] Slavonic took over, and wanted to know what was all going on and where money was going and so on and so forth,” Hamilton said, retracing the steps that culminated with the OVC decision to close Talihina.

“The auditor said, ‘Hey, Talihina’s losing money,’ which it is, and that’s fine. And then the commission met and made the decision, ‘We need to go ahead and accelerate the closing of Talihina.’ They made that decision ignorant of the legislative intent contained in the original bill, which mandated the closure of Talihina, which was, when it passed in 2018, those people that voted yes, either implicitly or explicitly said, they intended to leave it open until the last veteran had decided to leave or until the new veterans center was completed. That’s what the verbiage of the bill said.”

Reassessing our commitment

But, as Hamilton explained, the bill took a 180-degree turn from 2018 until April 2022 when Senate Bill 1814 was passed, repealing the original language Hamilton believed should be honored.

“It repealed that, and I voted against that bill in committee and on the floor,” he is quick to point out. “So I get it that, technically, we — meaning the state government — ‘can’ statutorily close that place early. However, just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean we should.

“I talked with a senior member of the Stitt administration [on June 27], and he told me, in all of our laws as Americans is baked into them basic human consciousness. If this feels wrong, we’re not supposed to do that,” Hamilton said. “This doesn’t feel right, and so we’re gonna back off on this.”

Hamilton, who was elected in 2020 to represent Haskell, Latimer, LeFlore, Pittsburg and Sequoyah counties, hopes the mandate from the original legislation will be honored.

“I’m not saying we’re gonna go ahead and leave it until Sallisaw is open — which I hope they do and I think we’ll get that to happen — but they’re not saying that yet. But what they are saying is this plan of closing it effective October 1 is on hold for now. And, hopefully, what we don’t get is a ‘Yeah, we’ve looked at all the options and that’s the best plan.’ I really hope that doesn’t happen.

“Hopefully what we can get is it’ll close when the last guy decides, of his own free will, to leave, or Sallisaw is open and he’s got a bed waiting for him in Sallisaw. The next best, a distant second, would be that we could close it in the future earlier than when Sallisaw opens, but definitely later than October 1. Anything that you can do to give people more time to react is obviously a better solution.

“But just to reiterate, I can’t say it enough, I feel like that we need to honor what we said in 2018. There’s people that would not have voted for that bill in 2018 had they known that later on we’re going to come back and change that very significant portion of it,” Hamilton said.

Occupancy dwindles

The century-old veterans home, which was originally built in 1921 as a tuberculosis sanatorium with many of the original buildings still standing, but abandoned, has been dealing with rapidly declining occupancy, which is a primary component of the facility’s current financial crunch.

The ODVA saw occupancy rates fall systemwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. On June 22 when the decision was made to close the facility Oct. 1, the Talihina Veterans Home had only 36 residents — a 21% occupancy rate for the capacity of 175 veterans. The facility had 120 residents on June 30, 2017. But since 2018 when it was announced the veterans home would eventually close, the number of residents declined to 66 by 2021. Hamilton said last week that there are now 30 residents after four left on June 27 and two left June 28.

The decision to close Talihina 16 months before Sallisaw’s opening, Hamilton surmised, was done “strictly as a cost-saving measure. We lost sight of what the original intent of constructing veterans homes even was, and that is to take care of veterans. We’re a people of integrity, and when we say we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it. We do what we say we’re going to do and we do the right thing and we don’t always put money first.”

Financial hardship

So how will the beleaguered facility continue to operate in the face of crushing debt?

“I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game,” Hamilton said in last week’s exclusive interview. “I don’t think if there’s one guy there, we’re gonna lose half a million a month. I do think that there’s probably some avenues that the administration of ODVA and Talihina Veterans Center can look at to be better fiscally responsible. And I don’t think those things have happened heretofore. And they need to, because we honor our word, and we will. It’s disappointing if that’s the corner we get back into that we’ve got to pay half a million a month” for a 4-to-1 employee-to-resident ratio.

Hamilton believes that with prudent budget strategies and cooler heads prevailing, the ODVA can devise a better plan.

“What I’m asking everybody involved to do is take a step back, take a deep breath,” the former Army pilot said. “At first glance, we see what we see. But like my old commander said, the first spot report is rarely accurate — I would add rarely complete. So you could have somebody that has incomplete information, and we don’t want to go off half cocked, moving rapidly in all kinds of different directions and accusing people of things that may or may [not be true]. We certainly don’t want to accuse somebody of something that’s not true. So before we go off half cocked, you gotta get all the facts. And I don’t think we have those right now.

“Everybody at ODVA has been very forthcoming and very much willing to listen to the point of view of so many people in the Legislature, and that is, OK, I got it that this bill from last year says that you can. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. So to put the onus back on the state, if I were in [ODVA’s] shoes, I’d say, ‘That’s fine. You sent me to go do a mission, I came up with a course of action. This is my recommendation. You have valid points. Tell me how we’re gonna crack this nut. Let’s all get in a room and figure it out, and then let’s come up with a better plan’,” Hamilton said.

Honoring our promise

Then the state senator circled back to what he sees as the foundational issue that should guide any decision related to veterans.

“This conversation, and I use that word in air quotes, this situation, this burden, this whatever it is, we wouldn’t even have this problem to negotiate — and it’s a first-world problem, which means it’s a good thing — we wouldn’t even have the situation to discuss, were it not for the sacrifice of these veterans. There are no veterans homes in Vietnam or in Argentina or anything like that. This is America, and we have veterans that we wouldn’t have a country without them, and we’re gonna take care of them. That’s what people thought when they signed up and put on a uniform. That’s the promise that the Legislature and Congress has made over and over and over. We need to do that,” Hamilton said.

“It is easy for competing priorities to become confused when the situation is tense and fluid, which this situation clearly is. We must always put our obligation to our veterans first. To put it bluntly, we wouldn’t even have this situation to consider were it not for the sacrifice and the service of these great Americans. They didn’t let us down, and we cannot let them down now,” Hamilton said in a press release sent last week.

“I am firmly convinced that everyone in Oklahoma’s government, including ODVA, both houses of the Legislature, and Governor Stitt remain committed to serving our veterans and honoring our commitments — either expressed or implied — to them. I am confident that future plans will ensure that our veterans receive the care they need, and that their lives are not unduly disrupted during this time of transition.”

Construction frustration

Hamilton praised the Sallisaw facility, which is still under construction, but expressed frustration about construction delays, which can be directly tied to distressing cost overruns that have increased by almost $22 million what was originally a $77 million project at the 90-acre site on U.S. 59 south of I-40.

“This facility, when it opens up, is going to be fantastic. It is going to be probably the best one in the entire state of Oklahoma,” Hamilton told those who attended last week’s legislative luncheon. “But I’m really disappointed that it has taken so long to get it completed.”

Then he draws a comparison to other engineering accomplishments from the past, achievements utilizing inferior technology currently in use.

“As a nation, how long did it take us to build the Hoover Dam, like nine months or something like that? It was some crazy thing. And most of it was done with wheelbarrows. [EDITOR’S NOTE: The Hoover Dam was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression.] “But here, we’ve got this fantastic site, we didn’t have to divert the Colorado River, and it’s taken us this long to get this thing up and running. It’s a disappointing situation. I wish I knew who to hold accountable, because I would, but I’m learning more and more every day.”