Just off Main Street in Presque Isle is a new Veterans Administration clinic, meant to replace its smaller counterpart in Caribou and provide more services to Aroostook County veterans.
There’s just one problem. Nearly two years after its projected opening, it’s still empty.
Veterans Administration officials said this week that construction is on schedule and the clinic should open this spring. But the building was originally slated to open in 2022, then after multiple construction delays it was supposed to be done in late 2023. Now it’s been pushed into 2024. Meanwhile, the nearly 5,500 veterans in Aroostook County must wait for an opening in Caribou or travel to Bangor or Augusta for medical care.
“We don’t have any answers,” said Jim Gehring of Bridgewater, service officer for the nonprofit Aroostook Veterans Alliance. “If they’re planning on a spring opening, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that it won’t be opening in the spring. I’ve never seen a project take so long.”
The alliance has about 30 members and works to connect veterans and their families with services like medical claims and survivors benefits, he said. They also work with Homeless Services of Aroostook to relocate homeless vets.
Groundbreaking for the new community outpatient clinic happened in July 2021, attended by local veterans, service representatives and Tracye B. Davis, medical center director of the Veterans Administration Maine Healthcare System.
At that time, Roger Felix, a member of the project’s Veteran Advisory Board, said the new facility would be 50 percent larger than the Caribou clinic and would include telehealth and female-focused care. The project was to be finished in 2022.
The Caribou facility opened in 1987, the first rural Veterans Administration clinic in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
It’s been difficult to find out just what is going on with the Presque Isle project, Gehring said. Local veterans groups have had little communication from the administration on what specific services will be offered or what the timeline to opening is.
The Maine Veterans Coordinating Committee, to which he belongs, meets monthly at Togus, he said. And each month, the recap of the new clinic simply says it’s in progress. He fields calls nearly every day about the clinic and is frustrated by the lack of response from the administration, he said.
Jonathan Barczyk, public affairs specialist for the Veterans Administration Maine Healthcare System, recapped the project in April and projected it would be finished by the end of 2023. He blamed the holdup on design adjustments, labor shortages and delays in obtaining building materials.
This week, Barczyk said crews are currently at work on the building, and once construction is done they will start outfitting the facility with equipment and supplies according to administration standards.
Workers were on site Tuesday afternoon, but a crew member declined to comment about the project and would not allow photos to be taken inside the building.
“Construction of the clinic is expected to be completed this winter and the overall timeline remains on course,” Barczyk said. “We are currently anticipating opening the clinic in the spring of 2024.”
Gehring hopes that is the case, because there are gaps in care for local veterans.
The new clinic is supposed to provide more veterans with care closer to home. Sometimes they wait months for an appointment at the Caribou clinic, Gehring said. If they can be seen sooner in Bangor or at Togus, it means a three- to five-hour drive depending on where in The County they live.
It’s also difficult to attract doctors to practice in remote Aroostook County, and there’s always a provider shortage in Caribou, he said.
“The thing is, if they open the clinic, can they staff it?” he asked.
Part of the problem is that, besides the fact that Aroostook is so isolated from the rest of Maine, there’s a technology gap. More than half of The County’s vets don’t have computers, so they can’t access the website to which administration staff direct them, he said.
The alliance is working with the Maine Veterans Center in Caribou to restart information seminars that stalled during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those sessions are the only line of direct communication with the Veterans Administration that some former service men and women have, Gehring said.
The nonprofit Aroostook Veterans Alliance has about 30 members.
Gehring doesn’t think it should be such a struggle to get the administration to provide the services they’ve said are coming.
“It would really be nice if somebody from the VA drove up here and called a meeting so they could explain to everybody what’s going on and what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it and when they’re going to do it,” he said.
