March 4, 2022, brought attention-grabbing news to the roughly 2,000 patients a day who visit the VA Western New York Healthcare System and to the 2,250 employees who work for the bustling health system.
“VA proposes new $1 billion hospital at or near Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus,” reported The Buffalo News that day. But those plans changed after a nationwide VA facility realignment program stalled in the face of political opposition.
Michael Swartz, executive director of the VA Western New York Healthcare System, said a new facility could still one day be built – but that is something that would be “probably 20 to 25 years down the road.”
“Right now, that’s pretty much off the table for a new facility for Western New York,” he said.
People are also reading…
“That may be re-evaluated down the road, but they limited it to a few facilities across the country, and Western New York is not one of those,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to do what we can to continue to renovate and rebuild our structure to meet the expectations of modern health care for our vets.”
With plans for a new facility on hold, Swartz and his team are going on major needed renovations for the roughly 75-year-old Buffalo VA Medical Center on Bailey Avenue, which is where the hospital will remain for the foreseeable future.
The VA has more than $64 million worth of projects in active construction on the 1.1 million-square-foot Bailey Avenue campus and another $3.1 million in ongoing projects at the Batavia VA Medical Center.
And there are more construction awards forecast to be dished out this fiscal year, just part of tens of millions of dollars in spending projected in the next five to 10 years.
“There’s a lot of money that we’re putting into this, and I think it’s probably the biggest pot that we’ve seen in a long time,” said Bryan Silverblatt, the assistant chief of engineering for the VA Western New York Healthcare System .
While the system has always done construction and renovations, Silverblatt said the “last really, really, really, really big, big, big investment in the campus at the level of funding that we’re talking about now” was probably in the 1990s when a new building – Building 20, the campus’ research facility – was constructed on the Bailey Avenue site.
“We’re positioning ourselves for the future of health care in Western New York,” said Danielle Bergman, assistant medical center director.
How did we get here?
The plan for a new Buffalo VA Medical Center emerged from legislation passed by Congress in 2018 that required a review to examine the future health care needs of veterans and to evaluate the VA’s aging health care infrastructure.
As part of that, the VA in March 2022 released its recommendations for markets across the country. In Western New York, it recommended replacing the Buffalo VA Medical Center with a new, rightsized hospital near the Medical Campus as well as relocating and expanding the Batavia VA Medical Center’s outpatient services to a newly built facility on property the agency already owned on its Genesee County campus.
A new hospital could bring hundreds of additional employees, patients and visitors downtown every day, but the VA plan is expected to be controversial.
Those recommendations were due to be reviewed by a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed commission, which would then provide its suggestions to the president.
But the process never moved forward after a bipartisan group of 12 senators announced in June 2022 that it was opposed to the commission. The senators claimed the VA’s recommendations “would put veterans in both rural and urban areas at a disadvantage,” and said such a commission was not necessary to invest in VA health infrastructure.
And investment is necessary, considering the median age of a VA hospital is nearly 60 years, compared with just 8½ years in the private sector.
The VA recommendations from 2022 pointed out the Buffalo VA Medical Center – some sections of which don’t have air conditioning – needed $260.9 million in repairs. Furthermore, the annual operations and maintenance costs at the facility totaled about $14 million.
Christopher Hall, chief engineer of VA Western New York Healthcare System, called maintaining the campus a “huge challenge.”
“It starts with the footprint of the building, not really lining up to what you would ultimately want for modern health care,” he said. “We do the best we can with those constraints.”
Critically, the VA Western New York Healthcare System has beefed up its engineering department in recent years. The department, Silverblatt said, now totals about 100 people across the Buffalo and Batavia campuses, including 75 to 80 skilled tradespeople who are key to maintaining the old structures and executing renovation projects – such as sprucing up some spaces – that don’t require millions of dollars in federal funding.
While the funding appropriated to the VA can ebb and flow, the VA nationally has invested heavily in infrastructure over the last five years. And the VA Western New York Healthcare System has been prepared by having a long list of projects in design and ready to go.
“The more we have in the hopper, the more likely we are to get more money,” Bergman said. “We’ve really prioritized that. We’ve really worked on building up Bryan’s and Chris’ staff and getting them ready, because the word is that lots of money will be coming. And so we want to be ready to be able to transform this facility.”
And local VA leaders have a lot planned for Buffalo.
Plenty of projects
On the ninth floor of the Buffalo VA Medical Center, Ward 9C is an active work zone, its walls peeled back to reveal the guts of how things were built in the late 1940s.
The $14.2 million renovation of Ward 9C started late last year and will take up to two years to complete.
It will transform a 28-bed legacy ward – shared bathrooms, shared rooms and tight on space – and turn it into a 14-bed unit. The new rooms will each be 300 to 400 square feet with private bathrooms.
Other active projects include $26.9 million to replace outdated electrical switch gear and $20.5 million to replace the chilled water plant with an energy-efficient system, the latter job geared toward sustaining future air conditioning loads. Another $2 million is being pumped into a project to provide better access to mechanical and electrical systems in the facility’s sub-basement and another $600,000 is going toward replacing the north water main feed from the city.
While the infrastructure upgrades aren’t flashy, local VA leaders stressed those projects are critical to be able to meet the demands of modern health care, expand air conditioning and power the facility’s advanced technology, such as the equipment found in its nuclear medicine department.
“Rebuilding the infrastructure will allow us to continue to expand and improve operations here in Western New York,” Swartz said.
There are many more projects ahead, with local VA officials crafting a roadmap that takes construction out five to 10 years from now and includes plans such as a 10-to-11-story utility tower to support upcoming health information technology needs.
Nine projects for the Buffalo campus have a planned construction award in fiscal year 2024, including a project to add two levels to its current parking ramp to increase capacity.
“Obviously, parking is a huge challenge,” Swartz said. “It’s probably the No. 1 complaint we have, for both patients and employees. The parking garage expansion cannot come fast enough.”
The VA is also in the process of securing a lease to relocate its research program from Building 20 on the Bailey Avenue campus to an off-campus space that is more modern. Building 20, which was built in the 1990s and is connected to the main hospital, will then be expanded and repurposed to house surgical and critical care operations.
“It also allows us to build all those brand new services in a new location without disrupting existing services” in the main hospital building, Silverblatt said.
Looking ahead
Even when the proposal for a new facility at the Medical Campus was on the table, Swartz said the VA knew it had to rebuild the infrastructure at the Bailey Avenue campus in the near term.
Further, the VA knew it had to do something innovative to provide modern surgical and intensive care services.
The reuse of Building 20 “was really the stopgap measure to allow us to continue to provide modern health care on this campus while we waited for the new facility to be built,” Swartz said.
Even if a new Buffalo VA Medical Center is eventually built – and it definitely still could be – Swartz called it a “major project” that would probably take about 15 years to complete at a cost of at least $1.5 billion. And if the VA were built at the Medical Campus in the future, Swartz said the organization would probably need a “parking garage three to four times the size” it has now.
But for now, the Buffalo VA Medical Center is staying put at its longtime home on Bailey Avenue.
“We will renovate what we can here,” Swartz said, “and I think Building 20 gives us a great opportunity to expand the footprint to meet the needs of modern health care.”
Jon Harris can be reached at 716-849-3482 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @ByJonHarris.