Kentucky Health Policy Institute

This evening, April 18, the VA Hospital Site Selection staff held a public hearing at Kammerer middle school to update the selection process, and to hear comments from interested citizens. It was an interesting affair to say the least.

The session was held in the school’s gymnasium and was heavily attended. The crowd was in a rare, if not hostile mood. The presentation included at least as much of the usual bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo and procedure that frustrated people. It did not help that things started very badly from a technical perspective. The VA team’s own wireless microphone had failed, and the school’s public address system produced only unintelligible sound. Things eventually got a little better and extra time was allowed for questions in this 2 1/2 hour session.

I rather expected that the room would be packed with current veterans, but this did not appear to be the case, and only a few spoke. Of course, all who made comments made reference to their own veteran status or that of their family members. Most of us can point to the veterans in our family and we all certainly want our veterans to have access to the quality health care they deserve. With those preliminaries out of the way, the 800-pound gorilla in the room was concern about the impact of increased traffic in an intersection that is already acknowledged as overloaded. There were concerns that the studies by consultants that concluded that any increased traffic could be mitigated and managed may have been based on faulty car-counts. It was easy to make the case that traffic is bad there, and there was no offsetting discussion about how things might be improved.  There was an obvious disparity between what various studies and projections said about the traffic situation and the experience on the ground by the residents. Continue reading “Spirited Public Hearing on Brownsboro Road Site for New VA Hospital.”

Downtown boosters still hoping to derail the VA’s decision for a suburban site.

Yet another hearing is scheduled for tonight to discuss the site favored by the Veterans Administration on which to build a brand new hospital for the veterans of the region. The location is 7.5 miles from University of Louisville Hospital at the junction of the Watterson Expressway and Route 42. The land was until recently used for farming and is undeveloped. It is surrounded on one side by the Expressway, on another by commercial development, and on two sides by residential neighborhoods. A new slip exit from the Watterson will enter the site directly from the west, but to enter from the I-71 side or to depart the site will require entering the already busy intersection of Rt. 42 and the Watterson interchange in some way. Although the final real estate sale preparations and other plans are well along, opposition still exists, as evidenced by an editorial in today’s Courier-Journal, and expected opposition tonight at a public forum.  I will try to report on the meeting tomorrow.

I can understand the opposition of some of the neighbors. It is a classic not-in-my-backyard issue for them. I do not blame them; I would probably feel that way myself. They were there first. They justifiably worry about traffic, perhaps about an ugly building, but hopefully not because of the presence of the veterans and their families in their neighborhood.  Making sure that the consequences of increased traffic are adequately addressed is a reasonable thing to demand. On the other hand, some commercial development is going there in any event. The need for long-range traffic planning is a given whether there is a hospital there or not. I and the majority of the veterans themselves believe that the consequences for traffic are even more substantial at the downtown location that the newspaper and the University prefer. However, even the Courier Journal does not believe that traffic congestion is the main issue. Continue reading “Let My Veterans Go!”