STAMFORD – Tom Finn and Tom Patterson were concerned enough to sound the alarm.
They reasoned that, if what they fear may happen does happen, it will be disastrous for Stamford’s military veterans.
So they called their congressmen, posted notices and started a petition warning that the federal Veterans Administration health clinic on Summer Street may close.
They will do all they can to stop it, said Finn and Patterson, two veterans’ advocates who served in the Army.
“Closing this clinic will be catastrophic. Veterans are not going to drive to West Haven for their medical care. In Fairfield County traffic, that’s an all-day affair,” Finn said. “They just won’t get their vaccinations and check-ups.”
He and Patterson work with veterans as members of Stamford’s American Legion Post 3, and as volunteers at the Stamford Veterans Resource Center in Old Town Hall downtown.
“Veterans will die,” Patterson said. “When we meet them at the resource center and see that they need services, we send them directly to the clinic on Summer Street. It’s close by. They go. If they have to get on the highway and fight traffic, they’re not going to go.”
Patterson and Finn became concerned when they began to hear from veterans that they were told at the clinic that they will not be able to schedule medical appointments after September.
Then they heard that the Connecticut division of the federal Veterans Administration is trying to get out of its lease for the clinic, housed in the Health Sciences Center building at 1275 Summer St., Finn and Patterson said.
Nothing ‘warm and fuzzy’
They said they have been trying to meet with Becky Rhoads, executive director of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System, which runs the Stamford clinic.
Steve Fischer, commander of the Stamford Veterans Council, said that, so far, it hasn’t happened.
“We were told Rhoads is out on vacation this week. She was at a conference last week,” Fischer said. “She promised to have her team set up a meeting with us down here, but we don’t have a date. The official word is that no decision has been made.”
Finn and Patterson said the same.
“We don’t know if it’s a done deal” that the Stamford clinic will close, Patterson said.
“Let’s say we don’t have a warm-and-fuzzy about it,” Finn said.
Contacted by email, Nick Savaria, community relations specialist with the VA Connecticut Healthcare System of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, was asked whether there’s a plan to close the Stamford clinic.
“The Stamford VA Community-Based Outpatient Clinic remains open and VA Connecticut Health Care System remains committed to serving veterans in Stamford and throughout the state,” Savaria wrote back Wednesday.
Asked whether “remains open” means it will not close, Savaria responded by repeating the same paragraph. Asked a second time to clarify, he did not reply.
“Does this mean they’re stalling until there is no basis for keeping the clinic open, because after September they won’t have any more patients?” Finn said.
“We just don’t know,” Patterson said.
Landlord: Clinic should stay
Finn said someone from Rhoad’s team told him the landlord of 1275 Summer St. was not cooperating with the Veterans Administration on a lease renewal.
Jonathan Turner and Rich Kremheller, property managers for the Summer Street building, said Wednesday that is not the case.
“We want them to be our tenant. We are doing all we can to hold onto them. They’ve been a tenant for 20 years,” Kremheller said. “For the last 10 years we’ve been going on one-year lease renewals. Typically we don’t get started talking about it until mid-August or early September, because their lease ends September 30.”
But they are talking about it now, including VA officials, the office of Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons, and the office of Congressman Jim Himes, who is in contact with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Kremheller said.
“We are in conversations with everyone. We are highly committed to our veterans in the Stamford area,” Kremheller said. “We like having them in the building. It’s a medical building close to the Tully Center and Stamford Hospital, so it’s a good spot for them.”
Asked what he thinks will happen to the clinic, Kremheller said, “I don’t know.”
The Veterans Administration operates many Community-Based Outpatient Clinics, or CBOCs, nationwide. Their purpose is to provide close-to-home primary care and specialty health services, including preventive care, laboratory work, refilling prescriptions, and mental health services.
In Connecticut, the Veterans Administration runs CBOCs in Stamford, Danbury, Orange, Waterbury, Newington, New London, Willimantic and Winsted. It also runs a large medical center and clinic in West Haven.
Contacted Wednesday, employees at CBOCs in Orange, West Haven, Waterbury, Willimantic and Winsted said they knew of no closings. Calls to the clinics in Danbury and Newington went into automated message systems that ended up on long holds.
Demand up as word gets out
Fischer said the VA has a structure for providing care for veterans but too often it doesn’t work.
“Veterans who are not within a 30-minute drive of a clinic are entitled to see an approved local physician,” Fischer said. “I did a lookup on the VA website for approved physicians. The closest one to Stamford that I found was in the Bronx. There were none in Connecticut that I could find.”
Clinics are needed now more than ever, Fischer said, because the 2022 PACT Act expanded VA health care and benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances.
The VA in the past has denied benefits for service-related illnesses, and veterans have a history of distrust with the agency, Patterson and Finn said.
“We’ve worked hard at the Stamford Veterans Resource Center to regain trust,” Finn said. “And now they may close the clinic? A lot of veterans don’t even know we have a clinic in Stamford. For the two years the resource center has been open, we’ve been telling them, and the number of veterans using the clinic has increased significantly.”
The clinic staff is excellent, and the mental-health services are key, Patterson said.
“We had a veteran walk into the clinic who was going to kill himself. The doctors took him right in and helped him,” Patterson said. “We have veterans who are in crisis. Things like that happen more than you think. If they take this clinic away from us, it will do tremendous harm to veterans and the city as a whole.”
There is an uptick in the number of homeless veterans, Finn said.
For “the longest time,” Finn said, “veterans have been stand-offish about seeking mental health. We’re trying to change that.”
Veterans the ones to fight
It’s not clear whether talk of closing the Stamford VA clinic is connected to the Trump administration’s plans to cut 70,000 VA jobs through layoffs and buyouts.
ProPublica reported in May that, despite Congress’ expansion of health care for veterans under the PACT Act, the VA began to eliminate employees and contracts earlier this year. The news agency reported that it obtained emails from VA hospitals and clinics, which serve about 9 million veterans in the U.S., explaining how care for veterans was being harmed.
The mayor’s office has reported that there are 3,500 veterans in Stamford and more in surrounding towns. The Stamford VA clinic is there to serve all of them, Finn and Patterson said.
Stamford, the state’s second-biggest city, “is a hub,” Patterson said. “If anything, they should expand the clinic,” he said.
He and Finn said they will fight to keep the Stamford clinic open.
“If we don’t take care of each other, no one else will,” Patterson said.
“If we don’t hold the flag up, who will?” said Finn.