VA dedicates additions, renovations at Wade Park campus
Plain Dealer – Looking a little like a kid at Christmas, Susan Fuehrer, director of the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, sized up the audience who came Monday morning for dedication of a half-billion dollars’ worth of additions and renovations to the VA’s Wade Park campus.
“So, what do you think?” she asked the crowd of about 250 people who had assembled in the dining hall of one of those additions — a 122-bed domiciliary for homeless veterans, created in partnership with the Volunteers of America.
Fuehrer got her answer in a round of enthusiastic applause.
There was enthusiasm to spare in the two-hour dedication of a complex that also includes a new 2,080-car parking garage, 135,000-square-foot administration building and an eight-story tower with 222 patient beds. The facilities both add new services and replace those formerly offered at the Brecksville campus, which is being shut down.
It was a day that “fulfills past hopes and creates future dreams,” as Robert Myers-Bradley, medical center chaplain, said in his invocation.
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of the slate of speakers, admitted he once was not a fan of shutting down the Brecksville campus, but noted, “I understand today why it has to be done. It does symbolize a new future for veterans’ health care.”
