The Florida Department of Veteran affairs is a festive place these days. Construction of the Ardie R. Copas State Veterans’ Nursing Home just crossed the one-year mark as the department starts its fourth decade. Steve Murray, communications director at the state veterans department, said construction of the state’s seventh veterans nursing home is meeting projected timelines with room to spare.
“We’re still expecting an early 2020 opening,” he said.
The state veterans department projects opening the Copas home in March next year. The department is separate from the federal Department of Veteran Affairs. However, the state is using grants from the federal VA to pay for 65 percent of the construction costs on Copas. “There’s a lot of vertical construction,” Murray said. “You can see every building now. I don’t think the roofs are on, but the walls are up.”
The ceremonial groundbreaking was in March last year. Crews showed up to start clearing the land in mid-June. A little more than three months later the ground was readied, and construction on the 121,000-square foot facility started. When completed, the facility will have 120 beds and employ about 175.
Nursing homes are – by far – the largest function of the Florida Department of Veteran Affairs. “We started the first home in Lake City in the late ’80s, right after we were formed,” Murray said.
The federal Department of Veteran Affairs and Florida Department of Veteran Affairs didn’t exist in 1988. Yes, there was a VA before then. Up until January 1989 those letters stood for Veterans Administration, which was an independent agency, not a cabinet-level department.
Veterans largely despised the Veterans Administration. It was, fairly or not, seen as ineffectual and apathetic. Congress created it in 1930, because Great War (World War I) veterans were dissatisfied with the corruption-ridden Veterans Bureau. The bureau was formed in 1921. It, in turn, had been formed by consolidating existing veterans benefits and services that were dizzyingly spread across the federal government.
By the 1980s veterans from both world wars, Korea and Vietnam were largely united in one proposal – creation of the Department of Veteran Affairs with a secretary on the president’s cabinet. An Army veteran in the White House agreed with them.
In 1988 President Ronald Reagan and Gillespie V. “Sonny” Montgomery – author of the G.I. Bill of Rights, also called the Montgomery G.I. Bill – made an irresistible push for Congress to create the cabinet-level Department of Veteran Affairs. Starting the nascent department fell to Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush.
Florida followed the national trend in 1988 to elevate veterans’ status in government. There was a veterans division within the Florida Department of Administration. But, the state’s services to veterans were spread across three agencies, which supporters of creating the Florida Department of Veteran Affairs said created inefficiencies and confusion.
The state legislature unanimously passed a bill to give Florida voters a referendum to create the option for a cabinet-reporting Florida Department of Veteran Affairs. Gov. Bob Martinez signed the bill. Florida voters supported the proposal overwhelmingly. More than two-thirds of the about 4 million voters who cast ballots on the state referendum approved creating the state veterans department.
At the time, Florida had the fifth-largest veterans population in the country. But, about 3,000 a month were moving to the Sunshine State, so it was the fastest-growing veterans population in the nation, too. Today the state has the third-largest veterans population and is projected to overtake Texas in coming years for the second largest. Murray said that growth in the 1980s was directly attributable to millions of World War II veterans who’d spent time training in Florida. There were training facilities from Pensacola to Key West.
“Our state, before and during World War II, was very rural,” he said. “We did not have a large population. We enjoyed lots of days of sunshine, lots of flat places that could be converted to runways.”
In 1989 the legislature acted on the overwhelming support for the referendum and created the Florida Department of Veteran Affairs, often called FDVA, without delay. The department couldn’t exist until the start of the fiscal year, July.
“That’s why we’re celebrating this July the 30th anniversary,” Murray said.
The new department had to quickly decide what its mission would be. Murray said one thing was clear – the FDVA wanted to do something the VA wasn’t. Because of the influx of retiring World War II veterans – the youngest of whom were in their early 60s at the time – the most obvious project was creating veterans homes. The VA didn’t have a system for providing long-term care.
The first facility the FDVA built was the Robert H. Jenkins Jr. State Veterans Domiciliary Home. It opened to residents in 1990. That facility started the tradition of naming the homes after Medal of Honor recipients with ties to their areas. With the education gained from building and staffing Jenkins, the state veterans department stretched itself. “And then we made the decision to transition from a domiciliary to skilled nursing,” Murray offered. “The next home in line was our home in Daytona Beach.”
The state veterans department opened its first 120-bed veterans nursing home in Daytona Beach three years after opening Jenkins – the Emory L. Bennett State Veterans’ Nursing Home. It did skilled nursing care, but didn’t have set-asides for patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
“Every future state veterans home included half of its beds for patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia,” Murray said.
Including Copas.
