UCLA's baseball field on VA property is back in the news: From the LA Times: President Trump signed an executive order Friday directing the Department of Veterans Affairs to create a center for homeless veterans on its West Los Angeles campus. The order set a goal of housing up to 6,000 homeless veterans at the center, which Trump named the National Warrior Independence Center, and ordered federal agencies to “ensure that funds that may have been spent on housing or other services for illegal aliens are redirected to construct, establish, and maintain” it.
Trump ordered VA Secretary Doug Collins to prepare an action plan to create the housing by Jan. 1, 2028. He also directed Collins to report within 60 days on “options like expanding office hours, offering weekend appointments, and increasing the use of virtual healthcare.” ...
The order comes at a critical moment in a trail of litigation over the VA’s management of the campus. A decision is expected any day from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on a federal judge’s ruling that the VA had failed a fiduciary duty to provide housing for veterans. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered the VA to immediately create about 100 units of temporary housing on the 388-acre campus and to build more than 2,000 units of permanent and temporary housing. He also invalidated leases of portions of that land to civilian entities including UCLA and [the Brentwood] school...
In a lengthy preamble, Trump’s executive order alluded to... the closing of veterans’ housing in the 1970s and improper leases of veterans’ land that led to the two lawsuits.* ...
===
*From the Executive Order:
...The story of the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center is indicative of this failure. More than one hundred years ago, Senator John Percival Jones and Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker generously donated hundreds of acres of land that they owned in West Los Angeles on the condition that it be used to house disabled veterans. The campus once featured a chapel, billiard hall, 1,000-seat theater, and housed about 6,000 veterans, but the Federal Government has since allowed this crown jewel of veteran care to deteriorate over the last few decades.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (Department) leased parts of the property to a private school, private companies, and the baseball team of the University of California, Los Angeles, sometimes at significantly below-market prices. As of 2024, there were approximately 3,000 homeless veterans in Los Angeles, more than in any other city in the country and accounting for about 10 percent of all of America’s homeless veterans. Many of these heroes live in squalor in Los Angeles’s infamous “skid row.” ...
No comments:
Post a Comment