Amid housing backlog for aging SC veterans, $87M state home planned for Orangeburg County
South Carolina’s next state nursing home for veterans will be in the Midlands area.
The Joint Bond Review Committee, an influential 10-member legislative body that oversees state capital improvement projects, on Tuesday approved the Department of Mental Health’s recommendation to locate its next veterans home in Orangeburg County.
With the addition of an Orangeburg County facility, the Department of Mental Health now has three veterans nursing homes in the construction pipeline and two newly-built homes nearing an opening date.
Four of the five facilities are located in the hometowns of Joint Bond Review Committee members who approved their construction.
State Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, who sits on the Joint Bond Review Committee, called the construction of a veterans facility in Orangeburg a “game changer” for the county and for veterans in the region.
“Orangeburg County brands itself as the logistics triangle because of how we are so situated, and so from a logistics standpoint it is just really going to improve access to care for veterans, not just in Orangeburg County but in Bamberg, Allendale, Clarendon, in that region,” she said. “I’m very excited about the potential that this facility will mean for Orangeburg.”
Kenisha Grimes, veterans affairs officer for Orangeburg County, said a local nursing home for veterans would be a blessing. Many of the county’s veterans who need that level of care are stuck paying out of pocket at private facilities because they can’t get a bed at the nearest state-operated homes in Walterboro and Columbia.
“They would love to be in a veteran-friendly nursing home,” she said. “But the ones who try to get there are placed on a list and sometimes end up passing before they’re accepted to either one of those homes.”
The five new state-operated veterans homes, which are slated to open over the course of the next decade, will alleviate South Carolina’s longstanding housing backlog for aging and disabled veterans by roughly doubling the number of beds available from 530 to more than 1,000.
The state is home to nearly 400,000 veterans, nearly half of whom are 65 or older.
Prior to the pandemic, the state’s existing veterans homes in Anderson, Columbia and Walterboro were all at full capacity with long waiting lists. Even today, with fewer total residents at the facilities than in March 2020, the homes maintain waiting lists, officials said.
Why Orangeburg County?
Orangeburg County was chosen as the site for the next veterans home due to its geographic location, perceived accessibility and proximity to several colleges and nursing pipeline programs.
While it ranks only 20th out of 46 counties in its projected number of veterans age 65 and older, Orangeburg either borders or is easily accessible to six of the top 13 counties expected to have the most aging veterans between 2020 and 2040, according to a Department of Mental Health analysis.
Orangeburg’s proximity to Interstate 26 — which runs through the county — and relatively central location in the state makes it accessible to coastal communities where the largest populations of aging veterans live, while still being far removed from hurricane evacuation zones.
Another selling point for the county is the assortment of colleges and universities located in or near it that a nursing home operator could tap for employees, mental health officials said. Those include South Carolina State and Claflin, both historically Black universities, and Orangeburg-Calhoun and Denmark technical colleges.
“When we think about placements for students and those types of things, it’s an opportunity that goes beyond just providing nursing care for veterans,” Cobb-Hunter said. “It also provides opportunities for workforce development and partnerships with four HBCUs in the region.”
Even though the facility likely won’t be built for at least a decade, officials are requesting approval now because of the slow and uncertain federal funding process.
If the department’s grant application gets added to the Veterans Administration’s 2023 priority funding list, federal dollars for a new veterans home could become available by 2031, mental health officials said.
The estimated cost to build a new home in 2031 is $87.3 million, with the price tag split 65-35 between federal and state dollars.
If approved, the state would be on the hook for $30.6 million, which the Department of Mental Health plans to ask for as part of next year’s capital budget request.
Status of new SC veterans homes
The Orangeburg facility joins future veterans homes in Florence, Cherokee, Sumter and Horry counties that are in various stages of completion.
The Florence and Gaffney (Cherokee County) facilities are built, but have yet to begin accepting residents. Both should be open by early next year, mental health officials said.
The state has acquired land for the Sumter home and is working with the local Veterans Affairs office on the final design phase of that project. The Department of Mental Health is preparing to solicit bids for it in January, with construction likely to get underway in late spring, said Mark Binkley, the department’s director of governmental and legislative affairs.
The agency hasn’t yet nailed down a site for the Horry County facility or been awarded federal grant money to build it, but Binkley said there’s reason to believe it will eventually receive priority funding status. It’s hard to say when federal money for the project will become available, but officials are currently projecting construction to start no later than 2028.
Aiken County, which in early 2020 had been mentioned alongside Horry as one of two potential sites for the state’s next veterans home, lost out to Orangeburg County despite being home to more than twice as many veterans.
While Aiken’s inclusion on the shortlist was due in part to its relatively high number of veterans over 65, the bigger attraction was its location in far western South Carolina, Binkley said.
At the time, the Joint Bond Review Committee was focused on locating nursing homes in all corners of the state and a facility in Aiken would have given families in that region a convenient nursing home option where none previously existed.
However, with the completion of homes in Florence and Gaffney, and projects afoot in Sumter and Horry counties, geographic diversity is now less important to the committee, Binkley said.
Orangeburg’s proximity to Berkeley, Dorchester and Charleston counties — all of which are in the top 10 in projected veteran population over age 65 — paired with its distance from coastal evacuation zones bumped it ahead of Aiken, he said.
Cobb-Hunter said she didn’t believe Orangeburg had been chosen over Aiken, so much as mental health officials had continued their review process, which included both counties, and rendered a decision based on certain criteria.
She said she didn’t speak with mental health officials about placing a new veterans facility in her county, but that as a member of the Joint Bond Review Committee who represents Orangeburg, she naturally advocates for the county any chance she gets.
“I didn’t have a conversation with Mental Health, but I have certainly made it clear for at least five years now that Orangeburg County, given our population, deserved to have a facility where our residents didn’t have to drive so very far for care, and families didn’t have to drive so far to visit them,” she said.
This story was originally published December 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Amid housing backlog for aging SC veterans, $87M state home planned for Orangeburg County."