July 22, 2010

Counties name vets panel

Service officer hiring continues

By Keri Brenner
The Chronicle

    Five people were tapped this week to help screen resumes for the new Wasco-Hood River counties veterans’ service officer.
    “We’re trying to arrange our first meeting as soon as I can get our schedules lined up,” said Wasco County human resources specialist Hope Vance, one of the five selection committee members along with Wasco-Hood River veterans’ advisory board members Stephen Lawrence and Mary Merrill, Wasco County Commissioner Bill Lennox and Val Conley of the Oregon Department of Veterans Affairs.
    In a related development, Hood River County Board of Commissioners voted 5-0 Monday night to appoint Jeanne Marie Davis and Lynn Guenther as Hood River representatives on a new Wasco-Hood River veterans’ advisory board.
    “We had two applicants, and we named both of them to the advisory board,” said Hood River County Executive David Meriwether.
    Hood River’s appointees will join five Wasco County advisory board members named July 7 in overseeing veterans’ services in the two counties and in helping elected officials identify area veterans’ needs.
    “I think the ad hoc committee feels that the most important thing to do right now is to get the veterans service officer hired,” said Lawrence, who is serving as de facto chair of the seven-member advisory board until it has its first meeting and draws up bylaws.
Lawrence, a Vietnam veteran and a retired trial attorney who serves on several The Dalles boards and foundations, is also a leader in an ad hoc veterans group that meets at noon Mondays at The Dalles Civic Auditorium.
    He said the group on July 12 toured the veterans’ health clinic next to the Oregon Veterans Home in The Dalles. They were unimpressed, due to the lack of full-time medical staff and minimal health services available for veterans, he said.
“Burns has a clinic that is staffed four days a week, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with doctors,” Lawrence said Wednesday. “You tell me how that happens.”
    Lawrence said he also wondered how the Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs could approve a new 9,000-square-foot veterans’ community center near the Oregon Veterans Home while ignoring complaints about the lack of medical staff at the clinic, which is operated by the federal Veterans Administration.
    “I wonder how we got relegated to a caddyshack with no staffing,” Lawrence said.
He said he had heard talk that the clinic might become part of the new community center. Neither Chuck Ritter, a medical services specialist at the VA hospital in Portland, nor John Osborn, state veterans affairs construction manager for the new community center, could be reached for comment Wednesday.
    Tentative plans on the new community center, which is partially financed by the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, call for construction to begin by next month with completion set for August 2011.
    Meanwhile, Wasco and Hood River counties have been without a veterans service officer since April, when the third person to hold the job in less than a year quit.
After that resignation, Hood River County leaders, who had managed the position until that time, asked Wasco County Board of Commissioners to take it over and conduct the search for the new officer.
    Wasco County received about 40 applications for the job by a June 30 deadline, said Tyler Stone, Wasco County administrative officer. Stone said Wednesday that he and other staff have so far screened out about a third of the total pool.
    They are giving the rest of the applications to Vance for further screening by the selection committee, Stone said.