Long-Awaited VA Clinic Awarded To Toms River Site

TOMS RIVER, NJ — After years of delays and false starts, a new outpatient clinic for veterans in the Ocean County area finally appears to be moving forward, after the Department of Veterans Affairs awarded a $60.7 million contract to lease a new clinic in Toms River.

The contract award, announced Friday, will pay FD Stonewater $10,057,880 to build the new James J. Howard Outpatient Clinic on Hooper Avenue at Caudina Avenue, Toms River officials said in a news release announcing the award. The VA will then lease the building from FD Stonehill for 20 years, according to the contract award.

The site, near the Seacourt Pavilion shopping center, is next to the site of the new Ocean County Social Services building. Ground was broken for the social services building on Tuesday.

"This is a big win for the veterans of Ocean County and surrounding counties because they will no longer need to find transportation to East Orange for many of their needs," Toms River Mayor Maurice Hill said Tuesday in a news release.

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"Since Day 1 in Congress, getting a new health clinic for our honorable veterans in Ocean County has been my top priority," said 3rd District Rep. Andy Kim, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee and represents Toms River and Brick. "The thousands of veterans in our community deserve a world-class facility that can give them the care they need right here in Ocean County. I’m proud of our work to deliver this new clinic and am grateful for the positive impact it will have on our veterans and our community."

The construction of the new clinic next to the new social services building, which will include the Ocean County Veterans Service Bureau, will provide "one-stop shop convenience for many of the needs of the men and women who heroically served our nation," Hill said. "It is the least we can do for them."

The new clinic will be a state-of-the-art facility with 68,000 square feet of space and have 480 parking spaces, which should alleviate issues that exist in Brick Township at the current home of the clinic, which opened in 1991.

In the years since the Howard clinic opened at the site at Route 70 and Jack Martin Boulevard in Brick, the population that's served by the 34,000-square-foot facility has risen dramatically. The clinic was built with the expectation of serving 5,000 veterans, but there are more than 35,000 veterans in Ocean County alone, according to U.S. Census data. The Howard clinic also serves veterans in Monmouth and Burlington counties.

An annex facility opened in 2015 to ease the strain, but the Brick clinic was handling more than 400 appointments a day before the coronavirus pandemic.

Plans for a new clinic were approved as a result of changes approved under the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014. That legislation resulted from extensive reports on serious failings of the VA in treating veterans, from extreme delays in access to care to sorely inadequate facilities.

The process of bidding the project started in 2016, and was scrapped once before the VA began seeking bids for a new site in 2018. The 2018 contract process, however, was abruptly canceled May 1, 2019, amid anticipation of the announcement of a new clinic. VA officials have never announced the reasons for the cancellation, and within days a new solicitation was posted, with similar specifications to the 2018 request for bids.

Brick Township officials had been lobbying the VA to keep the clinic, which had been a point of pride for the township, in Brick. Two sites in the township, including a 10-acre parcel bounded by Route 88, Jack Martin Boulevard and Burrsville Road, were proposed.

Toms River officials, in their news release about the bid award, said the VA chose the Hooper-Caudina site in 2019 but the prospective developer at that time declined the lease in early 2020.

The VA decided to restart the site selection process with a pre-solicitation on May 22, 2020. Toms River officials said the town managed to finalize a redeveloper designation with FD Stonewater in less than three weeks for the project.

Toms River officials said after the Hooper-Caudina site was chosen as a possibility, the town and FD Stonewater worked to refine it and added other parcels to the site, including property owned by Toms River Fire Company 2. Plans and artists' renderings of the site were submitted to the VA on Sept. 25, 2020, the township said.

FD Stonewater has built a number of facilities for the federal government, including VA clinics in Maryland and one in Maine, where they broke ground in July 2020.

"We have a tight schedule to deliver this important facility, but we are accustomed to navigating similar timelines, meeting the agency’s requirements, and successfully delivering specialized facilities for federal government tenants," said Claiborne Williams, one of the founding partners of FD Stonewater.

"It was a long road to get to this point, but now the real work begins," said Richard Mann, the other founding partner. "Our team is ready to get started and we are honored to participate in such an important project for our nation’s veterans and this community."

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