LEWISTON, Maine — U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, along with an entourage of staff from the offices of Maine’s two U.S. senators, heard directly from the man in charge as to why a Veterans Affairs counselling center in Lewiston for combat veterans and their families has been understaffed for nearly two years.
Poliquin was joined Tuesday by state Sen. Nate Libby and state Reps. Heidi Brooks and Mike Lajoie, all Lewiston Democrats.
Also attending was Lewiston Mayor Robert Macdonald, who first identified the staffing shortage to Poliquin during a meeting in early September.
Since then, officials within the VA system in Maine have moved to expedite posting the open positions, according to Steve Reeves, acting regional manager for the 42 Vet Center programs in the Northeast, who was visiting Lewiston on Tuesday to speak with Poliquin.
Reeves will spend the rest of the week visiting Maine’s other Vet Centers in Caribou, Portland, Sanford and Bangor.
Reeves, who also is the regional manager for 41 programs in the Pacific Northwest Region, is technically responsible for managing staff in a territory that stretches from Caribou to Guam in the Pacific islands, officials learned Tuesday.
In Lewiston, the Vet Center has been short by two counselors and one team leader for about 18 months — in all, the nine-member staff has been short as many as five at times during the last two years because of retirements and transfers.
At present, the centers are short three, with vacancies in the team leader role and two mental health counselors, Reeves said. He also said a candidate had been selected for the team leader role but that candidate may take up to two months to be in place.
Macdonald, a Vietnam War combat veteran who attends some group counseling at the center, said the center does good work and he and others are worried younger veterans, especially those from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, won’t have adequate access to necessary mental health counseling.
Poliquin and the other officials on hand Tuesday also learned from Reeves that at the heart of the staff shortages is a hiring system used by the VA that can take months to post, recruit screen and select candidates for open positions. The system can then take several more months before staff are hired and put to work helping veterans in their various roles.
These delays mean it could be another six months to a year before Lewiston’s center again has full staff.
Officials also learned Tuesday that Lewiston-Auburn has the highest per capita population of veterans in the state and that the Lewiston Vet Center sees about 300 veterans on a regular basis conducting about 3,500 individual and group sessions per year. With a full staff it would likely complete more than 5,000 sessions, Poliquin was told.
Reeves said part of the inability to hire qualified staff quickly may be the result of a system that’s an over-correction of a problem the VA had when it hired several unqualified staff.
“You would think when you were designing a system to hire people for these kinds of jobs you would want a system that worked faster not slower,” Poliquin said at one point in the conversation with Reeves.
Poliquin and the other officials also again heard that Reeves, who has been the acting regional manager for 14 months, works under the supervision of an acting manager who is responsible for the programs nationwide.
Poliquin credited Macdonald with being a “squeaky wheel” who spurred the state’s congressional delegation to pressure on officials in Washington and Maine.
“If the mayor had not brought this to our attention, how much longer would this have gone on?” Poliquin asked. “That’s the scary part. Not only is there a management problem with the VA in Washington, but it affects us here on the ground in Maine. … So we are heck bent on fixing the problem here in Lewiston.”
Poliquin said ultimately the top levels of VA management were responsible for allowing broken systems that are unable to quickly fill open job vacancies to persist.
Reeves said Tuesday that he believes the Vet Center programs should have their own human resources teams.
Reeves also said efforts to hire eligible veterans, who can be appointed to VA jobs more quickly, should be expanded.