Dear Friends:

       Right now, our veterans desperately need more health services.  They certainly don’t need private developers to lease acres of the only Veterans Affairs (VA) facility in Queens.

       Yet for the past eight years, the VA has sought to make 25 acres of the St. Albans Primary and Extended Care Center available for private development.  The VA’s justification for its plan is an outdated study, conducted when our country was only at the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In this questionable study, the VA actually projected veterans’ demand for health services to decline over 20 years, including mental-health services!  Since then, of course, veterans have unfortunately experienced the exact opposite, with staggering and alarming increases in veterans homelessness, home foreclosures, divorce, substance abuse, PTSD, and suicides.  

       I have been a vocal critic of the St. Albans development plan.  I have urged the VA to instead expand its health services for Queens and Long Island veterans at the St. Albans facility. Click here to see the letter I sent to the Secretary of the VA in December.

       Earlier this week, I was proud to speak on the House floor in successful support of an amendment that will block the VA from leasing veterans’ property at St. Albans.  We should be expanding the St. Albans facility and its services for veterans, not handing over its property to private developers! 

 

       Do you support my fight to protect St. Albans from private developers?  Tell me what you think.

Sincerely,

Gary L. Ackerman