The VA's South Bend years, and the clinic across the line

2012 – today

Two South Bend addresses: The federal presence in this record is a clinic with three homes, two of them South Bend's. The Department of Veterans Affairs' outpatient clinic for St. Joseph County began, in the Tribune's account of its moves, in a 7,000-square-foot building on South Ironwood Drive, south of the U.S. 20 bypass. In May 2012 it moved downtown, into the former Gates Toyota showroom at Western Avenue and William Street, across from Four Winds Field — an 18,000-square-foot facility that the South Bend Redevelopment Commission had bought and renovated for $3.3 million in January of that year, leased on to the VA's contractor at $280,000 a year. The Western Avenue move was understood at the time to be temporary, the final step before a purpose-built clinic elsewhere in the area; the clinic served South Bend from Western Avenue for five years.

The move to Mishawaka: Nearly a decade of lobbying ended in July 2015, when the VA announced a new 71,000-square-foot health care center — nearly four times the Western Avenue floor — to be built by an Indianapolis developer under a VA lease at Fir Road and Trinity Place in Mishawaka, beside Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center, at a construction cost of $38 million. Congress's own findings, in the act that later named the building, state that the VA completed construction of the St. Joseph County clinic in 2017; the clinic left Western Avenue for the new building, and South Bend's own VA tenancy ended. The boundary is printed plainly: the county's veterans hospital care now stands in Mishawaka, and what belongs to South Bend's record is the Ironwood-to-Western line and the reason the building outgrew both.

The Walorski name: On 30 September 2022 the clinic was designated by act of Congress — Public Law 117-179 — as the Jackie Walorski VA Clinic, for the congresswoman who had represented the district and pressed the VA's local cause for years. The act's findings carry the South Bend thread: Walorski was born in South Bend on 17 August 1963 and grew up there, the daughter of Martha, who worked at a local grocery store, and Raymond, an Air Force veteran and firefighter who kept an appliance store — a veterans household of the city itself. The VA's present facility record gives the clinic's standing form: the Jackie Walorski VA Clinic, formerly the St. Joseph County VA Clinic, 1540 Trinity Place, Mishawaka, offering primary care and specialty services including mental health, audiology, optometry, urology, prosthetics, laboratory and pharmacy — the county's full federal veterans medicine, four miles east of the Western Avenue showroom where the city last housed it.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune (July 2015), via the South Bend Regional Chamber — the Ironwood Drive beginning, the Western Avenue move of May 2012, the Gates showroom and the Redevelopment Commission's $3.3 million purchase and renovation, the contractor lease, the new center's 71,000 square feet, $38 million cost, Trinity Place site and lease structure, and the decade of lobbying.
2. Public Law 117-179, 136 Stat. 2112 (30 September 2022) — the designation of the Jackie Walorski VA Clinic and the congressional findings: the clinic's construction completed in 2017, and Walorski's South Bend birth and upbringing and her father's Air Force service.
3. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, facility record, Jackie Walorski VA Clinic (va.gov, Northern Indiana Health Care) — the present name, the former St. Joseph County VA Clinic name, the 1540 Trinity Place address and the services offered.