Officials celebrate topping-out of Charlotte VA center

Federal and local officials on Thursday celebrated the topping-out of Charlotte’s new $104 million Veterans Affairs Health Care Center, nearing completion in southwest Charlotte.

The six-story, 420,000-square-foot facility is expected to be finished by late fall or early winter of 2015, and should start receiving patients in spring or summer of 2016.

Workers raised the last steel beam into place Thursday atop the structure, located at West Tyvola Road and Cascade Pointe Boulevard, near the Tyvola/Billy Graham Parkway interchange at Interstate 77.

Childress Klein-Cambridge Healthcare Solutions, based in Herndon, Va., is developing the health center on the 35-acre site. JE Dunn Construction Co. is the general contractor, and RPA Design is the architect.

It will be Charlotte’s second VA facility. The VA operates a 67,000-square-foot outpatient clinic at 8601 University East Drive in east Charlotte. The closest VA hospital is the W.G. (Bill) Hefner VA Medical Center in Salisbury.

The new Charlotte health center has been in the planning stages since 2009 and will help meet the area’s growing demand for health services by veterans. More than 140,000 veterans live in the Charlotte metropolitan area, about 60,000 in Mecklenburg County alone.

This story was originally published November 13, 2014 at 6:31 PM with the headline "Officials celebrate topping-out of Charlotte VA center."