After years of promises and blueprints gathering dust, veterans in eastern Washington finally have a concrete site and a target year. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) picked a 12-acre lot next to Trios Health Southridge Hospital in Kennewick for a new community clinic.
The new veterans’ healthcare building will span 130,000 square feet. That’s more than thirteen times the size of the current VA clinic in Richland. The difference is huge. The existing clinic, squeezed inside the Federal Building in Richland, is barely 9,800 square feet.
Farewell to the Old Cramped Veterans Healthcare Building
Veterans have griped for years about cramped spaces, long waits, and having to drive all the way to Walla Walla for anything beyond basic checkups. “Now it’s like going from a repair garage to a real hospital,” said a former Marine who asked to keep his name out of it.
State environmental policy act documents show the new building will have up to 700 parking spots. Ryan Companies US Inc. is handling construction. The property sits south of Trios Hospital, bounded by Highway 395 on the east, Ridgeline Drive on the south, and Plaza Way on the west. Construction is supposed to start in October and wrap up by late summer 2028, which means patients would walk through the doors sometime in 2029.
The Jump in Square Footage to Serve Veterans
The current Richland facility serves about 9,000 veterans enrolled in VA health services across Tri-Cities, eastern Washington, and parts of Oregon. The new place was designed to handle that load and then some.
In a 2025 interview, the VA said new specialties could include radiology, optometry, dentistry, audiology, prosthetics, home-based primary care, lab, and pharmacy services. About 250 people would work there.
The political fight behind this had two key players, even though they’re from opposite sides. Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, and Representative Dan Newhouse, a Washington Republican, both pushed for funding. They know the region’s veteran population keeps growing, and until now many of them had to drag themselves to Walla Walla or Spokane for decent specialty care.
Healthcare for the Tri-Cities Metro Area Veterans
Newhouse called the planned new clinic a “historic investment” that would revitalize veteran care in the Tri-Cities metro area. Murray went beyond the health angle. She said the clinic wouldn’t just be a “game changer,” letting veterans get more medical care close to home, but would also bring jobs to Tri-Cities as they staff it up.
There’s some quiet skepticism among regulars at the Richland clinic. A few veterans remember past promises that fizzled. But having a signed construction contract, a purchased piece of land, and actual dates in environmental documents gives them something solid to hold onto. “When I see bulldozers moving dirt, I’ll celebrate,” an Iraq war vet said on a local online forum.
Until 2029 rolls around, those 9,000 veterans will keep using the cramped federal building in Richland or making that hour-and-a-half drive to Walla Walla. But now they know there’s a patch of ground two blocks from Trios Southridge that in a few years will change everything about how this region treats the people who wore the uniform.
