I hope everyone has been enjoying what remains of their summers.
This week was an exciting week of new beginnings in our district. Monday morning, I attended the ribbon cutting for the brand-new Valley Springs Behavioral Health Hospital in Holyoke. As a cooperative effort with the Baystate Health System and LifePoint Heath, this facility will provide the greater Springfield area with critically needed beds for patients suffering from mental health issues. As chairman of the Joint Committee on Mental Health, Substance Abuse, and Recovery, I’m thrilled to welcome Valley Springs to our community and glad to have services like these available to constituents in our region.
Monday afternoon was also the official groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of the new Holyoke Veterans’ Home, where I was honored to move one of the first shovels of dirt for the project. It’s been over three years since the tragic loss of veterans during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and after much hard work and collaboration from many of my colleagues in the legislature, we finally reached an agreement to build an entirely new Home with state-of-the-art facilities to help prevent such tragedies from ever occurring again. The new Home will have almost exclusively private rooms. This new facility is a huge triumph for veteran services here in the commonwealth and I’m extremely proud to have assisted in its passage. The Home is scheduled to be completed in 2028 and I cannot wait to see the doors open to our vets and their families.
