When the new veterans hospital in Aurora finally opens sometime this summer – if that’s when it does in fact open – it should forever be remembered as one heck of a classic showcase of government waste.

Delayed for years and vastly beyond its budget, the Department of Veterans Affairs was to announce later this month that the Aurora facility’s construction was wrapping up. But according to congressional documents obtained by The Denver Post’s Washington correspondent, Mark K. Matthews, any such announcement will have to come with a lot of eye-rolling. Much work in the form of repairs and re-dos remains, hiring to staff the facility is behind schedule in the metro area’s tight labor market, and attempts in 2015 to keep costs from looking any more ridiculous are coming back to haunt the facility – and will do so for years to come – wasting millions of dollars more.

What an insult to our veterans and taxpayers that this project, which understandably seeks to replace the aging current VA hospital campus in Denver, has become such a boondoggle.

Read more at The Denver Post.