County to Open Office to Help Military Vets

San Diego County’s military veterans will soon have help in acquiring benefits.

The county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved creation of a special office to serve the disadvantaged among the county’s 260,000 veterans.

The Veterans Service Office will cost the county $100,000 a year and will include a trained veterans service officer, three assistants and a clerk.

“There are many homeless veterans, people who defended this country, who are now on the streets without homes, emotionally torn and twisted, unable to deal with their problems,” said Supervisor Leon Williams, who pushed for creation of the office.

Williams said the staff of the office would be trained to find troubled veterans and direct them to the services they need, which in most cases are funded by the federal Veterans Administration.

Dan Emer, director of the Veteran’s Administration’s regional office in San Diego, said his staff oversees payments of benefits to veterans but does not have the time to reach out to those who need help but don’t know where to find it.

Charles Wilhoit, chairman of the Veterans Council of San Diego, an umbrella group for 19 veterans organizations, said he was delighted by the county’s decision to create the office.

“Now we’ll be finding more of these veterans who are in trouble and don’t know they’re entitled to benefits,” said Wilhoit, a retired Navy captain. “We need to get those people down to the regional office and get their forms filled out and their benefits coming.”

Wilhoit said he hoped the program would help reduce the number of homeless veterans, which some estimates have put at as much as 45% of the general homeless population.

San Diego at one time had a Veteran Affairs Office, but the program was abolished in 1975 and its function folded into the Department of Social Services.

Jesse Ugalde, director of the state Department of Veterans Affairs, said 53 of California’s 58 counties have such offices.