LIHU‘E — Two heavy hitters in the same room, and both of them were here to support Kaua‘i veterans.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki joined U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, in a meeting Thursday morning with a small room full of local veterans at the Kaua‘i Veterans Center on Kapule Highway in Lihu‘e.

“You can’t describe the feeling” of flying into the island, said the Kaua‘i-born Shinseki, a former Army general who was appointed by President Barack Obama shortly after November’s election to join his cabinet and head up the Department of Veterans Affairs.

He added that he had eaten at Tip Top Cafe Wednesday night. “It’s always good to be home.”

Akaka described the “duet” appearance as “a rare event” featuring two of the individuals primarily responsible for the federal government’s care of an estimated 20 million veterans across the United States.

“I find it a privilege to be where I am and to do what I’m doing,” Akaka said. His committee provides Congressional oversight of — and funding for — Shinseki’s department, and he said the pair have worked well together.

The meeting with Kaua‘i veterans sought to address one specific local issue — the VA’s lease on a Community Based Outpatient Clinic on Kuhio Highway near Wilcox Memorial Hospital is set to expire next year, and the Kaua‘i Veterans’ Council has asked that its proposal to build a new facility near the existing Kapule Highway complex be considered by the VA.

A spokesperson for the Department of Veterans Affairs clarified Friday evening that the Veterans’ Council, a conglomerate of various nonprofit Veterans Service Organizations, failed to meet an application deadline, but Shinseki on Thursday declined to rule out the possibility of a partnership, telling prominent Kaua‘i veteran William Honjiyo that plans should be put in place and funding secured before the VA would consider a lease.

The construction of a new CBOC could fit into a new philosophy, outlined by Shinseki Thursday, that would move his department away from big, centrally located brick-and-mortar hospitals and spread the VA’s presence wider to cover rural communities like Kaua‘i through the use of tele-health and tele-medicine for minor or routine medical procedures.

Honjiyo told Shinseki and Akaka that the proposal — complete with renderings drawn up pro bono by Westside architect Ron Agor, who said he could secure permits from the Planning Commission inside of a year — “is a project well-worth us doing” and the island needs a state-of-the-art medical center that provides one-stop service for veterans.

The proposal also earned support from Dr. James Hastings, medical center director for the VA in the Pacific Islands, who said Kaua‘i needs a new clinic and that the VA is leading the charge in a “major shift in the paradigm of healthcare delivery.”

Standing in the way is a lack of funding — Honjiyo said the building and a large adjacent parking lot would cost $4.7 million as currently designed, and the slow economy has proven to be a stumbling block in fundraising efforts.

Shinseki said federal law would not allow the VA to both contribute funding for the Veterans’ Council to construct and own the new CBOC and then also be a lesser of that facility — essentially, if the VA provides money up front, it would need to own the facility outright. He said he would put lawyers to work on it, and said later in a brief interview with The Garden Island that he could not write a “blank check.”

On a theoretical level, the secretary expressed unabashed support for the idea, saying he hoped a new Kaua‘i CBOC could be “a case study for what tele-medicine could be” and that the VA and local veterans can “make this a model for what we think we can do.”

As the conversation wrapped up, Akaka told the packed room they had witnessed something rare, saying “I didn’t know it would move this fast.”

“We’ve done a lot here in the few minutes we’ve had,” he said.

For more information, visit akaka.senate.gov or www.va.gov.

Visit www.thegardenisland.com for video from this meeting.

• Michael Levine, assistant news editor, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) or mlevine@kauaipubco.com.