With the opening of its new VA hospital in Lake Nona slated for next year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is considering what to do with the aging VA clinic that sits on a piece of highly valuable real estate between Winter Park and Baldwin Park near downtown Orlando. The 44-acre site includes a collection of 1970s buildings in which about 2,000 VA employees serve hundreds of thousands of local vets annually, mostly on an outpatient basis. As plans finally emerged for building Central Florida's first VA hospital in southeast Orlando, VA officials said the clinic by Lake Baldwin would close and the services provided there would move to the new site. But the VA now says the region's growing population of military veterans is likely to justify a decision by the agency to keep the Lake Baldwin property.
