Welcome Home - A Podcast for Veterans, About Veterans, By Veterans

Leading the Way: Commissioner Chuck Zingler on Transforming Veteran Services in Virginia

Larry Zilliox Season 3 Episode 89

Join us as we welcome Chuck Zingler, the dynamic Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Veteran Services, who takes us on an extraordinary journey from his early days enlisting in the Navy to the pivotal role he plays today. Inspired by the disciplined footsteps of his Marine father, Chuck's career is a testament to resilience and leadership, having worked for influential figures like Colin Powell during critical times in history. Through engaging stories of high-stakes missions and teamwork, Chuck shares the pivotal moments that shaped his path and fueled his unwavering passion for veteran services.

In this compelling episode, we promise to unlock the innovative strategies reshaping veteran services in Virginia. With nearly 700,000 veterans in the state, the challenge of ensuring they're all aware of available resources is more pressing than ever. Discover how the Virginia Department of Veteran Services is redefining outreach and support, especially in the wake of COVID-19, by creating a "gold standard digital hub" to connect veterans with essential services. We explore the power of community partnerships, such as those with Combined Arms, in building a cohesive support network that adapts to the unique needs of each veteran.

As we progress, we delve into the ambitious infrastructure expansion efforts underway, designed to enhance the lives of veterans and their families. From the Puller Center's development into a world-class care facility to addressing pressing issues like food insecurity and childcare shortages, this episode offers a comprehensive look at the initiatives making a tangible difference. Learn how the Virginia Veterans Network is facilitating access to crucial resources, ensuring that those who have served are supported thoroughly and effectively. Whether it's accessing critical documents online or initiatives for employment transitions, Chuck Zingler and his team are dedicated to improving the lives of veterans across Virginia, ensuring a brighter future for all who served.

Larry Zilliox:

Good morning. I'm Larry Zilliox, Director of Culinary Services here at the Warrior Retreat at Bull Run, and welcome to Season 3 of the Welcome Home podcast, really excited that we have a very special guest this week. Chuck Zingler, the Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Veteran Services, has joined us for the first episode of 2025. So, commissioner, welcome to the podcast.

Chuck Zingler:

Thank you so much, Larry. I'm really pleased and privileged to be here.

Larry Zilliox:

Well, I appreciate you taking the time to come up from Richmond and sit down with us. I'm really excited to get into a lot of the services that your organization offers. But first, if you would just tell us a little bit about your military service background, Well, thank you.

Chuck Zingler:

I enlisted in 1975, so a long time ago and it was something that was pretty common in my family my dad a Marine, korean War era Marine and kind of my idol going up a football coach and a teacher. And so as I was looking to figure out where I was going to go to school and what I was going to do, his experience was this is a good place to kind of get yourself and your head together and start to build a plan. That translated eventually into going to the Naval Academy, still curious as to where my journey was going to go. But once you got through the Academy and into the service and working alongside really great leaders and then great partners and subordinates, and it became, you know, a profession that I loved. And so I was an intelligence professional and I kind of grew into operational support, whether it was special warfare people, whether it was targeting for aviators in conflicts. It was something I loved and my Africa was kind of a journey, but something that I loved and something that my family put up with.

Larry Zilliox:

So real quick you entered the academy through the Navy. You weren't a Marine officer.

Chuck Zingler:

No, I chose. I was colorblind, so my choices were somewhat limited and I considered the Marine Corps. I considered supply Corps, but I had a hero at the Academy who was chasing down downed aviators in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam conflict and he became a mentor of mine while I was at Annapolis and I was fortunate enough to have a selection and that's what I chose to do and, like much in my life, that was a very fortunate selection and it turned out better than maybe the plan was a plan, but it wound up better than I could have hoped.

Larry Zilliox:

And so you leave the academy, you're in the Navy. What's your first duty station?

Chuck Zingler:

So, from the young kid that thought he was going to stay away from sea duty, I became probably the first member of my class to go to sea, because our training was very limited and I went to a squadron an A7 squadron getting ready to deploy. My first assignment was about 32 months. We were deployed. About 25 of those months, two deployments, two sets of workups, and it was thrilling. And um, we had, uh, several operational missions to do and and you got to see it at the height and um, and that told me that I wanted to do more. Right, and you made it a career. Yeah, I don't think initially, my, it was. I want to do this and I want to find out what it's like.

Chuck Zingler:

I took hard jobs and so I never had to worry about being bored and kind of making a choice that you go to sea and then you go to shore and then you go back to sea. I found it fascinating, but mostly because you were never bored. You sacrificed a lot. God knows that your family sacrifices a lot, but there was no question that you were doing something that was important. You were learning and it was stretching you. You were working with some of the most phenomenal leaders, and then you had a chance to build high-performing teams, which I think, whether you're in business, whether you're running a school or a restaurant, it's never you, it's how good is the team? You're only as good as your weakest element. So I had a lot of lessons and I always felt like I was learning.

Larry Zilliox:

Yeah, looking back now, what is your favorite assignment? Oh my, gosh.

Chuck Zingler:

Well, I'm not going to give you one answer. I worked at a very for a junior officer, for a junior officer, a job in the Pentagon, briefing our leaders. You would go into work at 6 o'clock at night and you'd be prepared to deliver the brief for the admirals, the secretaries of the Navy, at 8 o'clock in the morning and then you'd leave at 9.30. So for the whole week you were there from 6 pm until 10 am, but you did so much work to make sure they knew what was going on in the world. Just that process of how hard you needed not just to get the stories right, to be prepared to answer questions, was remarkable, and building the reputation, being able to handle that.

Chuck Zingler:

I was asked to go to work for President Reagan and run the Situation Room. My boss was a guy by the name of Colin Powell. Again, watching what goes on at that level was also humbling, and the pressure was never be unprepared. But in the end the most challenging and maybe rewarding jobs was being away from the flagpole. Where it's you.

Chuck Zingler:

You don't have a thousand leaders to get it right. You're on the edge, with people on the ground or people on a ship or people in a command center, trying to get dozens of things right every day and do well for the men and women that were on the front lines. You know, more than protecting our country but giving the opportunity for liberty in the places where nasty things are happening and I think those to me were fulfilling. But when I think through my career and the things that kind of still make the hair stand up on my arm was when our sailors and soldiers would go out on liberty and before they went out at night to have fun they would build a roof on a senior living home or a dilapidated church. They'd reface the side of a building or pick out weeds.

Chuck Zingler:

Or when we took a band into ports on the USS Iowa, which is significant to World War II World War II where Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill had and the songs for those from that era they would play and people would be walk onto that ship with tears in their eyes, knowing that those American soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen earned them freedom. And it gave you context to what our men and women that wear the uniform today or will wear the uniform tomorrow will do. So I didn't do that. You know the hundreds of people that walk through your doors or that walk in the streets or maybe have found poor luck or misfortune and are sitting out with a cup on a corner. They all represent the men and women that earned us those kind of liberties and freedoms. Sure, sure.

Larry Zilliox:

So how many years were you in?

Chuck Zingler:

75 through 2007.

Larry Zilliox:

Oh, okay.

Chuck Zingler:

So 31 in a few months, wow. But some of that was school and other things. But I spent a lot of time and now get to serve those that serve.

Larry Zilliox:

Yeah.

Chuck Zingler:

It's a real privilege.

Larry Zilliox:

So you come out, you're in the private sector for a while, yeah, and then you get a call from Governor Youngkin, from his team, yeah.

Chuck Zingler:

And what's that? Like A surprise. You never know what's going to happen, right, it's one of the great things in this country, whether you serve or you don't, that there's just so much going on and we all are living in our own stovepipe, right. And so I didn't know what the Department of Veteran Services in each of our states really did. We know about the VA and his team first did the interviews and the most remarkable part about meeting the secretaries of administration or of our security secretary here in Virginia, or the secretary for veterans and defense affairs, and all those reminded me a lot of the Reagan administration, where their attitude was remarkable, their enthusiasm, their energy In every business that you know. When you see people that are that energetic and they look at every problem as a challenge, not with disdain or frustration, you can do almost anything. Sure, this country has been all about that. So the first thing I saw was that the team, not even knowing the job, it was kind of fruit that I thought would be exciting to be a part of.

Larry Zilliox:

Yeah.

Chuck Zingler:

And then I met with our governor a week before I was to show up for the final interview and, not surprising, he's more than impressive. He's aspirational, he's better as the task gets harder. We walked in to have breakfast very, very early in the morning in a hotel and he said this is the first time I've walked through the front door. And I kind of was and he said because I usually go through the back door, through the kitchen door, because that's where you find the veterans. They don't walk into hotels like this through the front door. They're working. And I thought that was an interesting way to introduce what he's about and I haven't been disappointed yet Every time you see him. It's a hard job. I don't know what those days are like, but I know he is very quick to pick up on needs and ways to solve problems and when he gives you that kind of responsibility and the ability to find ways to build things that are great. That was the task and I've been privileged now for a year to see if we can continue to get better.

Larry Zilliox:

So you arrived for work and what did you find? Was you thought at the time going to be the most challenging thing?

Chuck Zingler:

for you. That's a really good question. First of all, I had a great turnover. My predecessor was a remarkable soldier and leader who had a very different experience. He was severely injured in Iraq and I learned a lot from him, but he was far better prepared for understanding what a veteran in despair really needed to get and how they were needed to be served by the VA or by the Department of Veterans Services here in the Commonwealth, and so I used that time to understand the organization and understand the mission.

Chuck Zingler:

The biggest surprise happened late in January, when I knew all the facts and figures. We have nearly 700,000 veterans here in Virginia and if you count you know the number of family members over a million of their spouses or former spouses and children and survivors. We got a couple million worth of constituents. One in three know about us and the Department of Veterans Services in Virginia alone will celebrate its centennial in three years. So we have a hundred year old organization in a state that embraces military and veterans, and two thirds don't know about us is stunning to me, and it quickly became the first challenge how are we going to fix that, or how are we going to become more well-known? And I'm sure that there are significant numbers of our veteran population because we are givers, not takers, that say, chuck Zingler did not have a bad or a significant catastrophic incident.

Larry Zilliox:

And.

Chuck Zingler:

I'm almost still whole right. My aches and pains are easily tradable for 30 brilliant years of the joy that I had serving our country. But not everyone is like that. So get me out of the way. Take care of the others. Take care of somebody else first, and that's part of it, but I think there's also those that you made a promise, a contract, you serve.

Chuck Zingler:

We're going to take care of your every need, and the system is not perfect, like much in our country, and so there are people that become discouraged or maybe don't believe anymore. And so how do you reach through them? Right? The people that raised their hand to go to Vietnam and were treated as poorly as they were for serving in that difficult time. And every one of these generations of veterans go through a very different experience, and not all of them are good. So I think the fact that every one of our veterans is like and family members is like a fingerprint, and we love to say here that we value veterans.

Chuck Zingler:

And I think our state, if you look at us 97 years of the Department of Veterans Services shows how much our legislators and our executives care about our veterans.

Chuck Zingler:

To now have this organization and I have well over a thousand people to deliver services throughout the various periods of a veteran's journey Just shows how much we care about where we got so far to go, and so that's kind of been my purpose is how do we continue to show our veterans how much we care? How do we continue to show our veterans how much we care? How do I continue to take a great organization of leaders and staff, personnel, headquarters personnel, cemetery personnel, care centers, personnel transition for those in despair, that give counseling and drug addiction services and those that get claims done the way we do, with the success that no other state has been able to do? How do we continue to lean forward to get better? And so that to me is like any other business, right Like any school or you just can't do the same things you've always done, that you kind of find a new ways and new ideas and find ways to team more. And I think coming out of COVID, where we all scattered to the wind, is also a challenge is how do we find new ways to get better and certainly I'm better by working shoulder to shoulder with the headquarters team or getting out to the veterans groups and the nearly 50 operating locations that I have across this great state.

Larry Zilliox:

So do you find it's sort of a hybrid approach now coming out of COVID, that's, you know, with Zoom and all these other technological advances for communicating, and you know it's not going to be quite the same as it was, but you can do sort of a hybrid approach to that what's working for you.

Chuck Zingler:

Well, yeah, the governor came aboard and started using this term for a gold standard digital hub and it was very clear that he believed, without being a veteran, that this way of reaching people which I'm a dinosaur, I'm not familiar with all the Instagrams and Facebooks and all the other different things this is also a new experience.

Larry Zilliox:

Yeah.

Chuck Zingler:

It's not what you say, it's what people hear, and I would modify that it's not what or how you talk, it's how people listen, and so this technology that we're on today does reach people, and so outreach, which is such a big part of my challenge, becomes a new way of doing business. This legislature and executive can't buy me enough people to go from reaching one third of the veteran community to two thirds or more. You'll never be able to afford that many carbon units, as we say. So the Virginia Veterans Network, which is our new release of this gold standard digital hub or this kind of technology, or finding ways to reach people where they go for information or knowledge, and so those ideas are everything, for you know, finding the VFWs and the American Legion posts or the community centers or the churches or the veterans bars where they go to meet, because we are a community group.

Chuck Zingler:

Those sailors and those airmen and those soldiers go find one another in places and where they share information. There's an E9 group that I go spend time with on the first Saturday in every month at a bar for a Saturday morning breakfast. It's not a bar event, but it is a community gathering of these great men and women. That's a great way to listen, learn and then maybe to provide some information that is also new to them that they can spread to their community. So to your question, I think not Chuck Zingler, but our organization needs to continue to explore new ways to reach. And the real challenge here in Virginia is it's a very big state with very cultural differences.

Larry Zilliox:

People don't realize how big the state is, how long it takes to drive from Northern Virginia down to Bristol. Virginia is nine hours easily.

Chuck Zingler:

The southwestern point, I have an office in a place called Big Stone Gap. Oh yeah, big Stone Gap is closer to five or six other state capitals than it is to Richmond, virginia, and their access to high-speed internet or you know, the technology access that they might have is very different than in Arlington or in Virginia Beach and it's different in Petersburg or Greenville or, you know, northern NAC even. It's just very it's a grand state and we think it's the best state for a veteran to live or work or raise their family. But we have to make sure that we have a lot of arrows in our quiver to get them information and then, more importantly, serve them where they are and how they need to be served Well.

Larry Zilliox:

I really think the Virginia Veterans Network is really going to be key to that, because if somebody has access to the internet, that's all they need. Now it may be slower in some places than it is in other places, but you just got to get on and you just got to sign up and this is. This is just such a great project. So can you tell us a little bit about how the network came about? And for our listeners, this is an online resource directory. Essentially, it's a partnership with a nonprofit called Combined Arms, based out of Houston, texas, long history of associating with some well-known national veteran service organizations. So isn't a fly-by-night organization by any means. But how did you guys come up with this and decide? You know this is really what will help us. Well, thank you.

Chuck Zingler:

Juan, Governor Glenn Youngkin I wasn't part of the administration then either before he walked aboard or shortly thereafter said here's this gold standard digital hub and we're going to bring it to life. And it was nothing more than that, and my predecessor and a great team started this shortly before I came aboard and then it was handed over and with combined arms that had done what they do in two other occasions, one in Texas and then in South Carolina, built this resource access portal, if you will, of these national organizations, and it gave us a model to start with. And most of those organizations go to those in real need. And so you think about the serving veterans that are out front that we see every day on commercials. We're there in despair. Homelessness has found them where they're in despair, Homelessness has found them. The PTSD and the critical brain injury, or maybe they've lost their job, become addicted.

Chuck Zingler:

And those organizations, if you will, if you will in today without some way to make this organized and to reach is little different in my mind than a digital Sunday, new Warriors or you see some of these brilliant ideas and giving organizations.

Chuck Zingler:

But how do I reach them and is it the right fit for me?

Chuck Zingler:

And so, through Combined Arms and their portals in those two states, we feel that we had a start of getting national organizations and now we partner with many of the statewide organizations that also to give those senior veterans that maybe can't drive anymore access to rideshare that can get them to an appointment.

Chuck Zingler:

We now have in Virginia six community veteran engagement boards that we think we can soon bring them into this network. So you'll have national organizations, you'll have statewide organizations that will continue to grow and soon we can have community-based organizations in Loudoun County to the city of Norfolk wants to participate, petersburg and all over. We'll have a horse blanket, if you will, of community veteran organizations that can go through the soup kitchens or the homeless shelters and the ride shares or the despair peer counseling services. That can now give you many choices and hopefully not make it as difficult to figure out where I am. I mean, the number of great programs alone that deal with suicide and opioid addiction are more than a few, but the number of seats at any one time are finite are more than a few, but the number of seats at any one time are finite.

Chuck Zingler:

We have been doing a relationship course, a great course for those that, for whatever reason, are finding the stress of the separation through a marriage or coming home and now being stressed by trying to find a job starts fracturing the family. Well, this course that we teach, if it's at the War Memorial in Richmond and you're in Bristol, virginia, as you say, you don't have access to do that. The number of seats are finite as well. So what do you do when you can't get there? This technology allows us maybe to put that course on a TED Talks or a YouTube video. Or how do you deal with something when you're waiting for that seat at that 27-week opioid addiction program to detoxify and to get well again? And we're very bullish that the opportunities that we can provide for the whole lifetime.

Chuck Zingler:

We had a. My predecessor had a study done and we had a year long study on where should our priorities be focused and that was delivered to me in the first week after I took this position in last January and it said where we first need to go is bring more veterans to Virginia, keep more veterans in Virginia and raise the floor and the ceiling of the economic opportunity for veterans. The special warfare community has a program through the Hope Foundation to get employment when our special operators get through their careers and they did a survey and they found that 90% of our special operators Navy SEALs and these rangers and the most talented and the most engaged right they become doctors when they get out and they are fearless and they can do anything. They found that transition and finding the right employment is more stressful than a combat deployment 90% more stressful because they've prepared for everything else and far too often our service members and their families know that it's time. A year from now or two years from now, kids are getting ready to go to school. We want to keep them. We've moved 11 times. That was my experience. I moved my kids 11 times. They've sacrificed. It's time for us to pay them and give them.

Chuck Zingler:

But it's hard and it's not the same and the skills might not be well understood and the value. You might have to take some humble pie that you got to learn all over again and you've got to compete all over again. And so they have a program for employment transition. Go on to militarycom and they have great transition training programs to get you ready.

Chuck Zingler:

We go through a TAP class that puts someone without a college education with someone that might have two degrees, someone that wants to be a blue-collar, this or a welder, with someone that wants to start their own business, and the transition course is the lowest common denominator and it really doesn't prepare anyone, let alone any large group of them, for what their individual program should be. So we think that to keep more people here and to draw people into this great state is we're now the number one state in the country for business. We've actually grown population for the first time in 10 years. So those new companies that are coming to Virginia need our veterans and their spouses and their family members to build the right kind of workforce, and we think we owe them not a job but a career, not underemployment but full employment. So that's also there through this network, and so I think that's what the Virginia Veterans Network can do for the state of Virginia.

Larry Zilliox:

Well, I want to tell our listeners we're going to have a link to it in the show notes. You could easily just Google Virginia Veterans Network. It'll get you there, everybody. If you're a resident of Virginia and you're a veteran, you need to sign up for it. There's just no doubt about it. It's free. It'll get you there, everybody. If you're a resident of Virginia and you're a veteran, you need to sign up for it. There's just no doubt about it. It's free. It took me nine minutes and 28 seconds to sign up.

Larry Zilliox:

I will tell you, though, you want to have your dates of service already to go in, because that's part of the questionnaire that you're going to go through. So, instead of stopping in the middle of this and then trying to find those dates, just look at your old DD-214, have those dates ready. But it's painless, you can get through it pretty quickly, and it's a great resource directory. One of the things that's really special about it is that the resources are vetted and they are regional and they're for the veteran in the sense that you know. There's a lot of directories out there. One that comes to mind is National Resource Directory from the Defense Health Agency, and it has thousands and thousands of organizations listed. The problem with it is, when I do a search for something locally, I get organizations for Iowa and Texas, because when they entered their information they fancied themselves national organizations, and then they come up in my search results. That's not going to happen here.

Larry Zilliox:

With the Virginia Veterans Network, you are going to get resources tailored to you, and what's great is you just don't get an address and a phone number. It connects you with that organization and then that organization reaches out to you, and so I just think it's a novel approach to doing things. I think it's going to work better than pretty much anything else I've seen out there, and I really encourage listeners to sign up for it. Look, you might think you don't need these resources right now, and that might be true, but when you do need one, that's not the time to try and be signing up and and figuring things out. Just take your time, do it now and, you know, tuck that username and password away for when you need it.

Larry Zilliox:

But I'm telling you this is a great resource that the Virginia Department of Veteran Services is offering all the veterans in Virginia at no cost. It's really something. What do you see, is the number one issue that veterans have in Virginia that your organization addresses most. Is it food insecurity? Is it housing I imagine housing is a big issue Job placement or is it a combination of a number of things?

Chuck Zingler:

I think it is a combination. And first I want to thank you for your last piece about the importance here. There is no service on this network that we charge for. They're all free and, to your point, we don't want you to know us when you're in crisis. We will answer you when you're in crisis.

Chuck Zingler:

But we think, when you come on to this, if it's just to register, and not only does the service member want to register, we think the spouse wants to register as well as you can, as the spouse of a veteran, the survivor of a veteran, and we want even to get those veterans that are or excuse me, those service members that are thinking of leaving, or those veterans are thinking of leaving Arkansas or Florida or New Jersey or wherever, to come here. But to your point, larry, if it's just to peruse the site and see where deals to get onto amusement centers or movies or concerts or a kayaking club, because it can serve you and put you into a community so that you know things that, when you are seeing a bump in your road, can learn about us. So, whether it's finding, how can I get my DD-214 online, you can get that from this site. You can get your. What's the value of having a veteran status on my driver's license and how do I get that? You can get that through our site, and so we want this to be a site that you and your family makes common practice of. But what do they need? Absolutely, in crisis, it's late and they need food stability or they have a family member that's met crisis. That's critical.

Chuck Zingler:

When I go to all the base commanders and there's a conference quarterly that we attend childcare. With the economy the way it was, the rise in rental or housing costs, the importance for a two-parent family to both have employment has become more significant. They can't if there's no childcare, a single-parent family, these things are terribly critical. When I went to the last conference of our base commanders, the average waiting list for childcare in and around our bases is between three and 400. So we would like to make that an entrepreneurial priority where we can find a new childcare profession, where we can find a new child care profession where we can train and then let them get out into the communities.

Chuck Zingler:

And we understand it's not solely a veteran issue. But, boy, if we could put those around where veterans know where they can access child care services, where we can get licensure for people moving into the state that have had that background and we can turn that into a growing area of service, that we'd be able to do that and those are some of the big problems that we have to solve. So, when you're looking, there's still a big need to re-adjudicate benefits claims that have not been supported and we have lawyers to do that. We can make this accessible to them through the Virginia Veterans Network. We've talked about those to spare services and access to these state and national resources and I think still the employment transition piece is really big because they don't start early enough.

Larry Zilliox:

Well again, listeners. All the contact information is going to be in the show notes. One last question, and it really has to do with our local veterans here in the Northern Virginia area. But what's up with the Puller Center?

Chuck Zingler:

Well, we think we're on a glide slope to finish this. I've been there many times and I've met with the team that manages it from the government standpoint and I've met with the contractors that have been in as transparent as I can be. Covid hit it hard and the finding a bevy of qualified contractors that had a full workforce was not the best to any industry, but especially to building contractors at that time. So I think the deck was stacked against a contractor and perhaps they didn't have all the talent both quantity and quality as they competed for subcontractors. They'd have one choice, not four choices, not an excuse. Have one choice, not four choices, not an excuse.

Chuck Zingler:

And when I first came on board and we started visiting, it was a series of excuses, of not wonderful stories. I don't want to talk much about that because we are now going through a process to get back the funds that were misspent furniture that was purchased too early, people that were hired too early, and the government is working to get recompensated for those expenses. We do know that they're in the final stage of finishing now we expect to take over, for that in the late spring is if things work out, then we'll have to go through getting all the equipment and the rehab equipment, the beds and everything furnished and the staff trained. New center that opened last December in Virginia Beach. You'll go through growing, getting inspection, making sure that we're delivering services, then getting certified for the various Medicare, Medicaid.

Chuck Zingler:

So we think in the summer and fall you'll see this place come to life. We will celebrate it. Having been to all of our care centers, they are remarkable and we're excited for the opening of Puller and Fauquier and Loudon and the rest of Northern Virginia, we'll be proud. It's about time and we understand why everyone is disappointed that we didn't have it when we needed it. But I think that'll be quickly overcome by wow, it's here and we're happy it's here. Here and those veterans and family members will be well served by a world-class care center memory care center and rehab center here in Northern Virginia.

Larry Zilliox:

Yeah, it's a beautiful looking building. From the outside, I could sense that the problems were on the inside. Oh yeah, yeah, but I'm really looking forward to the ribbon cutting so I can go pick out my room, um, but uh, well, that's great news. So I think we could look for that in 2025, uh, for sure That'd be great.

Chuck Zingler:

Before the year's over, we're going to, we're going to celebrate and, um, I'll look forward showing you where perhaps your room could be Okay, great, well listen, commissioner.

Larry Zilliox:

Thank you so much for joining us today. I really, really appreciate it.

Chuck Zingler:

Thank you so much. I'm proud to be here. Just for your audience, I'll tell them dvsvirginiacom or, excuse me, gov is our website. You can reach me at commissioner, at dvsvirginiagov or chuckzingler, just contact us. Tell us what we can do better, tell me where your needs are and tell me what we need to do to help you and your family in the future.

Larry Zilliox:

Well, great, and for our listeners. We will have another episode next Monday morning at 0500. Do you have any questions or suggestions? You can reach us at podcast at willingwarriorsorg. Until then, thanks for listening.

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