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BRIDGET HALL GRUMETThe man who helped bring a veterans nursing home to Land O'Lakes leaves the county service office in June.
NEW PORT RICHEY - For nine years, Fred Harrop has guided thousands of Pasco veterans and their families through the VA maze, helping them line up nursing home coverage, disability pensions and other benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Now he has decided to move to another part of the labyrinth.
Harrop, director of the county's Veterans Service Office, will leave his post June 18 for a similar job in Pinellas County with the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He will be a VFW service officer - in simple terms, a veterans' advocate - at the Bay Pines VA Regional Office.
He will help veterans with their paperwork and push for their benefits.
"I think we try to keep the VA on their toes," said Harrop, 54, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served as a pilot in Vietnam. "Not every decision the VA makes is wrong, but not every decision the VA makes is right, either."
"I'll be advocating for veterans, same as I've been doing here," he added.
The main difference will be the location: Harrop is moving south to cut his wife's commute to work. For the past few years, Peggy Harrop had a 58-mile drive to her job at a physical therapy center in Parrish, a community northeast of Bradenton.
"For the vast majority of my Air Force career, she followed me around," Harrop explained. "We made the decision it was time to move her closer to her job."
He will leave behind a crowning achievement - the Baldomero Lopez State Veterans' Nursing Home, which he helped bring to Land O'Lakes in the 1990s amid tough statewide competition - and a sea of grateful veterans who say they got their benefits through Harrop's efforts.
Jack Kinney said his mother-in-law, a widow of a veteran, could not afford nursing home care without the benefits Harrop lined up for her.
"He stuck with it and did everything he said he was going to do," said Kinney, a Navy veteran who served in Vietnam. "Even when the paperwork got snarled up, he stepped up and took care of it.
"Getting veterans' nursing home benefits for a widow who can't do the paperwork for herself takes somebody like Fred."
Thousands of veterans have similar stories. In the past year, Harrop's Pasco County office has filed 2,613 claims, netting $558,500 in benefits for those veterans and their families. Nursing home benefits are among the most common claims.
Letters of praise in Harrop's personnel file use words such as "caring," "extremely knowledgeable" and "professional."
"Of course, we're saddened we're losing him," said Adelaida Reyes, the county's director of Communities Services, which includes the veterans office. "In his support to the veterans and the county, he has been outstanding."
In a county where one out of six residents is a veteran, the Veterans Service Office is an important local government branch, Reyes said. The office provided some kind of assistance to 3,595 veterans and their families within the past year, she said.
The county will search for Harrop's replacement through newspaper ads in Tampa Bay area newspapers, with the hope of having someone ready to start when Harrop leaves, Reyes said.
His replacement must be another veteran, she said. Local residents like Kinney hope it will be someone with combat experience, sympathetic to those veterans' extra needs.
They agree: Harrop will be a tough act to follow.
"He's right on the ball whenever a veteran has a problem," said Gene Osborne, an Air Force veteran who served in Korea and Vietnam, and later served as a VFW state legislative officer. "The man is outstanding. I'll be sorry to see him go."
- Bridget Hall Grumet covers Pasco County government. She can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6244 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6244. Her e-mail address is bhall@sptimes.com