It’s a recycling center. It’s a Bed, Bath and Beyond.

No. It’s a new VA clinic.

The speculations are numerous, but the building going in at the corner of 12th Street and Marion Avenue at the Pony Village Mall won’t be for shoppers, but veterans.

The groundbreaking for the Veteran’s Affairs Roseburg Healthcare System’s new clinic at the Pony Village Mall behind Safeway is set for Friday.

Quite obviously, the ground already is broken.

On Aug. 28, workers started cutting away asphalt on the site. Since then the construction crew has been grading the site and driving piles into the ground, said Sharon Carlson, assistant to the VA director.

The ever increasing timbers, not steel, seem to grow out of the ground like a barren forest. They stand in rows and at various heights.

Civil engineer Mel Galli, with the Galli Group from Grants Pass, was on the work site Wednesday inspecting the piles. He said using timber, rather than steel is not unusual. Steel was one of the options available for the building, but the final design used timber, Galli said.  He wasn’t sure why the design called for timber, but it is less expensive.

Whether the combination is machine and steel, or pile driving machine and timber, driving the logs into the ground still is a noisy, grindy process.

A Knutson Towboat Company construction crew was driving piles on Wednesday afternoon. The crane fired up after lunch.

The crane operator let out a boom on the rumbling machine to pick up a log from the loaded truck parked next to the open gate on the work site. Crewmen hopped up on the truck and rigged a log to the crane. Lifting the boom and pulling up on the wire, the operator maneuvered the log to the ground, swinging it like a twig. Pile driver Ron Deronden measured and marked the log with orange spray paint. Forty-eight feet of Douglas fir.

Deronden signaled the operator to pull the log vertical. The operator  maneuvered the pile driver machine, also suspended from the crane, over the top of the pile. Working together the crane operator and Deronden slowly guided the pile into the right spot.

The machine shook and shimmied the pile into the ground. The force shook the ground. Then it stopped.

Deronden signaled to the operator to pull the pile out. Then he dug sand an rock out of the hole, and helped guide the log back into the right place. The rumble and shake started again and this time it was just right.

The tentative completion date is Feb. 24, 2009.

“After the groundbreaking things will really start going,” Carlson said.

The Roseburg VA announced in April its plans to close its Bandon clinic and build a bigger facility at the Pony Village Mall. It will be just shy of 10,000 square feet, about 4,000 square feet bigger than the Bandon clinic.

The new clinic will provide non-urgent primary care and mental health services to more than 2,000 veterans. Though bigger, the new clinic will keep the same amount of staff. Carlson said the goal was to provide better efficiency.

In a town hall meeting in July, Roseburg VA Director Susan Yeager said the VA wanted its South Coast facility closer to the veterans it serves. About 60 percent of the vets going to the Bandon clinic live in the Coos Bay-North Bend area.

Friday will mark the beginning of the VA making good on its intention of providing speedier, more accessible service.

“We are just really excited about the new clinic,” Carlson said.