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Gary VanLandingham
“We’re not trying to make anybody look good or bad,” says OPPAGA Director Gary VanLandingham. [Photo: Ray Stanyard]

As director of the Legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, Gary VanLandingham says his job is to “speak truth to power” — and he has the scars to show for it.

Gary VanLandingham, 51

Education: Bachelor’s degree in political science, University of Florida; master’s degree and doctorate in public policy and program evaluation, Florida State University

Family: He and his wife, Cindy, live in Tallahassee; two sons

Recent reading: David McCullough’s “Truman,” Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” Ben Bova’s “The Green Trap,” and David Fromkin’s “A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East”

Working at OPPAGA: “It’s sort of a gifted class for grown-ups. It’s full of really smart people who really enjoy what they do.”

Created by the Legislature to help improve the performance and accountability of state government and root out inefficiencies, OPPAGA evaluates dozens of programs every year, looking both at how they spend money and their overall effectiveness. The agency was a division of the auditor general’s office until lawmakers made it an independent agency in 1994.

OPPAGA’s findings don’t always sit well with those whose programs go under its microscope. In 2002, after the Legislature mandated that the agency review the operations of local school boards every five years, OPPAGA issued a report on the Okaloosa County School Board that included some critical findings. Among other suggestions, OPPAGA said the district could save $4.9 million over five years by closing an underutilized school, delaying the purchase of buses and moving its tech-support program in-house.

The report meant the district was ineligible to receive the State Board of Education’s Seal of Best Financial Management, and board members weren’t happy. The board rejected OPPAGA’s findings and called the non-binding report a “serious disappointment to parents, teachers and taxpayers and a regrettable waste of taxpayers’ money.”

OPPAGA raised hackles again in 2004 when it concluded that a Medicaid “disease management” program the state had launched in 1997 had failed both to achieve projected cost savings and to improve health outcomes. Under the program, drug manufacturers provided disease management services for state Medicaid recipients with chronic conditions in exchange for an exemption from state-mandated prescription drug discounts. OPPAGA found that the program had only saved the state about $13.4 million — far less than the $108.4 million legislators had originally projected.

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which oversaw the program, quibbled with OPPAGA’s methodology, as did executives from Pfizer, one of the vendors providing the services. But lawmakers pulled the plug on the project and passed a bill that prohibits programs like the disease management service from being substituted for supplemental cash rebates.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush was another not keen on OPPAGA’s work. Apparently miffed at the agency’s critiques of some of his privatization efforts, Bush twice attempted to eliminate funding for

OPPAGA. Rep. Ray Sansom and Sen. Jeff Atwater also took a whack at the office with legislation — ultimately unsuccessful — that would have made OPPAGA less independent by pushing it back into the auditor general’s office.

“Since that time, we have really tried to increase our communication with leadership to make sure we are meeting their information needs,” says VanLandingham. OPPAGA doesn’t have any partisan axes to grind, he says. “We’re not trying to make anybody look good or bad. We’re trying to tell the Legislature, to the best of our professional ability, what’s going on — here are the options we feel the Legislature could consider and the pluses and minuses of those options. Then we step back and let the Legislature make its policy decisions.”

The bottom line

VanLandingham says state lawmakers rely on his staff’s expertise in much the same way that a company’s board of directors turns to private consulting firms for unbiased advice. The cost of OPPAGA’s analyses, the equivalent of about $70 an hour, is about half what the state would pay a private firm to do the same work, he points out.

OPPAGA also generates value for taxpayers in other ways. A series of studies examining how the state buys its prescription drugs from the Medicaid program revealed that the state could save money by negotiating differently and altering reimbursement policies. The state has saved more than $100 million by adopting the new drug-buying methods. Overall, VanLandingham estimates that OPPAGA has saved Florida taxpayers “in the neighborhood” of $600 million to $700 million since its inception in 1994.

Money isn’t always the bottom line. In 2006, OPPAGA found that the cost of the state’s nursing home diversion program exceeded the Medicaid program’s nursing home costs for other frail elders. But OPPAGA had improved participants’ quality of life by delaying their entry into nursing homes. Participants also experienced shorter nursing home stays and were more likely to return to their homes. The Legislature expanded the program.

Currently, OPPAGA is examining a number of government programs, including Medicaid waiver programs and various funding options for the Corporate Income Tax Credit Scholarship program, which provides an income tax credit to corporations that contribute private school tuition money to kids from low-income families.

OPPAGA is also looking at Department of Corrections medical services to see if there are ways to control the costs of healthcare for inmates. And the agency is continuing its work with the Redirection Program, a juvenile justice program that provides alternatives to locking kids up.

All told, this year OPPAGA’s staff of around 70 will issue approximately 55 formal reports, 160 legislative research assistance memorandums and the mammoth Florida Government Accountability Report (FGAR), an internet electronic encyclopedia of 250 state government programs.

Despite occasional friction, VanLandingham says lawmakers are generally grateful for OPPAGA’s work and the savings that the agency finds. “Many times members will say, ‘Great job. We don’t like what you found, but we really need to hear it.’ ” Overall, the Legislature and agencies implement about three-fourths of the recommendations OPPAGA makes within two years.

Howard Rasmussen, a senior management consultant in the Florida Center for Public Management at Florida State University, says he’d be concerned if OPPAGA wasn’t causing a stir every now and then. “If they’re doing their jobs and they’re doing them professionally and well, that’s going to generate some heat. If somebody’s not upset, they may not be out there doing their job.”