Report: Veterans Affairs planning an obstacle to facility management

The Department of Veterans Affairs is using an outdated and shortsighted planning process for managing its facilities and it’s an obstacle for the VA’s effort to repurpose or rid itself of old buildings and plan for future of care.

That is the finding of the Government Accountability Office, which issued an opinion Wednesday on the VA’s two processes it uses to plan for managing facilities and how they are used to provide medical care for the nation’s veterans.

“Geographic shifts in the veteran population, changes in health care delivery, and an aging infrastructure affect the (VA) efforts to align its services and real property portfolio to meet the needs of veterans,” the report says.

The report comes after the USA TODAY Network obtained a list of 430 properties the VA says are vacant or underused. Those properties include odd buildings it inherited decades ago, most of which are housing units.

The VA said those buildings, which comprise more than 5 million total square feet and include smoking shelters, miniature golf clubhouses and trolley houses, cost the department millions to maintain.

Many of those facilities are also on the National Register of Historic Places, complicating the process to sell, demolish or reuse the facilities.

“Planning officials at four medical facilities in (GAO) review told (GAO) that state historic preservation efforts prevented them from demolishing vacant buildings, even though these buildings require upkeep costs and pose potential safety hazards.” the GAO report says, which includes images of fallen ceilings and dilapidated building fronts.

The VA uses two different and sometimes conflicting processes to manage its facilities and use them to provide care for veterans.

Both have problems, the GAO found, which stand in the way of the department’s effort to privatize and expand its heralded Veterans Choice program, which allows veterans outside a prescribed radius of veterans hospitals to get care elsewhere.

“The Strategic Capital Investment Planning (SCIP) and the VA Integrated Planning (VAIP) — have limitations that undermine VA’s efforts to achieve its goals,” the report says.

SCIP’s problems lie in its short-sighted budgetary planning, the GAO found.

“VA routinely asks its facility planners to submit their next year’s planned project narratives before knowing if their previous submissions have been funded,” the report said.

The other, VAIP, makes assumptions about providing care without considering that more veterans would seek outpatient care versus inpatient care over time, and they relocate.

“GAO found that the facility master plans prepared under the VAIP process assume that all future growth in services will be provided directly through VA facilities without considering alternatives, such as purchasing care from the community,” it said.

In both areas of criticism, the VA indicated it would revise the two policies.