Congress, Budgets, and Real Property: What’s In Store?

Here’s an experiment I’d like you to try. What is your answer to each of the following questions:

• How accurate is your real property data at the constructed asset level?
• Can you report against meaningful performance measures at that level?
• Do you trust that your real property data will support critical management decisions or substantiate needed funding?
• What impact does a wrong real property decision have on your mission?

If you don’t have substantive answers to these basic questions, I urge you to attend the April 10 luncheon of the Federal Real Property Association in Washington, DC at Herman Miller, Inc., 600 14th St., NW Suite 700, Washington, DC 20005 (www.frpa.us). VISTA’s VP of Corporate Development Ray Summerell will discuss real property reporting compliance, in the context of today’s budgetary realities.

Continuing Resolution Authorities and increased top-down budget pressure put new programs at greater risk than established programs. Mission programs are more likely to be funded over headquarters or administrative initiatives, including real property management. The only solution is to tie real property management work to return on investment as direct support for mission program funding.

Despite the fact that budgets are tight, the requirement for right-sizing the federal portfolio is not going away. In fact, just last month the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs’ Federal Financial Management Subcommittee held an oversight hearing titled, “Improving Federal Financial Management: Progress Made and the Challenges Ahead.” Senator Tom Carper grilled representatives from the Office of Management and Budget and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on what’s being done to address the persistent problems of waste in the federal real property inventory.

In the first of a quarterly series of legislative reports, Kimberly Price, VISTA’s legislative affairs liaison, summarizes the hearing in this issue of “Managing Change.” Her article, “Congress Takes Tentative Steps toward Real Property Reform,” is an excellent primer for anyone following real property initiatives on Capitol Hill.

And if you think the problems with the federal inventory are simply financial, think again. A scant two months after the GAO chose to keep real property on its High Risk Series (where it’s been for four years), the media and Congress flew into an uproar over charges of poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

In an article titled “Are Walter Reed’s Problems Really Government-Wide?”, VISTA VP of Corporate Development Ray Summerell sums up the current state of affairs at Walter Reed. Are these reported problems really part of the larger issue of real property asset management – and what else may be at risk?

Finally in this issue, Brad Peterson of ARCHIBUS, Inc. weighs in on the current state of affairs in real property asset management in our on-going “Three Questions” series. Brad is encouraged by the preliminary data-gathering efforts related to real property asset management compliance, and looks forward to seeing the results of this effort put into practical use throughout the government.

As do we all. Because if we’ve learned anything as a profession over the past several months, it’s that we will all be held more accountable by government to right-size the federal real property inventory, whether the budget to do so exists or not. We simply cannot defer maintenance on mission-critical assets – especially if we are spending money on unnecessary land and buildings.


David Baxa
President and CEO
VISTA