Three-Plus Years and Counting

By Ray Summerell

In the three and half years since President Bush signed Executive Order 13327 into existence in February 2004, a tremendous amount of good work has been accomplished. Both OMB and GSA OGP deserve credit.

Yet, we are only just beginning.

Creating solid decision support capability for the entire federal real property portfolio is a big task, one that will not be fully accomplished for years. So what happens along the way?

Certainly, with more complete and reliable information, the Federal government will be able to better manage its portfolio. Unfortunately, there simply isn’t enough money to solve all of the government’s real property data quality problems at once. Agencies are working to validate their inventory and report on its use and condition without supplemental funding.

Efforts to verify and validate the inventory can lead to a perception of greater problems than may actually exist. The consequences of wrong data can be painful. On July 12, Senator Tom Coburn’s staff published the headline “UN renovations already $148M over budget before breaking ground” on the Web site for the Senate Subcommittee for Federal Financial Reform, Government Information and Homeland Security and under the heading of “Your Tax Dollars at Work.”

It is entirely possible that validated data could show a worse-off picture about federal real property than in previous years. Past data collection efforts were conducted under time and resource constraint. Assumptions, modeling and trend-based data were used for the sake of expediency.

At the time of this writing, the FY2006 Federal Real Property Profile (FRPP) has just been published (To download a PDF of the report, click here.)

This year’s report looks more closely at performance measures such as condition and utilization. What is interesting to note is GSA’s own perspective on this topic. In June, Stan Kaczmarczyk of the GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy addressed the condition indices of federal buildings during a day-long seminar at the Reagan Building.

Kaczmarczyk noted that having so many of the government’s buildings maintained at a condition index below 90 percent supported the GAO’s criticism of federal real property and the tremendous backlog of deferred maintenance.

Keeping track of performance measures such as condition indices takes real substantive effort to get and keep that data correct and up to date. Most process models work well for very detailed assessments of individual buildings or even small groups – but they are too expensive and time-consuming for large portfolios with annual reporting requirements.

Even though this year’s FRPP has somewhat more accurate accounting and validation, statements regarding the inventory are still largely based on modeling and data trend analysis. That is why, even though it is a good and admirable starting point, the FRPP is still in some circles viewed skeptically as the sole basis for any formal real property asset decision strategies.

But it is a work in progress, being systematically improved. These systematic efforts to improve real property information quality will create a decision support capability that helps us all budget with confidence, reflect with accuracy the impacts of appropriations shortfalls, and set priorities for the requisite downsizing of a portfolio that our government can no longer afford.

It’s an unfortunate reality that contending with the pain of previously flawed information is the price of making a good faith effort to improve.

That may seem like cold comfort for the pain of the current scrutiny from Capitol Hill lawmakers. The simple fact of the matter, however, is the only way to improve decision support capability for real property across the Federal government is to build and sustain a credible information resource. Individual Departments and Agencies are starting that process, in part based on the EO 13327 initiatives and in part based on the simple requirement for improved fiscal management.

The FRPP can serve as a good utilitarian resource in time, once its year-over-year accuracy can be validated. In the meantime, we should all expect swings in the data. Some years may look worse than others before it all gets any better.

In the end, that’s the good news. For now, we must be diligent in avoiding the unintentional misrepresentation of our real property assets. By working and investing in doing better through decision support analysis, we will in time be able to face this increased scrutiny with the facts on our side.

Bottom line: It’s a journey and we’re getting there.