Media Watchdogs Monitor Real Property

Federal real property asset management is gaining the attention of media watchdogs, both online and in the blogosphere. Writers continue to connect surplus real property inventory with undue strain on taxpayers and the failing condition of the public infrastructure.

In the July edition of its online newsletter Wastewatcher, Citizens Against Government Waste ran an editorial by Dashle Gunn Kelley dubbed “Federal Property: Wretched Excess.”

“The United States government is seriously overdue for a garage sale,” Kelley wrote. “While the government is projecting a $205 billion budget deficit for Fiscal 2007 and splurging on tens of billions of dollars in wasteful programs and congressional pork-barrel spending, it also sluggishly attempts to divest itself of billions of dollars worth of derelict or obsolete federal property.” The CAGW commentary went on to point to a specific example of waste in America’s Second City – Chicago’s Old Main Post Office. “This 2.5 million-square-foot unused structure has been vacant since 1997 and costs $2 million to maintain annually, yet the government continues to hold on to it at taxpayers’ expense,” Kelley maintained.

“Instead of efficiently streamlining its branches, the United States Postal Service cannot close an office until it has meticulously analyzed the economic impact of its removal on the local community,” Kelley wrote. “Even after that, members of Congress are notorious for meddling in the process and preventing the closure or consolidation of postal facilities all over the country.” The Chicago Post Office also came under fire as an example of misplaced priorities in an August article by Stephen Littau, blogging in The Liberty Papers. Littau argued that the recent collapse of the eight-land freeway bridge in Minneapolis, MN might have been averted through better real property asset management. “the treasury does have enough funds to repair the bridges and highways without raising taxes and still have plenty left over,” Littau claimed.

Littau wrote that money saved from disposal of real property assets “could be put towards repairing the bridges or other priorities such as improving the VA hospitals, paying down the national debt, or Constitutional functions the government is actually supposed to fund.”

“While $20 million over 10 years to keep this post office is small potatoes to our government, it’s not an insignificant amount to the taxpayer,” Littau continued. “How many families could have put their children in private schools, purchased their own health insurance, made a down payment on a home, or invested in their futures had their share not been taken…to fund this wasteful spending?”

For the complete commentary by CAGW, visit this site: http://www.cagw.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=10903&security=1&news_iv_ctrl=1165

For Steve Littau’s blog in The Liberty Papers, visit http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2007/08/08/it’s-the-spending-stupid/