One of Florida's most conservative U.S. congressmen is leading the charge against what he says are billions of dollars wasted by the federal government to maintain excess, underutilized, and vacant properties throughout the country. Several of them are in Florida.
The federal government needs to stop sitting on its assets, U.S. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., tells Sunshine State News, alluding to the title of a report he co-authored in 2010 when he sat on the U.S. House's Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. There's a good deal of property sitting there, just sort of rotting, and the taxpayers are taking it in the wallet.
Mica, who now chairs the Subcommittee on Government Operations, refers to an estimated 77,700 properties designated vacant or underutilized by the federal government, which spends about $1.67 billion to maintain them annually. The North Central Florida congressman says the costs of government negligence might actually number in the billions of dollars, when one takes into account all the untapped revenue the federal government is missing out on by not selling or leasing its unused real estate.
Mica's latest public salvo came in a hearing he presided over Friday, titled Addressing Unused and Vacant Federal Courthouses: A Case Study in Miami-Dade, Florida.
The hearing was hosted by Miami Dade College, which for six years has expressed interest in leasing the nearby David W. Dyer Federal Building and United States Courthouse, which was abandoned in 2007 after operations shifted to the new Wilkie D. Ferguson Courthouse.
It costs taxpayers about $1.2 million every year just to maintain the Dyer building, which has developed a mold problem that will take approximately $60 million to clean up. Mica tells SSN that the new Ferguson Courthouse sits on about 97,000 more square feet than what was authorized by Congress, the excess space costing taxpayers an additional $48 million.
Between 2000 and 2010, the federal government constructed a total of 33 new courthouses. According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal government built 3.5 million square feet more than it needed. The unnecessary space cost taxpayers $835 million to construct and continues to cost $51 million annually to maintain.
Mica says those figures include excess space in federal courthouses located in Jacksonville, Orlando, and Tallahassee, in addition to theFerguson building inMiami.
Two of the more egregious examples of waste, according to the congressman, are Maryland's Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, more than 200 of whose 500 buildings are unused, an area about the size of Key West; and about a million square feet of a Springfield, Va., metro station.
In a time when we have mountains of federal debt and we're sequestering some very important services, and you're sitting on assets and not utilizing them, this is an outrageous offense against the taxpayers whose hard-earned money is tied up in these properties, Mica tells SSN. People are not fulfilling their responsibility to be good stewards of our public assets.
But on Monday evening, the congressman celebrated what he's calling a Mica success story: the General Services Administration (GSA) announced it had finalized the sale of the Georgetown Heating Plant complex that will net taxpayers $19.5 million.
"Its nice to see that we have forced an agency like GSA to get a grip on their assets. This valuable Georgetown federal property, which has been sitting idle for over a decade, will now help taxpayers and our Treasury as they are struggling financially, Mica said in a statement. Heaven only knows, this property could actually pay taxes, develop into a site where people have jobs and help expand our economy.
Dan Cruz, deputy press secretary for the GSA, which has been broiled in financial waste scandals over the past year, tells SSN his agency is working diligently to dispose of as many of its vacant and underutilized properties as possible.
As part of the [Obama] administrations efforts, GSA has been actively working with all 24 federal landholding agencies to identify unneeded assets and move them into the disposal process, he says. Last year alone, we disposed of more than 100 federal excess properties and we continue to engage the private sector. We're auctioning properties off and we're also offering proposed exchanges so we can get these underutilized properties off the government books sooner.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, recently lambasted the administration by holding up unused federal properties as one example (of many) where the federal government could save taxpayer dollars and make up for some of the losses resulting from the 2013 sequester.
Reach Eric Giunta at egiunta@sunshinestatenews.com or at (954) 235-9116.
