[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 83 (Tuesday, May 20, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4490-S4491]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mrs. McCASKILL (for herself and Mr. Hatch):
  S. 3043. A bill to improve Federal land management, resource 
conservation, environmental protection, and use of Federal real 
property, by requiring the Secretary of the Interior to develop a 
multipurpose cadastre of Federal and real property and identifying 
inaccurate, duplicate, and out-of-date Federal land inventories, and 
for other purposes; to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
  Mrs. McCASKILL. Mr. President, have you ever flown over the heartland 
of the United States and wondered how the Midwest and West got its 
distinctive and remarkable checkerboard pattern?
  The reason for that extraordinary system is a law enacted on this 
date in 1785. On May 20, 1785, Congress enacted a bill that laid the 
foundation for American land policy. The Land Ordinance of 1785 
provided that from a point of beginning in East Liverpool, Ohio, the 
new Northwest Territory was to be systematically surveyed and the lands 
subdivided into settlements and townships. Of the thirty-six sections 
of 640 acres in each township, the sixteenth was reserved ``for the 
maintenance of public schools.'' Congress began an extraordinary 
process of inventorying the lands to the west, providing for settlement 
and homesteads, surveying and subdividing the lands, and providing land 
for Revolutionary War soldiers, as payment in lieu of compensation to 
relieve the new Republic of its war debts to those who fought for our 
freedom.
  But while these early Acts of Congress, beginning with the Land 
Ordinance of 1785, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, through the 
Homestead Act of 1862 and the more recent Federal Land Policy and 
Management Act FLPMA in 1976, all contributed to the inventorying, 
surveying, preservation, disposal and settlement of lands of the West, 
to this day the United States does not have a current, accurate 
inventory of the lands the Federal government owns.
  The fact is, the Federal Government does not know what it owns, where 
it owns it, what condition it is in, what its characteristics are, or 
what its designated use should be. This is the third consecutive 
Congress in which Congress's watchdog agency, the Government 
Accountability Office placed `Managing Federal Real Property' in the 
High-Risk Series, a category describing those activities with the 
highest risk of waste, fraud or abuse.
  The GAO, GAO-03-122, found over 30 Federal agencies control hundreds 
of thousands of real property assets worldwide, including facilities 
and land. However, the portfolio is not well managed, many assets are 
no longer consistent with agency mission or needs, and many assets are 
in an alarming state of disrepair. Also, GAO, GAO-T-RCED-95-117, told 
Congress, ``The General Services Administration, GSA, publishes 
statistics on the amount of land managed by each federal agency. 
However, we found this information was not current or reliable.''
  To remedy the lack of a current accurate inventory of all Federal 
real property, and the duplication and inefficiency of the many 
property databases the government does maintain, I am today introducing 
the Federal Land Asset Inventory Reform, FLAIR, Act, along with my 
colleague Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. Our bill is a companion to H.R. 
5532, introduced in the House on a bipartisan basis by Representative 
Kind of Wisconsin and Representative Cannon of Utah.
  There is no reason for the Government to lack a current, accurate 
inventory of all the land it has been entrusted to manage for the 
citizens of the United States. With the technology available, it should 
not happen that then-Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton would 
testify before the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee on March 
2, 2005 that ``The Department currently uses 26 different financial 
management systems and over 100 different property systems. Employees 
must enter procurement transactions multiple times in different systems 
so that the data are captured in real property inventories, financial 
systems, and acquisition systems. This fractured approach is both 
costly and burdensome to manage.''

  It is time the U.S. Government invested in a methodology and 
technology to identify and inventory its land holdings. Such a system 
can help enhance the Federal land management, resource conservation, 
environmental protection, and use of Federal real property. We should 
not be creating multiple inventories when today's technology permits us 
to do it once and use it many times. Gathering information to solve 
national problems should not require an Act of Congress, particularly 
when a few keystrokes on a computer will do the job.
  Although the Bush administration took a step toward solving this 
problem when President Bush issued Executive Order 13327 in 2004, the 
resulting GSA inventory is neither GIS-based nor includes public lands. 
Unfortunately, this means that more than 300 million acres are exempt 
from the inventory currently maintained by GSA.
  Since 1980, the National Academy of Sciences has been calling for the 
development of a multipurpose cadastre, or land registry, in its 
report, ``Need for a Multipurpose Cadastre.'' The report said, ``There 
is a critical need for a better land-information system in the United 
States to improve land-conveyance procedures, furnish a basis for 
equitable taxation, and provide much- needed information for resource 
management and environmental planning.'' In 2007, the Academy renewed 
this effort and recommended the idea of the FLAIR Act, in its report, 
``National Land Parcel Data: A Vision for the Future.''
  This Federal effort will also help State and local agencies verify 
their ongoing efforts to identify what each level of government owns, 
and permit the fair, efficient and equitable taxation of private 
property. This will enable government at all levels to find missing 
lands through a gap analysis that identifies properties on which taxes 
are not being collected due to the inefficiencies in our systems. For 
example, when the State of Wyoming used a GIS to audit the mass 
appraisal process, it found that approximately 250,000 parcels were not 
on the tax rolls.
  Over the past decade, nearly 30 Governors and State Legislatures have 
created State land inventories. Let me give you a few examples of what 
some States have found.
  In California, an inventory discovered that in 1955, the State 
purchased a golf course in Oakland to make way for a highway. The road 
was never built, and the State still owns the land, unbeknownst to any 
State agency.
  In South Carolina, a State commission found the University of South 
Carolina, a State university, still owned Wedge Plantation, a 1,500 
acre tract valued at $5 million, originally used for research of 
insect-borne diseases, but now leased to a half-dozen hunters who pay 
no rent.
  While serving as Missouri State Auditor, my office issued a report 
noting that the Missouri Department of Transportation lacked accurate 
and reliable records of excess property and property being held for 
future projects. The best MoDOT could do was estimate

[[Page S4491]]

the amount and value of the land they held.
  The FLAIR Act addresses the twin problems of a lack of a single, 
interoperable, current and accurate Federal land inventory, and the 
proliferation of inefficient, duplicative, costly, inaccurate and out-
of-date inventories by authorizing the Department of the Interior to 
develop and manage a single multipurpose, uniform Federal GIS database 
to track and account for all Federal Real Property, as called for by 
GAO and recommended by the National Academy.
  Waste and duplication can be avoided if the Government knew what 
inventories it had. The FLAIR Act also authorizes the Secretary of the 
Interior to conduct an ``inventory of inventories'' to identify all 
inventory databases, whether efficient or inefficient. The efficient 
databases will be merged into a single multipurpose cadastre while the 
inefficient databases are repealed, thus preventing waste and 
duplication from continuing. By integrating the efficient databases, 
redundancy can be identified and eliminated. Resources can be applied 
to gaps in data rather than duplicative data.
  Once a multipurpose inventory is complete, the government can become 
a better real property asset manager, and a responsible steward of its 
land holdings. This will result in more efficient land management, 
again providing savings. That is what the FLAIR Act provides.
  I urge my colleagues to join Senator Hatch and myself in enacting 
this good-government bill.
                                 ______