G.S.A. Has Federal Property to Sell, but It’s Not Easy

WASHINGTON — As government agencies are forced to do more with less, the General Services Administration has stepped up its efforts to dispose of surplus government buildings across the country in new and more profitable ways, instead of simply auctioning them off.

In an effort to streamline operations, the G.S.A., the federal government’s landlord, has sold hundreds of buildings since 2010. But in the last several months it has been working with private developers to negotiate land swaps that reduce the government’s real estate portfolio while consolidating offices and saving money for taxpayers. The goal, the agency’s acting administrator, Dan M. Tangherlini, wrote in a staff memorandum, is “to maximize the value of our real estate assets and reduce our federal footprint.”

The federal government owns about 14,000 excess buildings and other structures, and the G.S.A. is working to dispose of them. 

The strategy is evident here, where a proposed land swap involving the 40-year-old F.B.I. building last month yielded 35 formal expressions of interest, and in Miami and Los Angeles, where plans are under way to replace and dispose of two old federal courthouses. “What we’ve seen is more attention and focus put on this activity, in part because of fiscal constraints across the government,” Mr. Tangherlini said. “At G.S.A., we are asking ourselves if there are other ways to speed the process of disposal and get positive outcomes as a result.”

Dorothy Robyn, the Public Buildings Service commissioner for the G.S.A., said at a public meeting on the F.B.I. building in January that “functionally,” much of the government’s property, with an average age of 47 years, is “out of date.” But despite government efforts to sell obsolete or surplus properties quickly, the process has sometimes bogged down in political, technical and economic issues.

The federal courthouses in Miami and Los Angeles were long overdue for replacement, but how to do it cheaply and efficiently and what to do with the old structures have presented challenges.

Disposing of the David W. Dyer Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Miami has proved to be far more complicated than expected. Built in 1933 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, the 170,000-square-foot Mediterranean Revival structure was vacated in 2008 when a new court building was completed. The G.S.A.’s initial plan to renovate the older courthouse for continued use as a federal building was scrapped because of the $60 million cost. When the G.S.A. sought expressions of interest in the building last August, only two responses came in, neither acceptable to the agency.

One of the proposals came from Miami Dade College, which wanted to convert the old four-story courthouse, across the street from the college, into an educational and cultural center. But the courthouse is connected to another courthouse, and they share a courtyard. Separating the utilities and dividing secure areas from nonsecure ones in the buildings could cost nearly $15 million, which the G.S.A. said it would not pay.

“I don’t see we have any budget for that,” said Juan C. Mendieta, a spokesman for Miami Dade College. “We have a pretty challenging budgetary situation here in Florida.”

At a House subcommittee hearing in Miami in March, John E. B. Smith, the Public Buildings Services commissioner for the Southeast Sunbelt Region, testified that “the Dyer courthouse helps highlight the challenges of developing long-term asset strategies in changing fiscal times, and the unique characteristics of properties that can present hurdles to repositioning.”

The swapping strategy being applied to the F.B.I. building, where a developer will get the old headquarters in return for building replacement headquarters elsewhere in the region, is now also being tested in Los Angeles.

For years, federal judges, citing security concerns, have been pushing for a new building to replace the late 1930s courthouse on North Spring Street. In December, the G.S.A. awarded a $318 million contract to Clark Construction, of Bethesda, Md., to build a 550,000-square foot courthouse at another city location.