Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act Restrictions and ...

Under a Secretarial
Initiative, BLM Reports
Agencies Spent $10.1
Million on the First Land
Acquisitions 7 Years after
FLTFA Was Enacted
activities involved in preparing land for sale under FLTFA mostly between
2004 and 2007. BLM offices in Nevada spent $2.6 million of this total.
No land acquisitions had occurred during the first 7 years of FLTFA.
Because the state–level implementation process had not resulted in any
acquisitions, BLM decided to jump-start the acquisition program and
conduct purchases under secretarial discretion, as provided for in the
MOU. In the spring of 2006, BLM headquarters officials solicited
nominations from the FLTFA leads in each of the other three agencies.
Most of the nominations agency officials provided were previously
submitted for funding under LWCF. This secretarial initiative was
approved by the Secretaries of Agriculture and of the Interior in May 2007.
The 2007 secretarial initiative provided $18 million in funding for 13 land
acquisition projects, including 19 parcels of land located in seven states—
Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wyoming.
Specifically, the initiative consisted of 9,049 acres and included projects
for each agency: six BLM projects for $10.15 million, two Fish and Wildlife
Service projects for $1.75 million, two Forest Service projects for $3.5
million, and three Park Service projects for $2.6 million. Only 1 of the 19
parcels is an adjacent land; the rest are inholdings.
Since the initiative was approved, BLM reported a number of changes that
the agencies made to the original list of land acquisition projects. For
example, the total number of acres increased to 9,987 in a total of eight
states. As of January 23, 2008, BLM reported that the agencies had wholly
or partially completed 8 of the 13 approved acquisition projects.
Specifically, the agencies spent $10.1 million between August 2007 and
January 2008 to complete the acquisition of the first nine parcels under the
secretarial initiative. 22 The acquisitions include 3,381 acres in seven
states—Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, and
Wyoming. See table 4 for a complete description of the current status of
these projects.
22 An acquisition is considered complete when the property title is transferred from the
nonfederal landowner to the federal government.
Page 27 GAO-08-196 Federal Land Management