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Nov 9, 2009 8:14 pm US/Eastern
Fl. Gov't Searches For 18,000 Missing Buildings
TALLAHASSEE (CBS4) ―
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The Florida State Capitol Building in Tallahassee
CBS4 News
The State of Florida is looking for help finding something you'd think would be hard to lose: approximately 18,000 buildings, owned by the taxpayers of Florida, that state officials can't quite put their fingers on. What's more, state officials say they don't have the people to hunt them down, so they want to use tax money to hire an outside company to find each building Florida has misplaced.
The plan was made public by Linda South, Secretary of the Florida Department of Management Services. Earlier this year, legislators handed her the job of locating surplus state-owned properties and buildings that could be sold, possibly raising a few bucks for Florida's cash-strapped treasury. The mission was simple; finding the state owned properties, not so much..
It seems that nowhere in the state was a single list of all of the properties taxpayers own.
Linda McDonald, a spokesperson for South's department, said it's not clear such a list was ever required by the state. McDonald said Management Services is actually only directly responsible for about 115 state buildings, and the department knows where each and every one of those buildings are.
The problem is while the federal government has a single agency, the General Services Administration, which manages all civilian federal buildings, in Florida different state agencies keep track of their own buildings and properties.
When Management Services went to them and asked them to hand over a list of those buildings, what they got back wasn't especially helpful.
So far, South told a legislative committee that they've been given information about slightly fewer than 18 thousand buildings across the Sunshine State. What she could not tell legislators is where all of those buildings are, what they are used for, what they are worth, or even if the buildings still exist.
What South could tell them is that her agency doesn't have the people to track that information down, so she can tell legislators what the state needs to keep and what it can try to sell.
"We do not have the knowledge base, the expertise in-house to understand what those values are. We need to ask the commercial real estate sector to tell us how we can get that done," South told legislators.
South said her agency will need help going from Pensacola to Key West, first to actually locate the buildings, then to determine what they're worth, so she wants to outsource the job. The problem is, according to McDonald, the department doesn't yet have an idea what that will cost.
"We have just issued an ITN, or Intent to negotiate, to invite companies to come back with proposals," McDonald said. Once the department knows what an outside company would charge, "We would have to get an appropriation," from the legislature, said McDonald. South told reporters she had "no idea" what a contract would cost, and said at this point, the proposal is "just fishing" to see if someone is willing to take on the building hunt.
State legislators who heard her report were surprised that nobody in the state had a single list of what buildings the state owns, and that despite more than 500 people working for Management Services, there was nobody on staff who could do the job South wants an outside company to take on.
"I think it's amazing the state doesn't know what our inventories are," said committee chairman J.D. Alexander.
Buildings don't get up and move, so taxpayers might ask why the buildings they own are so hard to find. After all, records in every county courthouse explain, in great detail, the location of every building on every street in every county, so it would seem county tax assessors could tell the state where each of is buildings in their county is located.
You might think that, but McDonald said county records don't help much with state buildings; because they don't generate tax revenue they may not all be tracked by county tax officials.
For now. McDonald said the department is working with state databases trying to get all the information they can about the state's wayward buildings. The agency is expected to award a contract to find them before Christmas, a holiday gift from taxpayers who will eventually pay to find the buildings they also paid to build.
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