Date: 2000-10-24
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker. H.R. 4656 authorizes the Secretary of Agriculture to convey for fair market value approximately 8.7 acres of land in a parcel in the Tahoe National Forest in Incline Village. Nevada. to the Washoe County School District for the use as an elementary site. The parcel has been valued at between $2 million and $4 million. However. because of the deed restriction directing the use of the school site or a reversionary clause. the Forest Service believes that the appraised value would be reduced by 75 percent. or approximately $500.000. This bill requires the proceeds of the sale to be used for acquiring environmentally sensitive land in Lake Tahoe. This all sounds good. until you examine this deal. The deed restriction. this land was purchased because it is environmentallysensitive land. I realize that there has been development around it. but that was the purpose and the priority for which it was purchased by the public. Now. because it has a deed restriction. they say that they want it transferred to the school district for $500.000. as opposed to fair market value. Well. if you are a school district and you are using it for that purpose. and that is the purpose of the deed restriction. it is like getting a fullvalued piece of property. because that is all you are going to use it for. But now we have worked in a discount in this property. and then we are told we can take this $500.000 and we can take that and go out and try to buy equally environmentallysensitive land somewhere else in the Tahoe Basin. when in fact we are talking about some of the most expensive land in the State. In many parts of the Tahoe Basin. $500.000 will not buy you a 50by100 building lot. much less a school site or environmentallysensitive land or anything else. The fact of the matter is that this land is valuable for that very reason. because either people want to enjoy it for their own homes or recreational benefits and/or because there is so little land left in the Tahoe Basin. given what we have to do. Yesterday we passed .a bill here to spend $300 million of Federal taxpayer monies to protect this very same basin. and yet we are giving away environmentallysensitive land here. with the belief that somehow we are going to replace it. and I object to that. I think that this is a continuation of a misuse of public resources. when in fact the local entity has all of the wherewithal to purchase the land at fair market value. Certainly they ought to purchase it for. at a minimum. what they just sold their own school land for. which was. I guess. about $850.000. They could take that and buy this site. which they believe to be a superior site. but they would rather have a discount paid for by the Federal taxpayers. The gentleman from Nevada suggested that somehow this is the same as other legislation that we have done. The fact of the matter is that is not the case. because in most instances. as we do with little disagreement on a bipartisan basis. we transfer land from the Federal Government to public agencies all the time. In most instances. that land is sort of generic Federal land. if you will. It really in some cases has no other value other than to be transferred to a local agency. whether it is a city or a school district or a sanitation district or whatever. as we have done now in a number of instances in the Committee on Resources. But this bill is simply bad policy. and it is bad economics for the taxpayer. and I think it is bad for the environment in the Lake Tahoe Basin. I think this bill also points out a continuing problem that we have in the Committee on Resources. and although this is not technically a land exchange. it is part of the same parcel where. once again. we just continue to dip into the Federal land base and we parcel it out on less than a fair market value. less than equal basis. when we engage in land exchanges. This committee and the Congress was just recently again put on notice by the General Accounting Office as to the problems that we are having in these exchanges. A number of them exist in the gentlemans home State. where the Federal Government. through. I think. bad policy on behalf of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. but especially the Bureau of Land Management. has engaged in real estate practices on behalf of the taxpayer. where the taxpayer ought to just scream to high heaven that they want a new real estate agent. We have seen properties that have been flipped on the same day of sale. where the Federal Government got its "value" of $763.000 in Nevada. only to find out that the same day that property was resold for $4.5 million. In another instance we got the "value" of $504.000. only to have that property sold for $1 million the very same day. I think it calls into question. So when the Forest Service makes a determination that because this land has a deed restriction. but it happens to be a deed restriction that allows you to use it exactly for that purpose. of a school. of which you want it. land which you cannot find suitably elsewhere. for the Forest Service now to step forward with a straight face and suggest that the value of this 8.5 acres of land in the middle of Incline Village. somehow the value here is $500.000. is simply not true. If the school district went out on the open market and sought to purchase 8.5 acres in the Tahoe Basin. the land value would exceed$500.000 in any instance. For those reasons. I think that the Congress ought to reject this legislation. This is not a declaration against all land swaps. because we have done land swaps. we have done land exchanges and done outright grants of land. as we did yesterday in a number of instances. But in those cases. the value of the land was essentially de minimis. other than the purpose for which some local agency wanted to put. it to use. So I think at some point you have got to cry "halt" here to having the Federal taxpayer just continuing to subsidize these kinds of arrangements. where in fact we simply cannot look our constituents in the face and suggest to them we got fair value or in any way did we get market value. The fact of the matter was that the gentleman from Washington tried to offer an amendment to provide for fair market value. That was rejected in the committee. and now we are operating under a closed rule so that he cannot offer that amendment so that we will have an opportunity to find out whether or not we can get fair market value for the taxpayers in the use of this land for the school district. I think that would be a much fairer way to go. but it is obvious that the proponents of this legislation do not want to engage in that public process of determining fair market value. They simply want the Forest Service. which I might add. -the proponents here who show such great support for the Forest Service evaluation are the same people who are usually beating the hell out of the Forest Service on a daily basis. but all of a sudden they become outstanding appraisers of the public land in the Tahoe Basin. But I guess it is the end of the session. Mr. Speaker. I would hope Members would vote against this rule and that the gentleman from Washington would get an opportunity to offer his amendment. and we could square the books on behalf of the taxpayer.