Land Sale of The Century

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The New York Assay Office. Built in 1932, the five-story, steel-and-concrete building has been vacant for more than a year. It sits in the heart of Manhattan's financial district and contains more than 88,000 sq. ft. of office space. A year ago, the building was assessed at $8.3 million. Today, in a city where developers buy buildings for the right to tear them down, the land alone may be worth that much.

Environmentalists have few objections to the sale of many of the lands included in the Administration's first offering. Much of the property consists of small tracts, of little use to anyone but the owners of adjacent lands. Some parcels are located in flood plains, which make them unsuited for development; others, like unused military installations, are clearly going to waste. Concedes Jack Lorenz, executive director of the 53,000-member Izaak Walton League of America, a leading conservation group: "Certain outlying units too small to be efficiently managed should be disposed of; lands having little value as parks or wildlife refuges and needed for the growth of urban areas should be sold at fair market value."

But opponents do object to the way in which the decision to sell off chunks of America was reached. "What the Administration is doing is trying to transfer as much of the publicly owned land and resources as possible to the private sector in as short a time as possible," says Geoff Webb of Friends of the Earth. "But none of this has been debated in a public forum. It is simply being done."

There is concern too that these initial land sales augur an indiscriminate clearing of federal property books. "As long as they come out here and talk about selling a little bit of surplus land, a lot of people don't get excited," says Ken Robison, a spokesman for Save Our Public Lands, an Idaho conservation group. "I'm concerned that, as the Administration proceeds, they're going to move on to this larger land-sale program, and they will interpret the lack of any real strong reaction to the initial inventory as consent."

Opponents also argue that the sell-off is unlikely to bring in anywhere near the amount of revenue projected by the Federal Government. William Turnage, executive director of the 50,000-member Wilderness Society, considers it "ludicrous" to sell land "when the U.S. real estate market is going through one of its most depressed periods in history." Agrees Webb: "In a soft market, the land will inevitably be underpriced, and the public, which, after all, is the owner of the land, will end up getting ripped off."

Even if the Administration reaches its revenue target, opponents argue that the public will still lose. They point out that $17 billion is a mere 1.5% of the $1 trillion national debt, and that there is no guarantee the money will ever be used for any form of debt retirement. By law, proceeds from land sales in 16 Western states must go into a fund for building and maintaining irrigation projects; proceeds from the dispersal of certain other federal lands must go into a fund for the acquisition of parks, wildlife preserves and similar properties. Senator Percy has proposed a bill that would let the Administration use the money to pay off part of the national debt, but passage is by no means assured.