AFCEC forges new ground in land inventory, management

  • Published
  • By Shannon Carabajal
  • AFCEC Public Affairs
JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas --  A team at the Air Force Civil Engineer Center recently forged new ground for the Department of Defense as they successfully reconciled a 1.5 million acre discrepancy between Air Force and Bureau of Land Management records of withdrawn public lands set aside for military use.

Led by Celia Prieto and Jerriett Simms, program managers with the AFCEC Installations Directorate Real Property Management Division, the team's accomplishment was an important step for the Air Force as the DOD moves forward with several initiatives aimed at identifying and eliminating excess properties, reducing military costs and developing renewable energy projects.

Defining the Air Force's real property inventory ensures the service is well-postured for making informed decisions in determining how to best manage Air Force assets, said Dennis Guadarrama, chief of AFCEC's Real Property Management Division.

"The validation of the real property assets, or the Air Force inventory, is key," he said, adding the reconciliation project is especially important in DOD's efforts to identify areas with high potential for renewable energy projects, such as solar energy or wind developments.

The land reconciliation project was no simple task. According to the Interior Department, military installations encompass roughly 28 million acres in the United States, of which 16 million acres previously managed by Interior's Bureau of Land Management were withdrawn for military use by executive order, congressional legislation or departmental regulations. Over time, lost records and overlooked errors added up to a 1.5 million-acre discrepancy for the Air Force and the team had to go through many records, some dating back to the 1800s, to make the records current, Simms explained.

The team started by comparing the list of Air Force withdrawn sites from the BLM with Air Force records to confirm the sites that matched and reconcile those that didn't.
For every site, "there is some type of congressional order, public law or congressional act that made it legal. We would start with the original order and move forward," Simms said.

The team traveled to 22 locations in 16 states over 13 months, Prieto said, and poured through thousands of documents at local BLM offices and Air Force base real property offices to get an accurate count of withdrawn lands, including the status, quantity and physical location of withdrawn lands inside or outside the boundaries of the installations.

Because there were no established processes for a project of this magnitude, Simms created analytical tools to systematically resolve acre variances and established processes and procedures to complete the project. Overall, the team reconciled discrepancies at 39 sites, ranging from a small, one-acre discrepancy at March Air Reserve Base, Calif., to a large 920,000-acre discrepancy at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz.

Forging a strong partnership with the BLM was an additional significant benefit of the reconciliation project, Guadarrama said, adding BLM was so impressed, they requested the AFCEC team provide lessons learned and a playbook of processes and procedures to help other DOD departments save time and money as they continue to reconcile their withdrawn lands.

"This team orchestrated and implemented the reconciliation of over a million acres in less than a year, exceeding Air Force and BLM expectations. They set the bar and that's impressive, that's really impressive," Guadarrama said.