FLAIR Act: Good for Property Rights, Good for Fiscal Responsibility [Common Sense in the Balance]

Property Rights Alliance ^ | 2011-06-14 | Grant Morgan

[92nina]

On Thursday, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Federal Land Asset Inventory Reform (FLAIR) Act into the Senate. The FLAIR Act would require the federal government to work with the private sector to create a single, up-to-date, inventory of federal land holdings. This bill will reduce waste, improve government operations, potentially help the economy, and benefit private property-owners.

This legislation is long overdue, for several major reasons. First, the current system of government land inventory is a Kafkaesque amalgamation of literally hundreds of different databases, which are neither mutually compatible nor checked for redundancy. As former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton noted in 2005:

“The Department currently uses… over 100 different property systems. Employees must enter procurement transactions multiple times in different systems so that the data are captured in real property inventories, financial systems, and acquisition systems. This fractured approach is both costly and burdensome to manage.”

Indeed, the Government Accountability Office has noted that federal land procurement and management was a high risk area, among the most prone to waste, fraud, and abuse. Both the GAO and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as several other non-partisan organizations, have supported previous efforts aimed at consolidation of federal land databases. Indeed, the NAS has been calling for reforms of this kind for three full decades...

[92nina]

So Utah senators Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch are coming together on this one? hmmm...(hint, Senator Hatch has his own campaign in 2012.)

Take this article and others I found to the fight to the Libs on their own turf; put the Left on the defensive at at Digg and at Reddit and in Delicious and Stumbleupon

[Graneros]

Just a government land grab. They do nothing without an ulterior motive.

[goodnesswins]

NO way....instead of INVENTORYING it they should be legislating to give it, or sell it, back to the citizens of the States. And, no, not to environmental groups that will just close it down.

[itsahoot]

The smell of election season brings forth many fruits.

[SunkenCiv]

The FLAIR Act would require the federal government to work with the private sector to create a single, up-to-date, inventory of federal land.

Thanks 92nina. Dick Armey-led Conservative PAC FreedomWorks has targeted Hatch for defeat.