An effort to consolidate or sell off underutilized federal real estate had boots on the ground this week at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood, one of largest campuses of federal workers in the country.
Paul Walden, executive director of the Public Buildings Reform Board, toured several buildings, including Building 810, a 680,000-square-foot facility that’s been on the board’s list since May as an older property considered costly to operate and maintain.
But Building 810 isn’t just any building. It houses operations for the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility. There, giant freezers store ice samples from Greenland, Antarctica and North America. Researchers study climate history from samples that haven’t thawed for tens of thousands of years.
“They’ve got some fascinating stuff over there,” said Walden, who had visited the 623-acre complex before when he worked at the General Services Administration. GSA manages much of the nation’s real estate, including the Federal Center.
The list came from GSA feedback and the board’s analysis of what government-owned properties have “high deferred maintenance, high vacancy and strong real estate markets,” to attract buyers, he said. GSA officials did not respond to a request for comment.
But the list, which includes two other Colorado properties, is far from final. It’s also vague. A 1,536-square-foot property at 405 W 7th St. in Eagle doesn’t appear to exist on a satellite map. Another 12,466-square-foot property with an Aspen address is described as a dorm and visitor center for the White River National Forest. Walden said the properties are most likely part of the U.S. Forest Service that the board is still “in dialogue with.”
PBRB officials aim to visit sites, meet with local real estate professionals and the community as they complete a financial analysis. They are also working with commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle in Chicago. The cost to modernize Building 810 is estimated to be $29.3 million.
“I’ll make this very clear. We’re in the data gathering stage here,” Walden said. “When we get to the point where we’re ready to submit the formal recommendations to (the Office of Management and Budget), there will be a public hearing.”
This is not DOGE
That’s different from the Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk until the end of May. After GSA identified 440 federal properties “not core to government operations,” DOGE began tracking canceled leases. There were 264 lease terminations as of Aug. 28.
PBRB makes it clear on its website that “PBRB is not part of DOGE.” This was added after the GSA announced the sites, then walked some of it back, causing PBRB to make the clarification due to “some confusion and misunderstanding about the work being done,” according to its media page.
But before this year, PBRB had accomplished relatively little. Established in 2016 after Congress passed the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act, it took a few more years for the board to get going. So far, 10 properties had been sold for $193 million as of May, though Walden added one more has since sold.
“The reality is that most of what I call the low-hanging fruits have been picked among the federal inventory. The buildings are already vacant. They were already in the high-asset round,” Walden said. “So for this final round, it’s a bit more of a challenge to identify properties that would be a good candidate. We actually started with 100 properties.”
The latest PBRB proposal, which the Office of Management and Budget approved in May, included disposing of 11 federal properties to save taxpayers $5.4 billion between consolidating operations and reducing future operations costs. None were in Colorado.
But the list of 58 future properties that include the Federal Center’s Building 810 are being investigated right now in order to put a final proposal together for the board before the end of next year. And it’s not just Building 810, Walden said.
“We’re looking at the campus,” he said. “And of those special-purpose buildings, can some of them be moved off site? Is it financially feasible to move them? I mean they have one facility that they use to test the concrete for dams. It’s giant. I don’t know how to describe it. I think they said it exerts 400,000 pounds. … It’s like a three-story vice.”
Uneasy year for city of Lakewood
Lakewood is home to more than 11,000 federal workers, including 6,000 at the Federal Center. The complex has about 4-million square feet of office and research space in 35 buildings. There’s another 1.1 million square feet leased by the federal government elsewhere in the city.
The city of Lakewood has been on alert all year and launched an online dashboard to track economic activity in the months after the Trump administration began reducing the size of the federal workforce as it cut grants and eliminated federal real estate leases in order to reduce government spending.
While the PBRB has visited Lakewood before, some may have been anxious to hear about the visit. It probably didn’t help that the GSA page for Building 810, had “gone offline,” though one can still find an old version of the page from February in the Internet Archive.
Travis Parker, the city’s Chief of Sustainability & Community Development, and economic development director Will Chan met with Walden and real estate consultants on Tuesday. He called it an opportunity for the city.
“It really did seem like a fact-finding mission in anticipation of coming up with some recommendations for the GSA about whether there are buildings that should be repurposed or property that should be sold,” Parker said. “I don’t know what they’ll come up with, but that seemed to be the intent of the meeting — to just learn more about the Fed Center at Lakewood.”