Yesterday (Monday, July 2, 2012), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) announced plans to open regional offices in or around Dallas, Denver, and Silicon Valley, Calif. These offices are in addition to the agency’s already announced first satellite office, scheduled to open in Detroit next week, on July 13. According to the USPTO press […]
Solar panels installed atop DOE’s Forrestal Building headquarters in Washington, DC. It’s hardly news that the largest single consumer of energy in the United States is the federal government, with its stock of 360,000 buildings and 650,000 fleet vehicles. What is surprising, though, is the extent to which that consumption has implications that are both […]
Twenty years ago, on April 19th, 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck at the curb, directly in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. In the back of that truck was a 4,800 pound bomb, improvised using primarily fertilizer and fuel oil. McVeigh, having set the fuse, calmly exited the truck and […]
The Cotton Annex (Photo: Ted Nigrelli) Last week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a hearing in the Cotton Annex, a vacant federal building just south of the National Mall. This hearing was the latest installment of the committee’s “Stop Sitting on Our Assets” campaign, the theme of which is to spur GSA into […]
The Social Security Administration is shrinking—though, as more and more baby boomers arrive at the age of SSA entitlements, the demands on it are growing. A report issued late in August by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) documents that the Social Security Administration (SSA) has reduced its physical footprint—that is, the total square footage of […]
The wait is over. For 17 months, the GSA has been studying third-party green building certification systems, as required every five years by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA). In the first such evaluation, back in 2007, the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) was selected as […]
View Larger Map Barrow, Alaska proudly names itself “The Farthest North American City” so it’s no surprise that it would also be home to the northernmost federal lease. If you’ve ever visited Alaska you know that…
OK, so the Postal Service isn’t expanding – quite the opposite. But, with all of the recent discussion of the decline of the U.S. Postal Service, we were intrigued by the attached, very cool, graphic illustrating…
Yesterday (Monday, July 2, 2012), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) announced plans to open regional offices in or around Dallas, Denver, and Silicon Valley, Calif. These offices are in addition to the agency’s already…
Today we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America. We thought it’s also worth recognizing another important birthday on this July 4th – that of Calvin Coolidge who was born July 4, 1872 and later went on to become the 30th president of our nation. Coolidge’s […]
In written testimony on March 7th before the House, Dr. Dorothy Robyn, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Installations and Environment, confirmed that DoD has embarked upon a formal initiative to review the Department’s anti-terrorism/force protection (ATFP) standards. These standards prescribe minimum requirements on DoD-occupied buildings that she said add as much as 9% to the […]
“BRAC” is the abbreviation for Base Realignment and Closure. Though, to be technically correct, it is formally used by DoD as the acronym for Base Closure and Realignment. Either way, BRAC is the process by which the military closes bases and realigns its forces around the globe. Up until the 1970s, the decision to close […]
“With COVID–19, basically, each home has become an enterprise.” So says Mark Pringle, senior vice president in charge of corporate real estate and global facilities at Dell Technologies and one of three outside authorities called on to speak to members of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on July 29, 2020. The […]
We’ve often said on this blog that you need only look at GSA’s budget as the bellwether for leasing demand. In recent years we’ve noted that budget reductions imposed by Congress have put GSA in a position where its owned inventory suffered and demand for leased space was buttressed. Despite the agency’s stated goal of […]
