NASA Goddard Space Flight Center should sell its unused land to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, instead of selling it to a developer. This is the December 27, 2021, recommendation from the Public Building Reform Board (PBRB) which oversees the disposal (sale or transfer) of federal assets as per the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act (FASTA) of 2016.
The land in question is Goddard’s Area 400, which is a 105-acre primarily flat wooded tract off the main campus and bordered by Springfield Road. The land is currently zoned R-O-S or Reserved for Open Space. None of Goddard’s campus is within the city limits of Greenbelt.
The report says, “The Board recommends the transfer at fair market value of all or a portion of the Property from NASA to the Department of the Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) under FASTA authority. The FWS has expressed interest in acquiring the property or a portion of the property for expansion of the nearby Refuge but has indicated it needs additional documentation on the environmental condition of the property.”
In a January 6 OpEd in the Washington Post, Ann Swanson, of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, and Joel Dunn, president and chief executive of Chesapeake Conservancy, advocated for the transfer of the property to the Patuxent Research Refuge. This position was echoed by many on the Greenbelters Facebook page this past week.
The PBRB report listed the steps that had been taken to facilitate this transfer: “On September 22, 2021, PBRB staff met FWS Patuxent Research Refuge Manager [Jennifer Greiner] who expressed an interest in acquiring the property to expand the facility for conservation purposes and subsequently provided a written request for transfer on November 3, 2021.” The PBRB staff also identified other stakeholders they met with including U.S. Senator Ben Cardin and U.S. Representative Steny Hoyer, who approved the idea of the transfer.
The project, however, is not a done deal, and the report notes that developers could still be in the future: “If the parties do not agree on terms for an inter-agency transfer at fair market value for all or for a portion of the property, the board recommends the property or remaining portions thereof go to public sale.”
The entire PBRB report is available at https://www.pbrb.gov/first-round-submission-december-27-2021/. The section discussing NASA Goddard starts on page 33.