The overall level of visitor services offered by the National Park Service is deteriorating. Visitor services are being cut back and the condition of many trails, campgrounds, exhibits, and other facilities is declining. The Park Service estimates that since 1988, the backlog of deferred maintenance has more than doubled to $4 billion (GAO, 1995b).
The magnitude of the numbers cited by agencies indicates that significant needed maintenance and repairs have been deferred because of underfunding or other factors. Historically, public officials have not often found the arguments for maintenance and repair funding compelling and have called into question the methodologies used to define building deficiencies and to calculate the costs involved in repairing them 2 . One reason for this skepticism is that although “the amount of deferred maintenance is important in itself, without also including information on the implications of deferral, public officials and the public will have considerable difficulty in interpreting the deferred maintenance figures” (Urban Institute, 1994). A second reason relates to the lack of a standard methodology for defining and quantifying deferred maintenance. The concern has been that inappropriate items have been included in the maintenance backlog to increase the overall estimate and argue for larger budget appropriations.
Agencies have also used different formulas or standards to compute the costs of eliminating the backlog. This situation may not be improved significantly by new reporting requirements of Federal Financial Accounting Standard Number 6 because under this standard “it is management 's responsibility to ...establish methods to estimate and report any material amounts of deferred maintenance” (GAO, 1998).
Aging of Facilities
The federal facilities portfolio includes structures that span centuries of different planning, design, construction, maintenance, management, and mission requirements. The average age of the federal facilities portfolio by square footage or by current replacement value is not known because accurate data are not available. However, it is safe to say that a large proportion of the facilities in the federal portfolio are already 40 to 50 years old. More than half of the 8,000 office buildings managed by the General Services Administration are more than 50 years old, and the U.S. State Department estimates the average age of facilities to be 39 years. Even in a “space age” agency like NASA, the average age of the facilities inventory is approximately 40 years. As facilities age, wear and tear on building components increases, and electrical, mechanical, and other systems, begin to break down. The rate and onset of breakdowns increases if maintenance has been implemented haphazardly or not at all, and the operating condition deteriorates. Aging facilities require more, not less, maintenance and repair to keep them operating effectively.
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Fiscal year 1998 is the first year in which federal agencies are required to report periodically on deferred maintenance by disclosing deferred maintenance in agency financial statements. Previously, some but not all federal agencies kept inventories of building deficiencies and the funding required to eliminate them; others provided maintenance needs estimates for budgetary purposes and ad hoc reports. |
