Dive Brief:
- The General Services Administration has a growing backlog of building needs as congressional appropriations limit it mostly to renovations and repairs.
- The agency, which owns the federal government's non-military buildings, is looking to the private sector for ideas to help it better design and deliver projects, including ways to cut energy use and reduce footprints to reduce costs, the deputy commissioner of the GSA's Public Buildings Service, Michael Gelber says.
- GSA was able use funds from the American Recovery and reinvestment Act in the early years of the recovery, but Gelber says that ended after 2010. Most recently the GSA has found itself with "almost no money at all" for construction.
Dive Insight:
Gelber recently addressed a joint meeting of the Society of American Military Engineers and the Design-Build Institute of America. Both are organizations that have an interest in seeing GSA get back into the business of hiring the private sector to build, not just patch up existing facilities.