Federal Land Management

The federal government owns about 45 million acres in California that include, among other areas, wildlife refuges and military installations. This comprises about 45 percent of the state's total land area. About 90 percent of this federal land was established in the public domain in 1848 when Mexico ceded the area that became California. Some of the remaining federal land acquisitions were made as part of a joint federal-state program--called CALFED--that was created in 1995 to protect the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. CALFED's mission is to develop a plan to restore the ecological health of and improve water management in the Bay-Delta area, which supplies drinking water for more than 22 million Californians and irrigation for state agriculture. This report identifies: (1) lands acquired by federal and nonfederal entities with federal funds through CALFED since it began in 1995; and (2) lands acquired outside the CALFED program by federal programs.

GAO noted that: (1) since the inception of the CALFED program in May 1995 through April 2000, federal agencies have acquired or are in the process of acquiring full ownership or easements through the program on about 16,300 acres in the Bay-Delta area in California; (2) about 11,700 acres involve full ownership by the Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service--the remaining 4,600 acres involve easements being acquired by Interior's Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service; (3) in addition to land acquisitions by federal agencies, nonfederal entities--including state and local agencies and nonprofit organizations, such as the Nature Conservancy--received federal funds through the CALFED program to acquire about 6,500 acres; (4) outside of the CALFED program, federal agencies also acquired about 404,000 acres in California from January 1994 through April 2000; (5) federal agencies acquired full ownership of about 336,000 acres--about 257,000 acres are located in the southern California desert and were acquired by the Bureau of Land Management, and about 79,000 acres were scattered throughout the state and were acquired by various agencies; and (6) easements were acquired on about 69,000 acres--mostly located in California's Central Valley--primarily by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wetlands Reserve Program of the Natural Resources Conservation Service.