Nixon, Coleman & Stein on Property Review Board and Federal land management

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I'm just wrestling with the map here, so.

John, if you take a seat, right?

President's right, please.

Okay, let's go.

All right, I'm happy with everything.

Just call it a day.

Let's go.

All right.

Thank you.

I just think we'll get something, you know, from today.

Maybe just John Maynard.

How are you?

You're responsible for those good reports.

Take credit.

I've never seen you in a locker room.

Yes.

I wasn't sure what they said.

Oh, I read it.

Life is.

Let me, uh, let me get over here.

Well, that'd be better.

Is it right there?

Yeah, it's right there.

Okay, and then stop, stop.

You can see it right here, Mr. President.

It's over.

Yeah.

Well, that's a pain in the arse.

I don't want to put it on the carpet, but it's a tough thing to do.

I'm surprised that you're doing that.

Well, she's got to stop it.

I don't want to put it on the carpet.

I'm sorry.

Thank you very much.

to purchase and use and then not to dispose of that property or not to.

constantly reassess what is the highest use is really the reason, of course, that you created this property and the importance of it.

So we reviewed the statutes, we inventoried the property, and we're not total, but not unimportant steps with respect to improving management in a federal road property.

A couple of points, I think, need to be made.

The press always wondered about the decision-making and very much there's been some options and split papers and so forth.

And I had a lot of foreign policy, economic policy, for example, split paper on the market for revenue sharing, welfare reform, et cetera.

But in terms of split papers, there have been more split papers than this.

You have a major problem that we have is

is ourselves, basically.

By ourselves, I mean the government.

Because the government agencies seem to get a vested interest in every piece of land, real estate that they have, and they fight against turning it over.

Now, of course, every cabinet officer, I suppose, has to fight to keep all the property that is under the jurisdiction of his particular department in his hand.

What it really is, is not so much the cabin officer, but the bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy, which is always there.

Cabin officers come and go.

The bureaucracy goes on forever.

The bureaucracy has gotten so used to just sitting on this property, a property that can be put to much better use, that they fight and twist and turn every time they try to get a better use for it.

Some of them cooperate.

For example, we've got some

most, to me, the most attractive part of this is those slip papers.

Why could I wish, I think it's been a good educational program to get various departments, I'm not again referring to Kevin, just because they, we had that man and told them that this was their job, they were looking for things here.

But to educate people

rare people in the democracy to the fact that their job is not to hang on to things, but to see that property is put to a better use.

There's one other point I should make, however, and this is the other side of the coin.

It isn't an option to say, well, the Defense Department shouldn't have all that stuff to beat China, or the TSA shouldn't have this property or the rest, and just turn it over willingly to some state government or a state park or

follow through to see that the agency to which you turn it over makes better use of it than the federal government's made.

And there have been several instances in which we have acted here where I have braved doubt for whether that's the case.

Not because the first instance, but because there is a bubble through.

Because there is an inertia in the government.

And all of us.

And the federal government has to be the bureaucracy there.

There's a bureaucracy in the state government.

And I just don't want to have a situation where all we do is to train Jews in charge of the property and still have the property not affected.

As John Erdman knows, I was very disappointed in what happened to the four acres, four miles of the finest beach land in America when I went down on the Fourth of July.

At most, at most, 200 people on that beach

There should have been at least 200,000.

There could have been, without spoiling, for us, the beauty of the environment.

I mean, you can have a beautiful beach.

I mean, look at some of those great beaches around Nassau, for us, where people can get to them.

The environmentalists, the true environmentalists, just doesn't want to keep nature raw.

The bird watchers can go see it.

What he wants is to get people there to see it, but keep it beautiful so that it's worth seeing.

But I must say that that was a real eye-opener for me, John.

I want to be sure that you would recognize that this is just a question of getting rid of the property and seeing if it's put to a better use.

And I said, I think it's a good start.

But the U.S. should cover all the states.

But more than that, it's more important to be sure that a lot out there in this western part of the country, as you know, many of these states, the federal government is not only the biggest landowner, but in some, it holds over half the land.

That's ridiculous.

to have that kind of legacy parkland built in, and if it can be effectively used, used for better purposes, particularly in the environmental area.

Like I said, the legacy parkland story.

Follow through, follow through, so that we just don't, we're just not trying to move the money from one pocket to another.

This report doesn't take into account the work in progress, but Daryl and the staff of this

I have a great many properties that are very active.

It takes quite a while to tough this out.

Actually, it takes a lot of time.

So I haven't had to curve on this.

That's in terms of geography overall.

Moving the ownership from one place to another.

The ownership is moved from one entity to another.

And the use is all better.

And that's our fault, you know.

We should answer that, particularly to the Defense Department, because I can see why, whether it's the Marine Corps or the Army or the Navy, they think they're doing a pretty good job.

As a matter of fact, I will bet you that the piece that I now refer to saw more use with the Marines when they were able to go there and swim and use it than it is from other people.

Now, Marines are people, too, and they come from all over the country.

I checked, for example, the commanding officer out there, and 80% of the

troops in the Marine Corps, never been to a beach before.

I mean, an ocean beach.

And so, if we are going to use it well, and we're going to settle when it's open, when the poor house is open to the public, of course everybody, we're not going to use it better than we're using it at the present time.

We'll just turn it right back to the Marines, because then it'll get some use.

But that's an example, and I hope we don't have others like that around the country, where we've twisted arms, and we have overruled cabin officers, and they've been very sad and unhappy about

And you go out and you say, well, now that you've done this, are things any better?

Because the great problem with reform and government and everything else that I have found is that the more you reform, the more things remain the same.

And we just aren't going to have that this way.

All right.

Good job.

Thank you.

Pennsylvania's got a lot of soft food.

Sure.

Thank you very much.

They would sit down there in the bank and they could have pumped up beaches so that people could get to leave the rest of the buildings.

This is ridiculous.

This is ridiculous use of our properties.

I don't want to see everything look like Coney Island.

a little bit more likely to train us.

Incidentally, it's kind of interesting.

My is on the front page of the Southern California Papers.

I just got one a week ago.

The head of the parks.

Raising you, raising your leadership, committing the state of California to the vigorous development of the four miles of beach and

how they thought about the Marine Corps, how wonderful the GSA was.

He is really battling it now.

He's a great example.

The way to do it is to, the only way we can get any manager out of this is to have the local people and say, gee, isn't this great?

And I would say, we ought to get some of these parks named.

Absolutely.

I'm going to talk to Reagan.

I'm going to see shortly about this one.

And he'll have any evidence.

We ought to, for the reasons

really worked our tails off and it would never have been done.

I was the only one who could ever have sold a Marine Corps rocket.

Well, it's all over.

And then this place gave an ass.

You haven't heard of that?

No, I haven't.

I was out there and I heard a T-shirt around and I said, well, this was a good story.

It's a good plan.

I was going to slide around on the Land Rover.

I had it up there and we turned around over and saw these people down there.

go down to the beach, and there are no hens down there yet.

Not at all.

They have to have a little boy or girl or so forth, a little lady wants to go to the bathroom.

What they have to do is to climb up the palisades, and it takes about 25 to 30 minutes to get back to the road where the hens are.

So then I ask the guy to put some hens, some little hens down there.

Always, it is hard.

They all do.

We don't want to destroy the natural beauty we do.

And I said, we want to pollute the natural beauty.

I said, look, these people have got to pollute it unless you want to have that there.

And it's true.

They're polluting the grass all over the place.

It's unbelievable.

They're worse than dogs.

You know, a little rod.

You know, a lot of snakes.

You know, it really is.

This idea, this idea that pure nature is man's, you know, it's polluting.

You've got to have places where they can pollute it.

The parks you've got to do it.

What we're going to say is,

I have a little, it doesn't have to be destroyed, put it in a restaurant, but the most elemental need that an individual has is to go to the can.

I don't have any crabs out there on the beach.

Huh?

They're all salt.

That's right.

All salt.

All right.

So the economic numbers last quarter.

We're trying to get everyone to pound the bottom of the country.

We've got to take advantage of what we've got.

I understand.

I was just thinking that some of our poor guys in the Congress don't get this enough.

But I think that it needs to be, and John, this needs to be a banner.

This needs to be a banner deadline.

But I cannot just want to hear Dave talk about it.

It should be a special issue.

And then the dean is, the economy that was supposed to be a loser is now a plus for us.

Look at these numbers.

Things are moving up.

Unimportant is coming down.

We've cut the rate of inflation in half.

We're all in the way.

And I would say, number, number, number, and then quote, the way I would do it, I would say, here are what we, here are what we in publications say.

Time says this.

Newsweek says this.

That would be very, very effective.

Here's what we say.

I would say something else that's very punchy.

We would urge you to use this in your speech.

And we now have two positive things.

Our foreign policy is positive.

economic policy can't work.

What do you think?

Is that right?

I want to help us stop a good speech on that.

Okay.

Well, you know, the average congressman, and send this also to all old candidates that we consider this to be vital for us, the average candidate is too busy, first of the way, thinking.

And secondly, he's usually too dumb, if he does think, to know what to say about it.

Now, he's just weak-minded.

He may be

important.

He doesn't know what's going on the floor.

He doesn't realize it.

Here's an issue that they've given us on.

Say, you remember a month ago, they were saying, well, after the Russian trip, that's pretty good.

They're hanging over it as a specter.

Well, it does hang over us, and it still does, and we still have problems in Vietnam.

But everything can't be perfect at the present time.

If you were a member of the House, would you like to be running with this sort of stuff?

Oh, my gosh, yeah.

I mean, these guys can win, but they've got to get their ass out of their pocket.

I think you need to tell people.

I don't think it's going to be better in the short run.

Okay, goodbye.

Nixon, Coleman & Stein on Property Review Board and Federal land management

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on July 25, 1972

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