In an executive order signed this week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did what legislators like Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Salinas, have been trying to do for more than a year: Get a simple list of what the state owns.

Schwarzenegger has ordered state agencies to catalog all property and assets, and he plans to start selling off the surplus this summer.

As part of his revised budget proposal unveiled Thursday, Schwarzenegger expects to raise $50 million next year - and even more money in the future - to help patch the state's $15 billion budget deficit.
Schwarzenegger called for one-time spending of $2.8 million to coordinate a new asset management policy.

"One of the biggest problems has been just to find out what does the state really own?" the GOP governor said at a Thursday news conference. "We don't know. We have looked at all of the departments, and it's kind of like fuzzy math a lot of times."

Denham and Sen. Jim Battin, R-La Quinta, wrote a 10-bill package to inventory and sell off $1 billion in "questionable" assets. Denham and Battin praised Schwarzenegger for stepping in to prod the bureaucracy.

In March, Denham unrolled a printout of undecipherable, coded property lists he obtained from the state Department of Transportation.

It took Denham several more months of pleading and personal meetings with agency officials to receive useful lists that described the property. One listing showed a golf course in Oakland the state purchased in 1955 to make way for a road. The road was never built, and the state still owns the land.

Denham also has drawn attention to an unfinished road project in San Rafael. It runs through state-owned land that houses a strip mall with a massage parlor as a tenant.

"I think the mentality in the past is to hoard as much property as possible," said Denham. He said Schwarzenegger's $50 million estimate from surplus sales is too conservative.

Schwarzenegger apparently wants immediate results.

He ordered his California Performance Review panel, charged with streamlining government, to make recommendations by June 30 on what high-value, urban properties can be sold.

Schwarzenegger said the state's "disjointed" property management system - spread across dozens of boards, commissions, conservancies and departments - "allows some decisions to escape proper due diligence reviews."

"Without this first step of mandatory data collection, we are only guessing about the state's holdings," said State and Consumer Services Agency Secretary Fred Aguiar, who is working on the project.

Schwarzenegger's reform plan also eliminates a requirement that the state had to offer surplus property to local governments - for a discount - before a public sale.

Denham still plans on pushing related legislation to publicize property lists on the Internet and require stricter scrutiny of new asset purchases.

At Caltrans, "we support any efforts that will assist in the disposition of surplus property for the benefit of California's taxpayers," said spokesman David Anderson.

He said Caltrans has sold $23 million in surplus property since 2002 under a new, accelerated land-sales program.

But the process can be slow, officials said.

Properties can be held for years, while neighboring parcels are acquired and existing leases are honored, before road construction begins. Other times, it can take years to unload property because a project needs to be canceled officially by the state Transportation Commission.

The Legislative Analyst's Office said in a study this year that the revenue brought in from surplus property sales has been low because the state generally sells unneeded field offices, labs, armories, fire stations and small parcels of land adjacent to larger state facilities that "have little development potential or value."

Denham has cited big-ticket state facilities - such as the Los Angeles Coliseum and the Cow Palace in San Francisco - for potential sale.