Congress came to Colorado Springs on Thursday morning, when U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn held a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources to talk about land management.

Six experts from various agencies and areas delivered testimony to Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, who was the only one of the 48 subcommittee members in attendance at the meeting.

The hearing focused on two bills that are waiting to be heard by the subcommittee in Washington, D.C. And all six witnesses agreed that the pair of bills would help save the government money and streamline many federal processes.

The first measure, a bipartisan bill with 17 co-sponsors, would require the federal government to take an inventory of all its real estate property.

The second would create a new federal department called the National Geospatial Technology Administration, to measure all physical space, contours, boundaries, and properties of land owned by the federal government.

“We can’t even truly manage federal land if it hasn’t been inventoried,” said Lamborn, who chairs the committee. “If we can take really accurate measurements, we might even then be able to sell some of it off.”

Leonard Gilroy, the director of government reform for the Reason Foundation, told Lamborn that 30 federal agencies own “hundreds of thousands of real property assets worldwide, including facilities and land.”

That’s according to a 2003 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which found that many of those assets are expendable, said Gilroy.

And that property, said Gilroy, is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. A fraction of that could be a benefit to the federal government, he said.

“Many of these assets are no longer consistent with agencies’ missions. Others are no longer needed,” said Gilroy.

The two bills also have the potential to save the federal government billions of dollars, said Brian Raber, the vice president of Merrick & Co., a geospatial engineering company that has been working for the past four years on a federal mapping project in Colorado and Nebraska.

For example, Raber said, Merrick & Co. could save the government tens of millions on just the mapping project, which follows a stretch of the Platte River. And, Raber said, roughly 100,000 people in Colorado work in the high-tech geospatial industry.

The first measure was introduced just over a year ago, and has languished in Lamborn’s subcommittee. The other, which Lamborn is carrying alone, was introduced in March, and has not yet been heard by his subcommittee.