Federal agencies set to move

Large sections of the former federal courthouse at East Seventh Avenue and Pearl Street in Eugene have been empty since the metal-clad Wayne Lyman Morse U.S. Courthouse opened in December 2006. But that’s about to change as the federal government gets set to move various federal agencies scattered about the Eugene-Springfield area into the old building.

“There has been vacant space,” said Ross Buffington, a spokesman in Auburn, Wash., for the regional office of the U.S. General Services Administration, which oversees much federal property, including the old 111,696-square-foot building and the new 270,000-square-foot courthouse on East Eighth Avenue.

In a cost-saving move, the GSA plans to move as many agencies as possible into the old Federal Building during the next year. The old building became about 50 percent vacant when court and other operations moved from there into the new courthouse.

“It is less expensive for the government to house federal agencies in buildings we own as opposed to buildings we lease,” Buffington said.

Why has the move taken more than three years? Lease agreements in private buildings currently housing the federal offices are one reason, Buffington said.

“GSA must address a variety of factors such as lease expiration dates and the development of space requirements before it can move agencies from one location to another, so it can be said that the process has moved relatively quickly,” Buffington said.

The move of federal agencies into the Federal Building will vacate about 40,000 square feet of rental space in Eugene, Buffington said.

The GSA is remodeling the old courtrooms in the Federal Building to make way for the Veterans Benefit and Veterans Health Administration offices to move in this June, the local Internal Revenue Service offices this fall and the FBI in February 2011, he said.

“And that will put us at about 80 percent occupancy,” Buffington said. With the expansion of some agencies already in the Federal Building over the next year, occupancy should climb to 90 percent, he said.

“It’s a building we plan on keeping as a federal building indefinitely,” Buffington said.

The Social Security Administration recently moved from offices on Oakmont Way into the Federal Building, but the Social Security field office is still in leased space and may remain there, Buffington said. The GSA is conducting a lease procurement auction and expects to make an award in the near future, he said.

The Federal Building is also home to the local offices of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Office of Detention and Removal Operations, among others.

The building opened in 1975 and was built for a cost of $5 million, about one-eighteenth the cost of the new U.S. courthouse, which cost about $90 million to design and build. Over the years, as agencies such as the FBI and IRS expanded, they had to move into leased space around town, Buffington said.

When the Federal Building opened, with a photograph of then-president Gerald Ford in the lobby, it become the home of 18 federal agencies that had been scattered about the Eugene-Springfield area, including the largest single tenant, the Willamette National Forest headquarters, as well as offices for Sen. Mark Hatfield and congressman Jim Weaver.

After the Morse courthouse opened and the federal court moved its offices there, the old Federal Building became even emptier when the U.S. Forest Service moved its local offices to Springfield in 2007. The Forest Service is now housed with the Oregon National Guard and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in the Lane County Armed Forces Reserve Center on Pierce Parkway.