USGS Moffett Field campus celebrates its first arrivals
Skyrocketing rents contributed to move from Menlo Park
Need another sign that Menlo Park is getting too expensive? The USGS, one of the city’s most notable employers, is packing up its seismologists and geologists and is headed to Mountain View.
The U.S. Geological Survey cut the ribbon at its new Moffett Field location on Wednesday, marking the first phase of a multiyear move heralded as a chance to cut costs and forge closer connections with NASA Ames.
Wednesday’s ceremony celebrated the arrival of the first 220 USGS employees at Moffett Field. The remaining 200 employees should join them by 2022.
The move was driven at least in part by skyrocketing rents at USGS’ Menlo Park location, where the federal agency’s 11acre campus had been a fixture of the community since 1954. In 2016, the year the move was announced, USGS paid $7.5 million in rent to the General Services Administration, essentially the
landlord of the site.
Because the GSA is required by law to charge its tenants market-rate rents, that figure would have soared to $18 million the next year, according to USGS Southwest Regional director Mark Sogge. Instead, the GSA was able to secure USGS a rent waiver that kept costs from increasing for the past two years of transition, so that USGS could redirect those funds — as well as federal funding secured by Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto — into construction of its new location.
At Moffett Field, by contrast, NASA won’t charge rent at all. USGS will be responsible for covering its own operation and maintenance costs; money that would have gone towards rent can now go towards scientific research, said Colin Williams, who led the move as director of the USGS Geology, Minerals, Energy and Geophysics Science Center. Scientists at the new campus will also research earthquakes, landslide hazards, water quality, ecosystems and species science.
“We have to deal with the realities of the federal government — we don’t have
the money we had decades ago,” Williams said.
USGS’ Moffett Field campus occupies the second floor of historic Building 19, which was built in the 1930s as army barracks. Converting the space to USGS offices meant a complete renovation of the upstairs. Eventually, USGS will expand to other Moffett Field buildings for lab work, as well as increased office space.
Sogge described the move as a “daunting” endeavor. At the first all-staff
meeting announcing the move, longtime employees took the podium in tears to speak about the prospect of leaving the campus where many of them had spent decades-long careers. Eventually, he said, opinions shifted, and more people wanted to be part of the first wave to move than could be accommodated.
But “moving people is the easy part,” he said: until 2022, USGS will continue the difficult task of moving sensitive lab equipment the 10-mile distance to Moffett
Field.
The move comes just years after another Menlo Park institution, Sunset Magazine, left the city for a hip new headquarters in Oakland’s Jack London Square.
The fate of USGS’ Menlo Park location — valued at $110 million in 2017 by then-mayor Kirsten Keith — is still undetermined, said GSA regional commissioner Dan Brown. GSA will follow a federal process to decide what to do with the land, although he noted that continued
high rents could make it difficult to house a different federal agency there. If GSA sells the property, the proceeds will go to a federal building fund.
At Wednesday’s ribbon cutting ceremony, speakers focused on the scientific benefits USGS’ new location could provide. Sogge called the move a “quantum leap” forward in their collaboration, and NASA Ames deputy center director Carol Carroll highlighted USGS’ work on the Apollo project and current and future
contributions to the Artemis project, which aims to send a woman to the moon by 2024. USGS helped with mapping the surface of the moon, equipment design and astronaut training on the Apollo 11 moon landing, which celebrates its 50th anniversary next week.
“This move brings together scientists and engineers from two of our nation’s top research agencies, and offers an opportunity to advance our understanding of Earth, the moon and our universe,” Carroll said.