BAKER CITY — The Bureau of Land Management will be moving out of its leased office in Baker City on June 20, and the 20 or so employees will move temporarily to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center about 5 miles east of town.

The termination of the lease for the building at 3100 H St., where the field office has been since 2014, is part of the General Services Administration’s effort to shrink the federal government’s real estate footprint, said Larisa Bogardus, public information officer for BLM’s Vale District, which includes the Baker Resource Area managed from the local office.

“BLM remains committed to the Baker office and the work it does furthering the BLM mission,” Bogardus wrote in an email to the Baker City Herald on April 25.

“We are still developing the plan for a permanent home for the Baker Field Office,” Bogardus wrote.

In the interim, employees will rotate between working at home, working in the field and working at the Interpretive Center.

All business functions for the field office, including people making payments and buying maps or permits, will move to the Interpretive Center starting at 8 a.m. June 23.

People who visit the center for business reasons won’t be charged the usual admission fee to the center, which the BLM operates.

The office closure won’t affect BLM firefighting crews, which will continue to work from a guard station on 13th Street in Baker City, Bogardus said.

BLM workers will be talking with permittees, including many Baker County ranchers who have permits to graze cattle on public land, about how they can meet with BLM employees when needed.

The General Services Administration, the federal agency that manages federal buildings, announced on March 4  it had identified more than 440 buildings nationwide, totaling almost 80 million square feet of rentable space, that “are not core to government operations.”

“Decades of funding deficiencies have resulted in many of these buildings becoming functionally obsolete and unsuitable for use by our federal workforce,” according to a statement on the GSA website.

A list of buildings, later removed from the site, included the David J. Wheeler Federal Building at 1550 Dewey Ave. in Baker City.

A separate GSA document showed the agency planned to end the lease for the BLM building, although that document listed a termination date of Sept. 30, 2025.

Oregon’s U.S. senators, Democrats Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, criticized the Trump administration’s proposal to potentially sell federal properties and end leases.

In an email to the Herald on April 25, Wyden wrote: “My office just learned of this sudden decision late yesterday. The Trump team claims this won’t affect services to the public. Given the Trump administration’s dismal record of ripping away services in rural America and illegally firing federal employees, I’ll be watching closely to make sure there’s no loss of services for Eastern Oregon.”