Update, Jan. 14: The federal goverment will pay just over $1 million a year, to start, to lease its new space at the Airport Business Park, according to the U.S. General Services Administration. The 20-year lease starts at $46.73 per rentable square foot, a rate that will increase over time along with the Consumer Price Index.

And full occupancy, the feds say, will be "approximately" 29 people.

Original Post: A new federal building planned in McKinleyville will roughly double the office space in the sparsely occupied Airport Business Park.

"It will create an awful lot of activity out here," said Steve Moser, whose Moser Properties owns the business park. "It's one of these anchor tenants that everybody looks for."

The 53-acre business park is still mostly unoccupied, he said, with just nine to 10 acres developed, including the plot of land that's been sold to a corporation which will lease it to feds.

The federal building is likely to house fewer than 75 employees. Its specifications call for 75 to 100 parking spaces, Moser said, but beyond that don't indicate many people will work there when it opens in 2014.

It will house a federal magistrate, bankruptcy court and probation offices, along with offices of the U.S. Attorney, U.S. Marshal and possibly other federal operations.

Most of those are now scattered around different sites in Eureka, where at least there's somewhere to go for lunch. Moser said the business park would like to have a restaurant, but doesn't yet.

So far it's got a hotel (the Holiday Inn Express), and offices occupied by accountants, attorneys, a psychologist, a real estate lender and a computer expert. About a sixth of the existing office space is vacant, he said, and all of it, added together, is roughly equal to the size of that new federal building, planned at 23,000 square feet.