Call it the political elephant in the room, amid Portland’s homeless crisis.
That is if the elephant was, as Multnomah County officials have said on several occasions, financially and geographically unfeasible.
Nevertheless, Thursday in an op-ed for the Portland Tribune, Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith resurrected the debate surrounding the hypothetical use of the Wapato Jail as an emergency shelter for Portland’s homeless population.
“We are missing a giant opportunity to use the empty Wapato facility as a shelter,” she wrote. “This region has homeless camps throughout our city going unchecked and unchanged without the County Board of Commissioners offering up Wapato, a building that we spend over $500,00 a year to sit empty. Wapato is a taxpayer- funded project that cost $58 million to build.”
She continued, “It is a facility that has the appropriate shower, toilet, kitchen, heating, cooling and community rooms that can serve 500 to 1,000 homeless residents……….today!”
And in the midst of her argument, Smith called upon “the Multnomah County chair and Board of County Commissioners to support a resolution, ordinance, or a vote to open Wapato as a homeless shelter immediately … No more excuses!”
County spokesman Dave Austin, who has been instrumental in the opening of hundreds of emergency shelter beds within the County over the last few months, didn’t mince words.
He argues Commissioner Smith has had the numbers all along, proving that Wapato is not an option.
“I don’t know if her motivations are political, if they’re because she doesn’t understand the numbers, but we’ll continue to provide this information, and I think it’s easy to fan the flames and say, 'Hey, we should open this building just because it has sat empty,' ” he said.
Austin said the crux of the argument lies in the price tag attached to making the building basically functional, by turning on electricity and running water.
“You can’t just turn on a portion or one room. You have to turn on the whole system. What that adds up to is $136,000 a month to operate this,” he said.
That adds up to $1,632,000 per year.
“Compare that to Hansen,” he said, of the 200-bed shelter the County opened up in the old Hansen Building earlier this year. “Hansen, from a facilities standpoint, costs $15,000 a year.”
On top of that, added Austin, comes the cost of paying a social service provider to come in and run the shelter.
“Let’s add that $15,000 to the $1.3 million a year it costs for a provider to operate it. That’s nothing compared to what taxpayers would have to pay … to keep Wapato open.”
Austin said much of the higher cost lies in the fact that Wapato was long treated like a “junkyard”.
“What people think is out there is a fully functioning building with kitchens and everything. It has none of that. It’s been stripped bare,” he said. “What we did was, if the sheriff’s office in their other three jails had a need for something — you know a big stove, an oven, a dishwasher — if those broke, we didn’t spend taxpayer dollars and buy new stuff. We went and took the stuff from Wapato.”
Austin concluded by giving a list of shelters recently opened, or soon to open, within Multnomah County.
They include a 90-bed women’s shelter in Gresham, set to open in early September.
After that, officials plan to open 120 beds in the old McLoughlin Building. That’s set to open in early October.
He added the Black Cauldrin, a former strip club turned family shelter, now has 40 more beds than when it first opened. Total, it holds 120.
The County’s goal is to open 650 emergency shelter beds by the end of the fiscal year.
None of those will be housed inside Wapato, said Austin, despite what Commissioner Smith suggested.
“She has a district, which is north and northeast Portland,” said Austin. “And again, she’s going to have her opinion on things, and that’s great. But we try to deal in the reality of the numbers.”