The actual F

The news had a story last week about how the bill for the rush-rush construction associated with the Multnomah County drug addict "deflection" center has doubled. The original liars' budget over the summer was $1.5 milion to $2 million, but now the amount needed to get the building in shape has ballooned to $3.8 million.

The facility, euphemistically named the Coordinated Care Pathway Center, opened two months ago on leased premises at 900 Southeast Sandy Boulevard, having been sneaked into the Buckman neighborhood by the county commision's Dear Leader, Jessica "Chevy" Vega Pederson of the West Hills. The dollar figures on which approval of the project was based were totally fake, as the bobbleheads have now been forced to admit.

Director of Facilities for Multnomah County Dan Zalkow told commissioners that to finish building 13 sobering beds in the other part of the building they would need to OK $1.8 million more in spending.

When the initial construction budget was approved for the $2 million, project planners had doubts.

"We did not have high confidence in those numbers. We had limited knowledge of the building and had not designed the project yet. Because of the very tight schedule, we did not follow one of our two normal project delivery methods: design, bid, build," Zalkow said.

He said the added construction cost is in part due to that rushed planning because the budget projection was done before contractors even entered the building.

"From a cost perspective from the start, nearly everything we touched in the building was worse than we expected. [There was] more demolition and asbestos than we thought, electrical HVAC and smoke alarm systems were in worse shape than we anticipated," Zalkow said.

Dear Leader's most excellent troublemaker commission colleague, a lame duck named Sharon Meieran, opposed investing in the facility originally. She thinks the money and effort should have been spent on a permanent treatment facility. And last week she expresssed her righteous outrage at the obscene cost overrun.

“What the actual F?” Meieran said at the board meeting. “I am shocked by this coming before the board, and I’m trying to gather my thoughts to be able to ask questions and make comments coherently because this is shocking to me.”...

“We as a county were never required to open a sobering center,” Meieran, an emergency room doctor who regularly treats homeless people, said. “It was not the choice of the board. It was the choice of the chair. The budget was rushed through, not because it was required to be opened on a certain day but because the chair wanted it to.”

Meieran, the only one left on the commission with her feet on the ground, voted against the new funds, but she was outvoted again, of course. Dear Leader's newly sworn-in yes-person, Shannon Singleton, fell right into line as expected, and even tossed a little word salad about how her buddies in the nonprofit industrial complex need to get in on the cash flow.

Commissioner Shannon Singleton addressed what she views as potential opportunities to partner with existing homelessness providers who may serve people eligible for deflection. 

“Our ending homelessness providers have a lot of relationships already with the people who are accessing the service, but I don’t see them anywhere in your ecosystem and how they’re able to either refer or provide that support," she said. “I actually think they can do a lot to navigate to those referrals as well as provide that ongoing support as that person also tries to get back into housing.”

My eyes are too tired to roll that hard.

Meieran's complaint is spot-on, as usual. The budget phoniness was bad. But to me the real scandal is that anyone would spend even $2 million, much less close to twice that, on tenant improvements to a building that they have only a two-year lease on, with no apparent option to renew. 

Here's the latest on how much money is going where on the project:

The revised project budget is as follows:

Direct Construction: $2,900,000

DIRTT Interior Wall System: $310,000

Soft Costs and Other Costs, Including Owner’s Contingency: $590,000

Total Project Cost: $3,800,000

Who is the lucky landlord, you ask? It's an outfit called Solterra, which appears to be in the business of developing trendy high-rise buildings. Based in Seattle, Solterra is fronted by a guy named Brian Heather. It's the company that's built a swanky greenwashed hotel and spa at the unlikely corner of 11th and Alberta in the northeast part of Portland. (Heather reportedly used to live next door to there.)

According to press reports, the rent for 900 Sandy (which once upon a time was owned by Joe Weston) is $144,000 for the first year, and $264,000 for the second year. Then Solterra can apparently have the place back if it wants, with many of the property's infrastructure defects now cured thanks to the county. The place will be up to city code, or at least a lot closer to it, after all the attention being paid by the bureaucrats to making it "deflection"-worthy. Finding a new tenant would be a lot easier than it was before the county moved in.

But from all appearances, Solterra would like to knock the place down. The firm's been talking for a years now about building a 12-story bunker, mostly apartments, on the site. The design features a lot of "mass timber," and the city has promised to pitch in a 10-year property tax holiday in exchange for the rent on some of the units being "affordable."

If the county facility is in fact demolished, much of what the taxpayers are now spending millions to set up will go to waste, of value to no one. But a lot of asbestos will have been removed, and according to city permit records, there was a broken sewer line, which I bet will have been fixed. Those items would lessen the expense of clearing the site for the big bunker.

No matter how you feel about the merits of "deflection," or the peculiar Portland version of it, you have to marvel at what a terrible deal the county taxpayers are getting on the building. The construction cost and two years' rent add up to $4,208,000, or $5,764 a day over two years, and that's just for the space, never mind the actual operation. There's a state grant to burn through, but money is fungible, and eventually the "deflection" process will be back to square one with that much less dough to play with. A large, permanent drying-out facility is supposed to be sited and built at some point, and the Sandy Boulevard location isn't suitable for it.

Meanwhile, no one is saying who the contractor is that's making bank on the $2.9 million construction contract. Try as I might looking around on the internet, I can't find a name for that party. Nor can I find any evidence that the work was put out for bid. In this information age, you'd think the contract would be posted somewhere on the web, but of course it's nowhere to be found. Neither is the lease with Solterra, for that matter. Typical Portland-area government "transparency."

If I were a young reporter again, or a young prosecutor, I'd be asking a lot of questions. But that wouldn't be Portland Polite™, and so a lot of the details of "deflection" remain backroom deals. It's the kind of atmosphere in which corruption can thrive.