Here are a few more photos from a geocaching expedition  to Kelley Point Park back in February that I forgot about until now.

Since we’ve found most of the caches at Kelley Point Park before, we stopped en route to look for a couple more around the Wapato Jail. I’d heard much about the jail before, but never knew exactly where it was located until we went on this trip.

The Wapato Jail is a multi-million dollar boondoggle, and a poster-child for … well, just about any kind of screw-up you can imagine. The 513-bed prison was built by Multnomah County at a cost of $58 million. Since its completion in 2004, the facility has housed exactly 0 inmates, and costs the county $300,000 per year to maintain. The county continues to maintain it despite tight budgets because it anticipates the need for the beds in the future and the NIMBY factor makes it hard to build prisons. There was some discussion of leasing it to the state, but the facility isn’t really suited for their needs so it would require millions more to renovate it—and the state is so hard up for cash that they postponed implementation of a new law that would have lengthened prison terms for many criminals. So Wapato will continue to weigh on the residents of Multnomah County for the foreseeable future.