Posted on 05/03/2012 9:53:16 AM PDT by matt04
... Ray Neal joined and helped launch Occupy New Haven. About 30 young people, some with children and professional jobs, set up camp on the Green where their protest could be heard. The goal was to get people to stand up against corporate greed.
The Occupiers in New Haven say it was the city who came up with the idea for them to set up on the Green in the first place. So, Occupy New Haven began to take on life as the weeks turned into months. It grew into more tents, more blue tarps, more signs, more people.
...
The Green was showing signs of permanent damage. And the city's budget was starting to be impacted by the bills.
Police spent many extra hours responding to calls on the Green and eventually trying to remove protesters after they were evicted. The department spent $76,000 in police overtime.
The public works department removed trash, maintained portable toilets during the occupation. It spent $12,000.
The fire department 's concern with fire hazards added thousands to its budget. The city hired extra attorneys to fight the federal suit at a cost of $30,000.
After 186 days the encampment was cleared. The city said the protesters left $25,000 in damage to the Green ranging from contaminating the soil to killing the grass.
The protestors believe the city overspent because it never had a clear plan for removing them. They claim the city allowed them to protest in the first place.
"Hindsight is 20-20. We would have gone back and started the process a little earlier," said Rob Smuts, New Haven's Chief Administrative Officer.
New Haven's $145,000 Occupy price tag is not excessive. New York City spent millions dealing with its protest. Hartford reportedly spent $45,000 for its two-month encampment.
(Excerpt) Read more at wfsb.com ...
Well New Haven would have made the Tea Party get a permit, pay taxes, get insurance, etc....
“Well New Haven would have made the Tea Party get a permit, pay taxes, get insurance, etc....”
And get IRS clearances for the tax returns of all Tea Party members involved.
Ive been to very large Tea Party events, including Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck in DC, and if anyone dropped litter it would have been picked up by someone else there. Trash was carefully and completely contained, and there was no damage beyond unavoidable trampling of the grass. The total cost of a Tea event is probably two men in a truck making a single circuit around the venue to pick up trash already in bags. I'd guess that comes in cheaper than picking up the scattered litter after the much smaller number of ordinary tourists present on most days.
Put this together with the other New Haven story today, the one about the pizza delivery redlining. Here you have a bunch of vain, grandstanding protestors forcing a poor, troubled city to spend a lot of money cleaning up their mess instead of putting it into law enforcement, education, etc. Reminds me of the late 80’s, when Yale students built a shantytown on campus to demostrate for divestiture from South Africa — mess up your safe little playpen to get attention for your outrage over inequalities half a world away (like a toddler smearing feces on the wall), instead of going down the street to do something productive about the problems brewing in your own backyard.
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