Mayor’s Office Inflates Cost Related to Occupy D.C.
I’ve been wondering about these costs related to handling occupy protests that mayor’s offices around the country have been citing. Well today, some evidence came out in an article written by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund that looked into the fine print behind them. Here in D.C., the numbers just don’t add up.
Initially, on November 15, the Mayor’s office estimated total costs to be “about $21,000” and acknowledged that any costs were within “normal daily duties” and further, that were any additional costs to arise they would be covered by the “congressionally appropriated funding from the federal government for [these type of] events.” The District receives $15 million a year in federal funds designated to cover demonstrations and other national events. Three days later, on November 18, the Mayor’s office claimed that Occupy DC cost the MPD alone $870,000.
The Mayor’s second round of numbers sought to extract regular budgeted agency costs of carrying out normal daily business as though they were special costs incurred in response to the Occupy demonstrations. Moreover, they used an estimate of the normal police costs for an average day of staffing significant demonstration and march activities and multiplied it out over the days of the encampments regardless of actual deployment and costs.
That last line is pretty significant. Instead of actually estimating what the costs were, the mayor’s office simply multiplied what it cost to police a “significant demonstration and march activities” even though Occupy D.C. only has a couple marches per month.
Rather than just use that figure for when Occupy D.C. is actually demonstrating, they claim they have to use that number of police everyday just to sit around and watch a 1.66 acre park, which the National Park Service is actually in charge of policing.
But it gets worse. Apparently the inflation in value was also related to a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors:
“Correspondence also includes an email from the U.S. Conference of Mayors from November 28. By then, the multi-city campaign to evict encampments was in full swing. That email solicits the EOM to recalculate MPD’s costs which had been reported to them as $65,000 since demonstrations began at both Occupy locations. The email from the U.S. Conference of Mayors states, “That seems low to me, so wanted to make sure it’s correct.”
In response, the EOM adjusted the reported cost related to the DC occupations upwards to nearly $1.6 million both in submissions to the U.S. Conference of Mayors and in public statements including today’s testimony. The U.S. Conference of Mayors representative writes back: “Thanks so much for pulling this together. I’ll make sure they replace DC’s previous responses. This will be especially helpful as we try to show what the Occupy Movement is costing cities.”
If this article is accurate, which it seems to be, then mayors across the country have been inflating the cost related to a legitimate First Amendment protest in order to have a reason to evict.
Source: http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/documents-reveal-dc-mayor.html
