Lots of local headlines this past week about the NHPD overtime costs related to the Occupy New Haven settlement on New Haven Green. I think it was one of the local TV stations which first did the math. Struck me as idle trawling for a story—once the luster of any event starts to fade, the first question most folks ask is “What did this cost?!”
To me, the answer to that burning question—$65,000 or so since Occupy first planted itself two months ago—seems not just reasonable but a downright bargain, and I speak as someone who has covered city festivals and events for a couple of decades now, and who helped set up a couple of big outdoor spectacles on the Green as a short-term employee of the city’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs in the late 1980s, not to mention the many downtown local-band festivals the New Haven Advocate was involved with throughout the 1990s.
Expenses for a one-night event on New Haven Green can quickly go into the thousands of dollars, with the need to accommodate the safety and well-being of the citizenry. Even a deliberately low-cost endeavor such as the Ideat Village festival needs a budget in the four digits to kick back for costs of essential city services. A big parade can run into the tens of thousands.
More to the point, on any given weekend in New Haven, there are untold numbers of cops getting overtime for standing by as college student parties on residential streets spring up unexpectedly and suddenly need overseeing. There are bigger-than-usual closing-time needs at dance clubs. There are community festivals where special clean-up services and security procedures come into play.
I loved City Hall’s reaction to the cost of maintaining the Occupy settlement: that this is what the First Amendment sometimes requires, and this is what New Haven Green is for. Due to the abruptness of the settlement at first, expenses were somewhat inflated and have since been modified. I imagine that the expected future expense of regrowing the grass in that area of the upper Green would be about the same whether the tents were there for a week or for two months.
If we look at this another way, the City has helped support a dynamic new movement which is rethinking how we can live in the city (providing shelter at rock-bottom rates, including for some who are otherwise homeless), express our views in a public forum and gain international publicity beyond that which has been achieved by any single cultural event in recent times, for what seems to be a minimal expenditure.
This is the cost of doing business in the new America, and it’s well spent.