While the Occupy Tampa movement has been focused on trying to get access to a park they can occupy full time, and other encampments are being broken up by local officials (as in Oakland and Portland), the Occupy St. Pete movement has evolved at a much lower intensity.
Unlike the Tampa movement, activists in St. Petersburg are not occupying a park full time. Instead, they're meeting up every Saturday in South Straub Park, with organizational meetings held throughout the weekend at local cafes.
Members of the group say they're beginning to get focused on putting their energies towards trying to affect change at a local and state level, and late Saturday afternoon members gathered to hear about a
specific strategy - to deny a bid by local energy provider Progress Energy to make ratepayers pay for the costs to repair their Crystal River plant, which has been shut down since 2009.
Since 2006, consumer groups have objected to energy customers being charged for nuclear power plants that the utilities themselves have not even made final decisions to go forward with. It's called Nuclear Cost Recovery.
But if that wasn't controversial enough, Progress is now hoping to get a favorable decision by the Public Service Commission to help pay for their current problem, which is that they had to shut down the plant after the company itself botched replacing aging steam generators, and the bill to fix that for taxpayers is $670 million.
