On a recent Saturday morning inside Lykes Gaslight Park in downtown Tampa, the humidity is quickly rising as 15 members of Occupy Tampa sit languidly in a shady area underneath the large oak trees. Although a General Assembly has been called at noon, it’s not until about 12:10 p.m. that Occupy member Nathan Pim asks, “Do we have an agenda for today?” After general agreement that there are issues to discuss, at 12:20 somebody else suggests they should begin — at 12:30.
The consensus protocol was essential when the crowd for General Assemblies numbered in the hundreds, but is still employed for these more intimate sessions. For the next 50 minutes, discussions cover the various protests that will be taking place during the Republican National Convention (and transportation to and from the protests), with Occupy member Chris Kuleci writing down the events on a chalkboard.
If the meeting seems devoid of urgency, well, at least they were meeting.
After Occupy Wall Street made its presence felt at Zuccotti Park in New York City last fall, similar efforts cropped up across the country. But, just months later, most of those encampments were history, shut down by big-city mayors.
Since then, except for the occasional outburst by members in Oakland, there hasn’t been much Occupy action in 2012. During a recent national conference call, the conversation ranged from foreclosures to protests about police shootings. In Nashville a representative discussed participating in a two-day strike with the Communication Workers of America against AT&T. Local Occupy members are concerned about a plan for West Tampa that that would raze a venerable public housing complex. But the events are all relatively low-key compared to last fall.
As Natasha Lennard, a reporter for Salon.com who has covered the movement extensively, says, “May Day was going to be a real big kickstarter, and it sort of wasn’t, and I think that took the wind out of a lot of people’s sails.”
In June, the progressive blog Common Dreams asked, “The movement has gone from hibernation to invisible, but can rebirth still flourish from summer and beyond?’
In the case of Occupy Tampa, its continued existence has been buoyed by two factors. One was its move to private property away from the heart of downtown. The other was the fact that, as host city for the RNC, Tampa was about to be flooded by activists — so why not have a welcoming base for them?
Unlike other cities that saw major Occupy encampments, Tampa and its mayor never allowed the group to sleep overnight in a public park. So there was never any encampment to break up. Some members of the movement instead chose to sleep on the sidewalk in front of downtown’s Curtis Hixon Park, an effort that led to lots of back and forth with Tampa police, with Occupy members claiming they were being unfairly harassed (some of those arrests are still tied up in the courts). They also held their nightly General Assemblies inside the amphitheater in Kiley Gardens, up until mid-December.
That’s when Occupy members decided to accept the offer from adult entrepreneur/political activist Joe Redner to take up residence at his own privately owned park off of Main Street in the heart of West Tampa, a working-class neighborhood that, though only a few miles away from Curtis Hixon in downtown, was completely off the grid in terms of exposure to the “1 percent,” opposition to which was part of the group’s DNA.
Some OT members think the move to Redner’s Voice of Freedom Park was a mistake. One member who refused to be identified said frankly, “We got gamed. Joe Redner got to us. It was a mess, it was a bad time and we made a poor choice.”
The relative lack of intensity among Occupy in West Tampa coincided with the national movement losing some of its mojo. But the group got re-energized when some local neighborhood activists began grumbling this summer that the camp was an “eyesore,” with Mike Vannetta, president of the Old West Tampa Neighborhood Association collecting hundreds of complaints that were given a platform at City Hall.
The fact is, West Tampa has been economically depressed for decades, so to blame the Occupy movement for its further deterioration would be a bit of a stretch. In fact, when Tampa City Councilman Frank Reddick set aside time on the council’s agenda to allow complaints about Occupy to be voiced, Councilwoman Yolie Capin called his concerns “a lot of hype.”
Capin knows of what she speaks. Over the past year she’s toured the area on random Friday nights, sometimes riding with a Tampa police officer, other times just with her husband. She says she received complaints a year ago from residents about noise, much of it emanating from Voice of Freedom Park well before Occupy took up residence there.
At last week’s council meeting, she recounted that on one recent foray into the area with an officer she heard eight gunshots go off, and was stunned to learn that the TPD wouldn’t be writing up the incident, since they were already on the scene.
“There are a lot of issues in that area,” she says, but Occupy isn’t one of them.
That didn’t deter Reddick from insisting on having Tampa police and other officials discuss Occupy’s presence at City Council last week, where code enforcement officials said that even though the park was privately held, camping overnight was banned as a zoning violation in a commercially intensive district.
Reddick originally was a fan of the group, but now says they’ve lost their way.
“They are no longer being community activists at all. They just seem to be hanging around, and it’s become a camping ground for some people, and if that’s their intent, then I don’t think they need to be out there. If they’re going to be out there using free speech and being activists again, I could support them. But just to be lingering around in a park, having cookouts, that’s not what their original purpose was.”
Some speculate that the West Tampa business community’s opposition to Occupy is more about anti-Joe Redner attitude than anything else. Some black residents haven’t forgiven him for running against Gwen Miller for City Council in 2007. For his part Redner says simply, “I don’t know, but there is some of the population that has no respect for me.” Some of that animosity from the black community has manifested itself in opposition to the expansion of his son’s extremely successful Cigar City Brewing in West Tampa.
Last week Redner reiterated that he and Occupy had come to a mutual agreement that the encampment (which these days consists of just a few people sleeping overnight) would end in early September.
Some members who were part of the Curtis Hixon wave say the movement lost its edge moving to West Tampa. Mike Madison says he’s still sympathetic to the group. “I’m glad they’re still active in whatever way they are, in terms of beautification, but that has nothing to do with the economic issues that drew me to the movement.”
Joe Jay was with Occupy at its initial inception in Tampa last fall. He moved with the group to West Tampa in December, and camped in the park overnight up to six nights a week. But by springtime he said the camp was devolving in a “really bad direction.”
Saying he thought the movement had excelled in changing the national dialogue a year ago, he said once the conversation changes, “there was no clear game plan after that — and we needed something a lot more tightly focused than just protesting everything.”
But Zoe Alif, who has been active with the group since last fall, says that the issues that created the Occupy movement, such as bankruptcies and the foreclosure crisis, are still vital. “None of that has changed. It just has gotten worse.”
Other camps have been created for the thousands of activists scheduled to show up in Tampa for the convention, none getting more coverage than the encampment behind the Army-Navy Surplus Market on Tampa Street coined “Romneyville.”
St. Pete human rights activist Bruce Wright, who participated in many Occupy Tampa events in its original incarnation, began soliciting months in advance for funds to find a place for activists to stay during the convention. News about the encampment broke in July, though in fact the first tent went up in mid-May. Though the owner has been informed that the tents are in violation of commercial zoning laws, it would take until after the convention to adjudicate a hearing. So the city has come to terms with the fact that Romneyville will exist until after the RNC.
Wright still supports Occupy, calling it the most important activist movement in the U.S. in the past 15 years.
“I think you have to understand that Occupy was a new thing, with people who were never politicized.”
Occupy member Nathan Pim says, “There are a lot of groups that have done just fine without a public space to occupy, and I guess that’s where I guess Occupy Tampa is headed.”
Occupy’s Chris Kuleci says where the group will go next is up for debate. Voice of Freedom Park could still work as a meeting place, but just not an encampment.
“You need to have a base,” he says. “We’re running a revolution here. We’re trying to get something accomplished, and you need a base camp to do that.”
Though some might question how successful that revolution has been, in Tampa Occupy has definitely established a presence. If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan get elected this fall, who’s to say that their revolution might not get more motivated?
Natasha Lennard with Salon says, “Lots of people around the country are just realizing that they’re going to have to actually start living differently forever now, because of the people they met within the movement. Whether or not they call it Occupy or not,” she adds, “is pretty irrelevant.”
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2012.