- Chip Weiner
- Occupy Tampa at Voice of Freedom Park (taken 7/6/12)
In recent weeks, tension has been building in the West Tampa community about the encampment of Occupy Tampa protesters in their neighborhood.
The activist group become a part of the neighborhood last December, when Occupy moved from their nearly three-month old presence downtown at Curtis Hixon Park to Voice of Freedom of Park on Main Street. Members of the group had conducted an internal debate for weeks on whether to accept the invitation from adult entrepreneur/activist Joe Redner, who has owned the park for several years. Although its location was away from downtown, the fact that it was private meant that sleeping overnight would not become an issue, as it had been at Curtis Hixon, where Mayor Bob Buckhorn and the Tampa Police Department allowed the activists to sleep on the sidewalk in front of the park, but not inside the park itself.
For most of 2012 things had been relatively low-key, but in recent weeks complaints from local business and neighborhood association groups about the park looking unseemly began to grow, to the point where a petition complaining about Occupy began circulating and will be presented at the Tampa City Council this coming Thursday. That led to reports on this site and others, leading to a 90-minute meeting held at the West Tampa Library on Saturday afternoon with about 20 participants, most from Occupy Tampa.
The upshot is that there was some harmony achieved. The fact that the two sides had not been speaking with each other, but more at each other thru the media, became apparent shortly into the discussion.