Managing the Occupy Vancouver protest for the first two months cost nearly $1 million, according to a new memorandum from city manager Penny Ballem.
The memo, sent Monday to council and Mayor Gregor Robertson, divides the estimated $981,103 protest price tag between the Vancouver Police Department, city engineering department, Emergency Operations Centre and Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services.
The data doesn't include the "extensive time spent by many exempt managers from across all departments… who worked many days and nights to effectively manage this challenging situation," Ballem wrote.
Policing made up the bulk of the cost, with an estimated $590,000 incurred from the Oct. 15 launch of the protest to Dec. 15. The city says that number was largely due to overtime costs and additional deployment.
Almost $400,000 of the policing cost was spent by Oct. 20, according to the memo.
Engineering cost $345,878 during the same period, with $127,124 being spent during the first two weeks of the protest.
Staffing the Emergency Operations Centre cost $28,494 while Vancouver fire services cost $16,730.
Ballem said the cost was curbed by dispatching fire department staff to monitor the protest, which "allowed us to significantly reduce the VPD presence where the costs are significant."
The city manager also compared Vancouver's expenditures with other North American cities, such as Portland, Oregon and Oakland, California, which racked up more than $1.4 million and $2.4 million respectively in policing and park restoration alone.
New York spent more than $7 million in police overtime alone, according to the memo. Data from Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton was not available.
Ballem lauded the city for managing the protest without resorting to the same violence and crowd control tactics employed by some international cities to break up their local Occupy movements.
"The City can be proud of the peaceful resolution to the protest in Vancouver," she wrote.
The protest and associated costs are expected to continue, however. Participants say the Occupy Vancouver movement is also far from over, despite having been without a steady encampment site since late November.
Occupiers say they will continue to demonstrate, and recently organized sparsely attended protests at Port Metro Vancouver and a Department of Fisheries and Oceans office.
In a statement emailed to CTV News, protester Min Reyes wondered why some people are so intent on reducing the Occupy movement to a matter of money.
"What kind of society and government officials decide to put a price tag on the political expression of its citizenry?" she wrote.
"Why do we focus so much on the price of a social movement that aims at expressing Canadians' political frustration and demands?... Does everything in our lives, including our ability to freely and peacefully assemble, really comes down to budgeting?"
