Vancouver city hall bent its own rules in November to occupy a room for almost $200 a night in a luxury hotel across the street from the Occupy Vancouver tent village.
Records obtained via Freedom of Information show taxpayers were billed $1,545.26 for room 505 at the Rosewood Hotel Georgia from Nov. 14-21. The room was vacated the same day that a B.C. Supreme Court order forced protesters at the Vancouver Art Gallery's north plaza to pack up and move.
The Occupy Wall Street-inspired, anti-corporate greed camp reappeared outside Robson Square provincial court for a day before relocating to Grandview Park and disbanding late Nov. 22 while riot police were on standby.
City of Vancouver's corporate travel policy states "no accommodation or per diems will be paid" within Greater Vancouver, but exceptions should be approved by the city manager. The Hotel Georgia, built in 1927, was renovated and rebranded under new management last summer and received a 2011 American Automobile Association four-diamond rating.
City manager Penny Ballem's Dec. 19 staff memo estimated the city spent $981,902 related to Occupy Vancouver through Dec. 15. Of that, $394,000 was spent by Oct. 20, mostly for policing the peaceful Oct. 15 protest during which tents were erected.
Attached to the hotel receipt is a list titled "Command Control Center for Occupy Vancouver Nov. 8th-21st" showing a roster of five battalion chiefs who were rotated through two daily shifts at the hotel. Fire Chief John McKearney was there during eight days, including the morning shift on Nov. 10 with Deputy Chief Wade Pierlot and two assistant chiefs. Ballem attended the evening of Nov. 9 and morning of Nov. 12. Vancouver firefighters parked a mobile command vehicle on Hornby Street during the protest.
Ballem's memo said the fire department was used "on the ground as the key interface group with the protesters at the VAG" instead of Vancouver Police for cost reasons. She did not mention the hotel expenses in her memo, which claimed unnamed hoteliers allowed city personnel access to business centres to use computers and printers.
"They also provided intermittently through the situation access to a hotel room to allow us to monitor events and deploy staff when required," Ballem wrote. "Both VPD and VFRS used these facilities intermittently for their 24/7 oversight of the situation."
Deputy city manager Sadhu Johnston told the Courier the first six nights at the Rosewood were free before the hotel charged a 50 percent discount rate.
"No one was sleeping there and it was being used for the observation post," Johnston said. "This was kind of a unique emergency situation that we used it for."
Johnston said he believed the city was also given a free room for a night at the Wedgewood Hotel and Spa.
Occupy Vancouver member Eric Hamilton-Smith called it "very alarming" that city hall would, according to him, break its own rules to book a hotel room to spy on protesters.
"It occurs to me that that $1 million spent by paying people overtime just to watch the protesters was, from the get go, unnecessary from a practical standpoint, completely necessary from a [public relations] standpoint," Hamilton-Smith said. "How this room that they had at the hotel factors into that is kind of confusing. It wasn't for the PR aspect of it."
