The Covington Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to seek restitution for the time police spent removing a large banner, which environmental protesters had hung on the outside of the Roebling Bridge last week, at their meeting on Tuesday night.
Commissioner Ron Washington pitched the motion to the rest of the board, who asked the city attorney’s office to draft a letter after some discussion to the Kenton County Commonwealth Attorney’s office, requesting reimbursement from the state as restitution.
“I believe in freedom of speech, but it does have certain limitations,” Washington said. “And when you are causing such disruption to our city and our city’s taxpayers, it’s just not fair. And we should be reimbursed.”
Protesters from the Rainforest Action Network, who has since taken credit for the demonstration, scaled the bridge early in the morning on Oct. 4 and unfurled the banner at around 6:30 a.m. The banner specifically called out Proctor & Gamble, whose corporate offices are in Cincinnati, with the words “Stop Forest Destruction.”
In statements to the press from last week, the group said it hoped to draw attention to the company’s resource extraction operations throughout the world, which the group said contributed to deforestation and other environmental destruction as well as the displacement of indigenous communities.
“Today’s demonstration occurs amidst a rapidly escalating, multi-faceted campaign calling on the consumer goods giant to meaningfully address systemic failures of its corporate policies and actions to prevent forest destruction, climate pollution and conflicts with local communities that result from its large scale use of forest risk commodities like palm oil and wood pulp in its products,” Blair Fitzgibbon, a public relations representative for the Rainforest Action Network, said in a press release.
The demonstration led to a closure of the bridge for about six hours and followed a series of bomb threats–unrelated to last week’s demonstration–that had closed the bridge in September.
Kyle Krakow and Lauren Howland were arrested for carrying out the demonstration and charged with wanton endangerment. Margaret Martin and Marcella Largess were also arrested and charged with complicity for wanton endangerment. They all later plead not guilty in court.
In addition, the group held a protest outside of P&G’s headquarters in Cincinnati earlier in the day on Tuesday during the company’s annual shareholder meeting.
As reported by WCPO, the meeting yielded strong support for the company’s current board of directors, much to the chagrin of the descendants of the company’s founders, who have pushed repeatedly for P&G to reduce its environmental impact.
“We’re not going away and this issue is not going away, regardless of how shareholders vote,” said Jim Epstein, a fifth-generation descendant of P&G co-founder James Gamble.
Epstein was among 39 descendants who asked shareholders to vote against four P&G board nominees, including CEO Jon Moeller. They argued the company hasn’t done enough to respond to a 2020 vote in which 67% of shareholders called on P&G to “increase the scale, pace, and rigor of its efforts to eliminate deforestation and forest degradation from its supply chains.”
P&G did not release a tally of its shareholders’ votes, but it will file the results this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
At the meeting in Covington, Commissioner Tim Downing wondered if there was a precedent for such an action, adding that “all too often we end up bearing the brunt of situations that happen to us from forces that are beyond our control…”
A representative from the Covington Police Department said that the effort to close the bridge and remove the banner was multi-departmental and included workers from Covington Police, Cincinnati Police as well as state workers who actually performed the work of removing banner. The city has not yet furnished a monetary amount they would hope to recoup.
For the timebeing, the city will seek restitution from the state, as they do not currently have the legal standing to seek restitution directly from the protestors or Rainforest Action Network before trials have taken place.
LINK nky reached out to the Rainforest Action Network for comment, but they had not provided a statement on the matter at the time of this article’s publication. LINK nky will update this story once they have.
The next meeting of the Covington Board of Commissioners will take place on Oct. 17 at 6 p.m. at Covington City Hall on Pike Street.