They had extra sanitary facilities set up. They had people working 'security' as well as legal observers. They had extra trash receptacles out.

This morning, as I walked to the corner store, I passed by volunteers collecting the last of the garbage, and other effluvia from the previous night. City crews should be so immediately efficient! I myself passed through the crowd shortly after ten o'clock last night. It was a happy merry group, with a remarkably social feeling utterly lacking during wallet trap festivities like Italian Day or the city's Car Free Days. When I got home (I live two and a half blocks from Grandview Park, ground zero, of the event. There was no disruptive noise other than that of the police who were there like they expected a minor war.

The city and their opportunistic civic level regulations do not trump federal level rights. They do not have the authority to regulate our rights into effective non-existence. And the costs now involved are truly unnecessarily high and there simply to pad city coffers. And, of course, the police union's membership.

The Drive, before the devolution of civic government to self perpetuating bureaucracy , once was home to The Fringe Festival: gone. The Illuminari or Lantern Festival: truncated to a shadow. The Parade of Lost Souls:. reduced to a ring of isolated displays behind Britannia. All these wonderful events which helped bring our extraordinary community together are effectively dead. Exsanguination through fees and permits and endless timelines more fitting for Superior Court appeals than a community party.

So I ask the city, and its apologists, why are there so many bureaucratic and financial obstacles for events which we used to hold without problems, and which were easier to 'officially' hold, and less costly by far? Are the only official festivals to be allowed, the only affordable for organizers, to be the BIA sponsored wallet traps?

And our communities wither, regulatory drop by drop.