In other words, it’s no place for the World Trade Organization to hold a meeting. That’s because wherever the WTO goes these days, thousands of anti-globalization protesters usually follow. But that never occurred to Australian federal officials who chose the tony neighborhood–without consulting the local city hall–as the site for the WTO’s “mini-ministerial,” a gathering held last week for 25 trade ministers to discuss challenges to the organization’s new trade round. When they learned of the plans, Sydney’s city officials cried foul, reminding their federal counterparts of the more than $15 million worth of property damage that protesters caused two years ago at a World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne. The mayor demanded the meeting be moved to a more secure–and isolated–spot. “Everything [the protesters] dislike about the world sits in Double Bay,” says a government adviser. “It could have been vastly expensive.”
It was once an article of faith that mayors and city officials would go to any length to get their city named the site for an international meeting. Foreign delegations filled hotel rooms, dropped their currencies around town and generally added to a city’s prestige. But since anti-globalization protesters trashed the streets of Seattle in 1999, the world has witnessed economic summits grab more headlines for the violence they provoke in city parks than the deals they ink in boardrooms. That has altered the economics of global meeting making. No longer are these foreign get-togethers a boon to a city’s bottom line. Seattle ran up a bill of $20 million in property damage, and the price tags for Quebec City and Genoa in 2001 were $70 million and $100 million, respectively. Now you can almost hear city officials quietly praying that the world’s financial institutions will land their next summit someplace else.
Last week Sydney’s prayers went unanswered. Early estimates for security costs at the two-day conference are $2.5 million. And Sydney’s officials believe they got lucky: police warnings, the threat of new terrorism, and the fact that Australians are still in mourning from the Bali bombings kept many protesters away. But officials still had to prepare for the worst, and fortifying a city is expensive. Sydney locked down train stations and closed local businesses that were likely to come into harm’s way. As protesters began to arrive, they were met by hundreds of police standing behind 12-foot high cement and steel barricades. They were backed up by mounted police and three heliocopters at the meeting’s new site, Sydney’s Olympic Park in Homebush Bay–a facility whose broad boulevards and remote location were designed with security in mind.
This sort of damage control–and the costs incurred–are all too familiar to Washington, D.C., officials. As the home of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Washington has been besieged by anti-globalization protesters in recent years. Last year’s joint IMF-World Bank meeting, which was ultimately canceled in the wake of 9-11, was expected to cost the city $30 million. Their weekend summit this past September ran up $5.5 million in security costs. And almost none of that is recouped. “We don’t realize much benefit at all,” says Margaret Kellum, the deputy mayor for public safety and justice. “That’s because most of the people coming are tax-exempt diplomats who stay in their embassies. It’s really just a drain.”
With the high costs of anti-globalization protests becoming more routine, the city has naturally wanted to relieve the burden on its taxpayers. But it’s faced tougher resistance from the federal government than from protesters. After the Bush administration responded coolly to requests for help, the city put matters starkly. “We said there’s no money for it. So tell your delegates to bring water bottles and sleeping bags, because once they go in the building they’re not coming out,” recalls a senior city official. The federal government ultimately agreed to pay the costs of bringing additional police officers from other jurisdictions, and has budgeted $15 million to reimburse the city for security at future meetings.
If other cities aren’t able to broker such deals, there may be fewer places willing to play host–at least in open societies. After Seattle, the WTO did not want to risk launching its next trade round in just any city; it chose the Qatari capital of Doha, where authorities take crowd control seriously. Protesters already decry these institutions as secretive, opaque bodies; it could be devastating to their perceived legitimacy if they live up to the charge. But without a better way of reimbursing cities for the trouble of hosting such meetings, organizations like the IMF and the World Bank may have little choice. Next year, they’ve scheduled their annual meeting in Doha too.
