Communities cope with costs of visits

The state patrol has spent about $334,000 to date.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- President Bush's motorcade took only three minutes to drive through tiny Columbus Grove, population 2,200, during a campaign visit last month. Cost to the village: $500 in police overtime.
"It's not much, but we're a small town," said Janet Hermiller, treasurer of the northwest Ohio community.
Municipalities are racking up thousands of dollars in overtime costs and other expenses, from chopping down trees to renting trash bins, as Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry return to battleground states over and over again.
Bush alone has visited more than 25 Ohio communities since January.
In Michigan, an August visit by the president cost the Traverse City area about $17,000, mostly in overtime costs to city and county police.
In Wisconsin, the city of La Crosse has spent $85,000 to handle security and the cost of renting trash bins and fencing for visits by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards.
The city billed Bush $8,000 for the rental costs; Mayor John Medinger, a Democrat, said he would have preferred charging the entire amount to the campaign.
"Taxpayers should not have to subsidize anybody's campaign for security or any other costs," he said. "Everybody else gets paid -- the only suckers in this are the local taxpayers."
He said if he used tax dollars to subsidize his own campaign, "I'd go to jail."
State costs
In Ohio, the state patrol has spent about $334,000 to date on presidential campaign visits, including wages and the cost of keeping helicopters or planes above the events.
Akron has spent about $27,000 on visits by Bush and Kerry. In Columbus, the state's largest city in battleground Franklin County, police overtime for visits by both candidates is about $188,000 since January.
Cleveland has spent more than $250,000, including $6,000 for painting offices and building a platform for photographers at the Cleveland Convention Center for a Bush visit in March.
The costs come at a time when city revenues are weak because of the slow-to-recover economy. Cleveland, for example, laid off 250 police officers earlier this year to balance its budget.
"You're not going to hear anyone say, 'Gee, we love these overtime costs,'" said John Mahoney, Ohio Municipal League deputy director.
In Cambridge, officials were trying to decide what to do about $15,000 to $18,000 in damage to the baseball field at Don Coss Stadium, reduced to a sea of mud after a Bush rally held in the pouring rain in July.
In Springfield, the city billed the Kerry-Edwards campaign after spending $4,800 at the campaign's request to dismantle -- and later reassemble -- four small bus shelters that blocked the staging area for a midnight rally in September.
The campaign also reimbursed a local museum $1,100 for four young maple trees it asked to be cut down in a parking lot needed for the rally. But Springfield also spent about $15,000 on police overtime it doesn't expect to see back.
"It's nice to get the attention of the candidates," said Jim Bodenmiller, Springfield's assistant city manager. But, "it's also tough times financially for many local governments, including our city. It also represents some challenges when we have these additional costs."
Reimbursement policy
Cities should be able to bill the campaigns for reasonable expenses, said Dean DePiero, mayor of the Cleveland suburb of Parma, which spent $18,000 on a Cheney visit in June.
"These campaigns are spending millions and millions and millions of dollars," he said. "I don't think it's too much ask when they come to write checks to defray some of the costs."
Campaigns follow federal campaign rules that allow for reimbursing everything but security costs, said Aaron McClear, a Bush-Cheney spokesman.
The U.S. Secret Service relies heavily on local officials for security, said spokeswoman Lorie Lewis.
"We understand that support often results in costs to communities that host visits," she said. "The Secret Service is not equipped or funded to reimburse communities for those costs."
The visits are the cost of doing business as a city during the political season, said Mark Williamson, a spokesman for Akron mayor Don Plusquellic.
"The frequency with which they decide to come through here is about as much a variable as a snowstorm," he said. "You don't get a lot of advance warning, but you've got to produce."