Saturday NOT in the park

By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Saturday’s planned No Kings rally planned for Saugatuck’s Coghlin Park didn’t happen.
“We learned late insurance would cost $8,300 to use the park for public political event,” said Saugatuck-Douglas Indivisibles spokesperson Erin Wilkinson. “It was $250 for our past rallies in Wicks Park.
“We have two groups: ours and Jan Cohen’s Good Trouble Indivisible, which was also holding a Blue Star Bridge demonstration from noon to 1:30 p.m., then planned to March down to Coghlin and join ours from 2 to 3:30,” she continued.
“We had speakers lined up: state Rep. Joey Andrews (D-St. Joseph) and Fennville’s mayor (Carlos Lopez), but given how late we learned the insurance price — What’s new is insurers don’t want to touch a political rally or event — we decided not to hold ours in the park and instead just the other group on the public streets, where we have free-speech rights.”
Our photographer, there to shoot costume and sign displays in the sunshine, arrived to find only Cohen in the park around 1:45 p.m.
“Our marchers will arrive here shortly,” she says. “But we’ll have to stand and chalk on the sidewalk.”
Other No Kings demonstrators supported Holland and South Haven rallies that day, which were both held on public streets without instead paying park event insurance costs.
“That’s not particular to Saugatuck or Douglas,” noted Wilkinson. “That’s the case everywhere.”