Ohio town stuck with $650,000 bill for KKK rally security: Mayor admits it is ‘frustrating’

On Saturday, members of the Ku Klux Klan hosted a rally in Dayton, Ohio. The rally was small, and only nine members of the KKK were present. In objection to the KKK about 600 people from the community showed up to protest.

While the rally was not violent, the city ended paying nearly $650,000 on security.

"I’m proud of the city,” Mayor Nan Whaley told TIME. “I think it is frustrating on how expensive it is today to keep people safe.”

She added that the hefty price tag was necessary, seeing as Ohio has a open-carry of weapons policy.

“The number of assault rifles was troubling to me,” Whaley says. “This place we live in now [is] where we have to really prepare for really bad scenarios, and that’s really expensive.”

“The way that the city did it was really awesome, but as a taxpayer of the city, I’m extremely aggravated and irritated [at] the fact that our city spent $650,000 on this,” Dayton resident Jesse Seiber, 25, said.