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Occupy Oakland protesters returned to Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of Oakland City Hall today, but on a smaller scale than before. 

About 30 protesters rallied at the plaza at noon today and at 2 p.m. they erected a teepee on the side of the plaza while a small group of Oakland police officers and security guards watched. 

Assistant to the city administrator Arturo Sanchez said the city has granted the protesters a permit to set up the teepee but they must take it down at 10 p.m. every night. The protesters can then erect it again at 6 a.m. every morning, he said. 

J. Kirk Boyd, a University of California at Berkeley law professor who's a legal adviser for Occupy Wall Street protesters throughout the Bay Area, said the protesters plan to hold a vigil at Frank Ogawa Plaza around the clock 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Asked if the protesters will take down the teepee every night, Boyd said, "For the time being." 

He said the protesters plan to take down the teepee tonight but declined to say if they will take it down every night. 

The vigil is on a much smaller scale than the encampment that previously was set up in the plaza. That encampment reached a peak of about 200 tents before Oakland police closed it down two weeks ago. 

Boyd said the teepee is "symbolic" and the vigil shows that the protesters "will be here for people who worry every night if their kids will be able to go to college or whether they will have health care." 

He said, "We will have people here around the clock." 

Phil Horne of Occupy Oakland said, "This is a demonstration that doesn't involve sleeping out or dwellings." 

He said protesters are "building coalitions and reaching out to people." 

Horne said protesters will fight home foreclosures and will occupy banks. 

Among the protesters today was former Berkeley mayoral candidate Zachary Running Wolf, who recently spent seven consecutive days perched in a tree in Frank Ogawa Plaza. 

Running Wolf said he now takes turns with seven other protesters so that one person is in the tree at all times. 

"We've been in the tree for 17 days," he said. 

Running Wolf previously participated in a long-running tree-sitting protest in a grove of oak trees near the football stadium at the University of California at Berkeley. That protest attempted to stop the building of a student recreation center but the construction work eventually went forward and is now nearly complete.