The role of Chevy Chase's
exclusive Columbia Country Club in orchestrating
opposition to the Purple Line has been unmasked by a
leaked letter
from club president J. Paul McNamara and a subsequent expose
by Washington Post reporter Katherine Shaver.
The March 24, 2008, letter
revealed a plan to “launch a grassroots campaign to
identify and organize a broad and diverse coalition of
opponents to the current proposal for the Purple Line.”
Soon thereafter, a new group called Alliance for Smart
Transportation (A4ST) appeared, with a website registered
in the Madeira Islands, a tax haven located off the coast
of Africa, through a service called “Domain Discreet”
that conceals the name of the true owner.
The Post's research
revealed that A4ST is headed by Geoffrey Gonella, a
member
of Columbia Country Club's Board of Governors. Gonella
is a lobbyist who specializes
in creating “grassroots” backing for paying clients, a
practice often referred to as “astroturf,” and is
rated by Golf Digest among the best
golfers in the Washington lobbying corps.
Joining Gonella on A4ST's
executive committee is Glenn Cowan, another lobbyist
with a specialty in astroturf. Cowan was a pioneer of this
technique, coming to public attention in 1990 when he
helped create a “grassroots” group called Nevadans
for Fair Fuel Economy Standards to fight the Clean Air
Act. Cowan's consulting firm was working for automobile
manufacturers, but most of the people on the group's
letterhead later contacted by the Boston Globe said
that they had not been informed of the industry
sponsorship. “I got the impression this was a group of
concerned people and not the auto industry. It was done in
a surreptitious manner,” county government official Bob
Stewart told the Globe.
In the 1990s, Cowan and
Gonella worked together at lobbying powerhouse Cassidy
& Associates, whose founder Gerald Cassidy is himself
a member of Columbia. Cowan ran the
firm's astroturf operations while Gonella recruited
new clients. Cowan's astroturf clients included the oil,
tobacco,
pharmaceutical
and telecom
industries.
In 1995, Cowan was caught
up in another
scandal, this time involving use of names without
permission. Operators in a boiler room operated by a
subcontractor were supposed to call people and read a
script asking if they were in favor of competition in
telecommunications. If the answer was yes, they were asked
if a message could be sent to Congress in opposition to a
bill that long-distance companies wanted to defeat.
Messages were sent signed by 56,000 people who had not
given permission.
The McNamara letter
does not reveal how much the country club—which charges
an initiation fee of $70,000—is spending, but the
expenditure is not small. Not enough money could be found
in an annual budget of more than ten million dollars, and
the club is drawing from its capital reserves. “The only
grass roots at Columbia Country Club grow in the fairways,”
commented Karren Pope-Onwukwe, co-chair of Prince George's
Advocates for Community-based Transportation.
The creation of a “grassroots”
front group is the most recent in a chain of tactics used
to keep the Purple Line off abandoned railroad tracks that
adjoin the country club's golf course. When Montgomery
County in 1989 purchased old railroad tracks alongside its
golf course to build light rail, the club initially tried
to exclude the public altogether by creating a nature
reserve. Only when that gambit failed did the golfers
reverse course and fund a
coalition that advertised itself as the voice of
hikers and bikers who want to preserve trees along their
trail.
A rare moment of frankness
occurred in 1996. The club's attorney, Dennis
Osterman, told the Gazette [June 5, 1996]
that running light rail through the club would be a
"recipe for disaster" because it would force the
club to move tees at the 15th and 18th holes. That
would "change the competitive dynamics of a golf
course that has been around since 1911," Osterman
explained.
