The Town of Chevy Chase will not charge transit activists for documents they sought describing the town’s efforts to defeat the Purple Line, town attorney Ron Bolt said Wednesday night.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled in August that the town wrongly set high fees for the documents, which Action Committee for Transit member Ben Ross of Bethesda sought. ACT and Ross filed a Maryland Public Information Act request to find out the town’s legal and lobbying efforts to defeat the Bethesda-to-New Carrollton light-rail line.
The court ruled Chevy Chase charged the fees because the town expected ACT and Ross to criticize the community’s opposition to the Purple Line.
“Any time an agency says to you, ‘We’re not giving you this information because we don’t like you or we don’t like the things you say,’ this case says you lose,” lawyer Elliot Feldman said after the ruling. Feldman, of the Baker Hostetler law firm, represented ACT and Ross pro bono.
At a town council meeting Wednesday night, Chevy Chase resident Donald Farren asked officials how much the case cost the town. Town manager Todd Hoffman said insurance covered the town’s defense.
Bolt said the town would be part of a circuit court hearing to determine how much the town owes in ACT’s and Ross’s attorney fees.
In its ruling, the court said that “without belaboring the issue, we agree with appellants that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression of speech protects persons from the imposition of financial burdens based upon the content of their speech.”
In early 2014, ACT sought documentation from Chevy Chase about the town’s hiring of legal, lobbying and public relations firms to fight the Purple Line. The multibillion-dollar Purple Line will connect Bethesda with New Carrollton, with stops in Silver Spring and College Park; the route will pass through Chevy Chase. Construction started last month, then a federal judge vacated federal approval of the project and ordered another study of the Purple Line’s ridership forecasts.
Although the town complied with ACT’s first information request, in subsequent requests the town insisted ACT and Ross pay to cover research costs. The Maryland Public Information Act allows government agencies to charge reasonable fees, and they can waive research and copying costs if the requests are deemed to be in the public interest. In January 2015, Ross and the organization appealed the costs in a suit filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
On June 30, that court sided with the town.
However, in defending its position, the town claimed ACT and Ross had engaged in a “smear campaign” against the town concerning its Purple Line opposition.
The Special Appeals court’s decision quoted a memorandum from the town that read:
“ACT had posted false accusations against the Town on ACT’s website and had repeatedly attacked the Town because of the Town’s opposition to the proposed Purple Line project, accusing the Town of acting illegally. The Town, like any private citizen, is entitled to take a position on the public issue. … Thus, the Town rightfully disbelieved ACT and Ross’s claims that the request for the fee waiver was in the ‘public interest.’ ”
