Let's Call it Snowgate: Was an RA E-mail Promoting Weekend Snow Removal a Tacit Endorsement of 3 RA Board Candidates?

Only in Reston could a call for volunteer snow removal become an imbroglio involving the election of Reston Association Board candidates. I mean, really?

You may remember that the Reston Association sent out an e-mail over the weekend encouraging volunteers to help dig out schools and sidewalks so kids could go back to school. It was a great idea, it really played up the good things about living in Reston -- the scads of people willing to help out a common cause -- and it made for some cute photos that filthy "web loggers" like us could make fun of. But there was this one line in the official RA e-mail:

(While the organizers, including Mike Collins, Kevin Danaher, and David Robinson, are Reston Association members, this project is not an RA sponsored event.)

The three aren't just Reston Association members -- all three are running for the three open seats on the RA Board, all of which are contested. Further, none of the three are running against each other.

Another one of the candidates is crying foul. Others have argued that this has basically tipped the RA's hand by showing what it considers to be its hand-picked slate of candidates. On the surface, it's hard to dispute that's exactly what this looks like.

Maybe the RA just goofed. Getting volunteers together was a good idea, and there's nothing that says that involved Reston residents -- who are exactly the kind of people who should be running for the RA Board -- shouldn't be able to reach out and ask the RA to help them get the word out about an event of this nature. If these three considered this part of their election strategy, that just makes them savvy campaigners. You really can't blame them for trying to get their names out.

But the RA needs to do its job and ensure that the process remains fair. At a minimum, they absolutely should have identified the three as RA Board candidates -- calling them "RA members" appears to the cynical to be a deliberate attempt to keep from pointing this very fact out. In its defense, the RA may have discussed how to identify these three people and thought that this would be the most fair way of handling it, as to avoid the appearance of a blatant endorsement. Unfortunately, it just made them look more underhanded in some people's eyes instead.

Perhaps the RA should not have promoted the event through official channels at all. Lord knows there are filthy "web logs" that will do that dirty work for pretty much anyone who asks.

In the interest of fairness, we'll publish any rebuttal or explanation these candidates or the RA wants to offer. In fact, we'd welcome it. Because without an explanation, this really makes the RA look conniving. Or incompetent. We'll leave it to others to decide which.

Update: From the comments, the most plausible explanation we've heard thus far.

I got an e-mail from the Lake Anne PTA a couple hours before I received RA's and that line was already in the first e-mail. I think the organizers themselves wrote it and the people who dispersed the message just left it in resulting in a sort of oversight. It seems a lot of the people who were out to help really just wanted to volunteer and help get their kids to school but the event seemed to be led by current RA board member Richard Chew and the three candidates. Maybe these aren't RA's hand-picked candidates but some of the current board members' preferred candidates?

We'll buy this less cynical theory. But the skepticism out there -- and not just on this filthy "web log" -- is a reminder that everyone involved needs to be more careful.