Our Brand Is Crisis: Elite RTC Rollout of Elite Paid Parking Going So Well They Hired An Elite Crisis Management Firm

So it's been a quiet few months for our favorite elite plastic fantastic fake downtown. Aside from the community outcry about the shift to planned parking, a few worrisome app privacy issues, and the (now-fixed) creepy ability to access pictures of people coming and going to their cars in the Reston Town Center parking garages from anywhere in the world, we'd say the transition is going just swimmingly. We'd expect nothing less from an elite destination. Just ask Reston Town Center spokespeople Kathy Walsh and Rob Weinhold. Rob?

Rob Weinhold, another RTC parking spokesman, said user security is “critically important to both Passport Inc and RTC, and we take our responsibility to protect that information very seriously.”

But as one clever Internet sleuth figured out, Rob and Kathy aren't employed by Reston Town Center. Instead, they work for the Fallston Group, "a firm that specializes in crisis and issue management consulting." Give us some jargon-laden blockquote, Fallston Group:

Fallston Group, LLC is a highly trusted, executive advisory firm focused on building, strengthening and defending reputations. We operate where leadership, strategy and communications intersect. Reputations are both positively and negatively impacted by many variables. Whether working with clients in a proactive or reactive sense, we engage with velocity and vision while turning adversity into advantage. Fallston Group knows what it takes to get a client into or out of the news, and we are committed to strengthening and protecting our clients’ brands through the development and distribution of core messages that support the story they want told. This gives our clients the confidence and persuasive power to shape stakeholder opinion. Fallston Group team members provide a blend of both executive and operational services to help leaders prepare for, navigate through and recover from issues of adversity and crisis. Many leaders refer to Fallston Group as their “Chief Reputation Officer."

They must get paid by the word.

The company's case studies page includes stories about data breaches, partnership conflicts, and perhaps most troubling of all, the hiring of Jose Canseco by a minor league baseball team. "Paid parking" seems fairly low on the list of corporate crises -- but hey, it's August.

As our Favorite Correspondent, the Peasant From Less Sought After South Reston, points out: "Bottom line seems to be that, by hiring this firm, Boston Properties realizes it has an epic PR disaster of titanic proportions on its hands."

The switch to paid parking is scheduled for September 12.