BY COLIN MIXSON
The source of a mysterious phone call, which falsely purported to be from the local councilmember and aimed to drum up support for a controversial zoning plan, has been traced to a PR firm working for the Downtown Alliance — though both groups deny using such dubious tactics.
Earlier this week, Downtown Express broke the news that a local community leader received a bizarre phone call displaying the Caller ID of Councilmember Margaret Chin’s office, with the caller extolling the benefits a zoning proposal to allow retail development in public arcades along Water St. — which the local legislator doesn’t even support.
Chin’s office denied making the call to Southbridge resident and Community Board 1 member Paul Hovitz, and suggested the caller had used so-called “spoofing” technology to produce a fake Caller ID.
The call has now been identified as originating from Global Strategy Group, a company contracted by the Downtown Alliance in its efforts to build support for the Water St. infill plan, according to Chin’s spokesman Paul Leonard, who pointed the finger at the PR firm during the Community Board 1 meeting on Tuesday.
Spokesmen for both the Alliance and Global Strategy Group confirmed Leonard’s allegation, but neither organization has been able to explain why the councilmember’s Caller ID showed up on Hovitz’s phone. The Alliance, which helped originate the arcade infill plan and is leading the push for Council approval, said it is working with the phone-banking firm to determine the source of what both groups are calling a “technical error.”
“We’re still working with Global to figure out exactly how this happened,” said Alliance spokesman Andy Breslau.
Hovitz, who opposes the plan, said that the caller first invited him to register his support for the zoning amendment with Chin’s office, but when he said he would instead like to register his opposition, the caller hung up.
He said that such tactics smack of desperation among the plan’s boosters.
“It tells me there are people very desperate to get this passed,” said Hovitz. “To make it seem like our councilmember is steering the issue is a very desperate act. And not only that, if I were the councilmember, I would think she’d be infuriated over this.”
Indeed, the Alliance’s plan to hand 110,000 square feet of public space along Water St. to landlords to develop as lucrative ground-floor retail met with unexpected resistance from the Council during recent hearings.
But the Alliance stated that it would never resort to such deceitful tactics to promote a measure that it contends already enjoys fairly widespread backing among locals.
“There is a great deal of public support for this proposal, we’ve tried to organize it and there’s absolutely no need for any kind of misdirection or fake caller ID to manifest that support,” said Breslau.
Breslau went on to say that the phone-bankers employed by Global Strategy Group work off of scripts in which callers begin by announcing their affiliation with the Alliance, and said that using phone-hacking techniques to display a false Caller ID would be pointless when the callers clearly identify themselves as calling for the Alliance.
“I can assure you that, as evidenced both by the script and the logic of what we were trying to do, there was absolutely zero intent on the part of the Alliance to misrepresent itself,” he said.
But Hovitz disputed the claim that his mystery caller stuck to the Alliance’s script, and said he is positive that the caller announced herself as an employee of Councilmember Chin, not as a representative of the Alliance.
“They identified themselves as calling from Margaret Chin’s office,” said Hovitz. “There’s no question. There was no talk about the Alliance.”
Global Strategy Group said that there’s no way its callers went of script, and claimed to have the phone records to prove it, according to spokesman Glen Caplin.
“GSG adheres to the highest standards of transparency and ethics,” said Caplin. “Phone calls are monitored for quality purposes throughout the campaign and we have been assured by our subcontractor that not one caller deviated from the script that clearly states Downtown Alliance as the client in the opening line. At no time, did anyone attempt to hide who the phone banking was on behalf of. We dispute the accuracy of these facts about the work of our subcontractor.”
Pressed to provide Downtown Express with a recording of the Hovitz call to verify those assertions, Caplin demurred, citing “confidentiality.” After the spokesman suggested that the recording could be released to Hovitz himself, Downtown Express put Hovitz in touch with Caplin, but Hovits has yet to receive the recording.
This isn’t the first time Global Strategy Group has ruffled feathers Downtown for conducting phone surveys on contentious development issues that locals complain are skewed to produce one-sided results.
In 2014, when Howard Hughes Corporation was pushing back against local opposition to its now-defunct plans for a 500-foot residential tower at the South Street Seaport, the developer hired Global Strategy Group to do a phone survey that suggested 84-percent support for the tower.
But locals who received those calls said it resembled a “push poll” in which the questions are worded specifically to prompt a positive response — similar to Hovitz’s more recent experience being asked to support a zoning change the caller said would “enliven” Water St.
Likewise, Howard Hughes said that locals’ characterizations of the callers’ questions did not match the script it provided — just as the Alliance said what Hovitz reported hearing was not what its callers were supposed to say.
Given that the instructions for the calls were being passed from the Alliance to Global Strategy Group and then on to at lease one layer of subcontractors, it’s possible that a scripting screw up occurred because Hovitz was at the end of a long game of telephone.
If you’ve gotten a call from someone asking you to support the Water St. arcade infill plan, please let us know what the caller said and whether the Caller ID said it was from Chin’s office: news@downtownexpress.com.
