Dan Snyder to Host Mitt Romney at Fundraiser at his Mansion

DAN SNYDER, the beloved Washington Redskins owner, will host Mitt Romney at an upcoming fundraiser at Snyder's mansion in Potomac, Md.

In 2001, Snyder got Prince George’s County to ban pedestrians from walking to FedEx on game days. His lawyers argued that the walk-in ban was necessary for the safety of ticket holders.

The beginning of the end of Snyder’s pedestrian ban came when D.C. lawyer and lifelong Redskins fan J.P. Szymkowicz went to a game and, having lost his parking pass, parked his car at Landover Mall, which sits across from a main entrance to the team-owned parking lots. Police officers at the main intersection wouldn’t let Szymkowicz cross the street to go in.

Thus was born a class-action lawsuit that Szymkowicz filed on behalf of Redskins season ticket holders. In it, he alleged that the team and county officials conspired to violate state antitrust laws.

The “smoking gun,” Szymkowicz told me during the litigation, came when he found a report by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission responding to the Redskins’ request to add 5,000 new parking spots to existing FedEx lots.

The prohibition was originally put in place by Prince George’s County officials in October 2000. The publicly declared motivation was to prevent stadium-bound walkers on Redskins Road from getting run over by cars. Szymkowicz, a P.G. native, argues that the real reason folks can no longer walk on county-owned land is to increase the number of cars that park in Dan Snyder’s lots at $25 a pop. And he asserts that the fact that the original ban was not enforced after Redskins games, when just as many folks are using the sidewalks but all the parking revenues have been squeezed out of them, proves that something other than safety was behind it.

“If they can let people walk safely into Camden Yards, they can let people walk safely into FedEx Field,” he says. “This is about money.”

Szymkowicz learned about the ban while on his way to a Redskins/Dallas game at FedEx in 2001. A friend had given him a ticket to sit in the owner’s suite.

“My friend lost his parking pass, and I didn’t want to pay $25 to park,” says Szymkowicz, “so I thought we’d just park for free at Landover Mall and walk over. Then the police were telling me I couldn’t walk into the stadium. I didn’t even know there was a ban until then.”