Does the color of money differ from one credit-worthy customer to the next? If you have strong differences with a prospective customer's philosophy or business, how far do you carry your beef? Those questions are at the heart of a harassment and intimidation campaign an Austin, Texas, concrete contractor has waged to delay construction of Planned Parenthood of the Texas Capital Region's “The Choice Project.” The 10,000-sq.-ft. facility is aimed at providing women family-planning advice, health care services, and abortions.

The campaign became an enforcement tool for a supplier and subcontractor boycott of the $6.2 million job, prompting San Antonio-based Browning Construction to withdraw as general contractor early last month. “We have requested the contract be terminated because we are unable to secure and retain adequate subcontractors and suppliers to complete the project in a timely manner due to events beyond our control,” company officials noted.

Ready mixed suppliers apparently dragged into the boycott include Capitol Aggregates and Centex Materials LP — companies tied to Texas construction pillars Zachry Construction Corp. (San Antonio) and Centex Corp. (Dallas) — and independents Lone Star Ready Mix and Rainbow Materials. All appear to have been bullied by Chris Danze, who heads a foundation business, Maldonado & Danze Inc. He opposed the Choice Project from its September ground-breaking in the South Austin neighborhood forward, spearheading what the Associated Press called a “telephone and letter-writing campaign urging more than 750 Austin and San Antonio businesses not to provide supplies or services for the project.”

A copy of a late October “Dear Building contractor/supplier” letter provided to Concrete Products by Planned Parenthood shows Danze informing recipients that his organization, “Austin Area Contractors and Suppliers for Life,” would 1) document with video recorders and cameras companies participating in the Choice Project; and, 2) forward a list of those companies to business and church communities, some of whom had taken action to exclude those participants from future projects. The letter also claimed that 18 producers within a 60-mile radius of Austin indicated they would not supply concrete to the job. The letter followed what Planned Parenthood reports were hundreds of phone calls Danze sympathizers made to harass and intimidate Browning and potential subcontractors.

Concrete Products' calls to Danze were not returned, nor were calls from other media (Engineering News-Record among them) unlikely to indulge him with quotes such as, “God does not want this thing built.” That observation was made in the Nov. 14 AP story, where Danze was also credited with comparing “the building of an abortion clinic to construction of a concentration camp during the Holocaust.” Does Danze think concrete laborers in Nazi Germany enjoyed freedom of expression comparable to that of a small-change contractor in today's Texas?

Success of the anti-Choice Project campaign could be short lived. The week after Browning's exit, Planned Parenthood of the Texas Capital Region announced during an annual public affairs luncheon in Austin that it would act as its own general contractor. To lighten the mood, keynote speaker Sid Blumenthal, an advisor to President Bill Clinton, was flanked with 10-lb. bags of dry mix concrete.

In addition to the negative national political climate surrounding Planned Parenthood and its mission, Blumenthal spoke to a point even closer to his host: “A radical extreme war is being waged, in my view, against the American tradition. Against the separation of church and state, against long-settled law, against positive social policy whose benefits are proven, against the Constitution.”

In that spirit, Chris Danze's campaign against the Choice Project is less about opposing abortion and more about obstructing the pursuit of legal activity in a free, capitalist society. That's bad in concrete or any other business.

e-mail: dmarsh@primediabusiness.com