Fake Comments Muddy a Debate in Dallas Many people have offered opinions in the long-running and literally heated battle between the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and a next-door condominium called Museum Tower. The condominium stands accused of producing glare that has compromised the museum's galleries and garden. But few have gained the notoriety of Barry Schwarz of St. Louis. "Louvers won't work, they reflect light too," he wrote in June in a blog comment on dallasnews, a Dallas Morning News Web site, "and retrofitting on a 42 story building has never been tried and the makers say they would rip off in high winds prevalent in Dallas." An honest opinion, except that there is no such Barry Schwarz. This post and others - including some from "Brandon Eley" of the Bronx - proved to be the work of a former Dallas television anchor, Mike Snyder, long a fixture in the city and now a public relations executive who had been hired by the tower's outside law firm. "While the comments I made contained accurate facts and data, I regret I was not always transparent in the posting of comments on news blogs by using my own name," Mr. Snyder said in a statement last week in announcing his resignation from the project. I am sincerely sorry and apologize to those people whom I offended using a screen name. Mr. Snyder's resignations, from the assignment and from the public relations firm he founded, Ropewalkers, are just the latest development in the unusually bitter fight between the museum and a luxury condominium that uses its proximity to the sculpture center in its name. The Nasher contends that the developers of the $200 million tower, completed in January, have been intransigent in refusing to modify its reflective glass skin; the Nasher has proposed louvers for the facade. Museum officials say the garden has had to be resodded twice because of the higher temperatures created by sunlight bouncing off the glass; that some trees have burned; and that light-blocking panels were needed for the roof during a recent Ken Price sculpture retrospective. "The glory of this building, which is the pure, crystalline, indirect light - diffuse light - was substantially compromised," Jeremy Strick, the Nasher's director, said of the center in an interview. The galleries had to be made dark. Even then, the reflection from the tower was so intense that you could still see spots on our walls. Last fall, a mediator assigned by the mayor to resolve the dispute resigned out of frustration: he said he thought the tower's owner, a public employees" pension fund, had violated an embargo against talking publicly about the negotiations. The sculpture center, designed by Renzo Piano and Peter Walker, is the creation of Raymond D. Nasher, a real estate developer and banker who, before he died in 2007, amassed one of the world's leading collections of Modern and contemporary sculpture. The museum, which opened in 2003, is an integral part of the Dallas Arts District, a 68-acre collection of cultural institutions that includes the AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and the Dallas Museum of Art. In a published letter last month, two executives from the Dallas Arts District Foundation - Maxwell L. Anderson, its chairman, and Catherine Cuellar, the executive director - wrote, "The glare - and the lack of action taken by the owners of Museum Tower to eliminate it - is also damaging our city's reputation locally and internationally." They added, "We cannot allow one single stakeholder to spoil the reputation of our entire neighborhood and detract from a flourishing urban center, all while the world is watching." The condominium tower, where apartments cost millions of dollars, is owned by the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System, which says it is doing everything it can to resolve the issue. "It's important to the city of Dallas for projects like Museum Tower to be successful and to bring residential living to the heart of a great city," the developers wrote in a July op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News. We will continue to be forward-thinking and open-minded to resolve this challenge. They have proposed that the Nasher modify its screened glass roof to redirect the sunlight and have offered to pay for the work. The benefits of a modified roof are also mentioned in a series of promotional videos narrated by Mr. Snyder. "Its developers desire to contribute to the community by supporting the arts and they want to be a good neighbor to the Nasher Sculpture Center next door," he says in one. So when sunlight reflected by Museum Tower was discovered streaming into the Nasher galleries - affecting the visitor experience - finding and paying for a solution to the reflections became the top priority of the tower's developers. The Dallas Morning News examined the Schwarz and Eley postings mainly because they closely resembled the developers" arguments and discovered that their true author was Mr. Snyder, who had worked for the NBC affiliate KXAS-TV (Channel 5) in Dallas for 30 years, until 2010. The newspaper posted an article about its discovery on July 27, and Mr. Snyder resigned from his firm three days later. Mr. Snyder said no one else at his company had any idea that he had posed as others to comment on the debate. Mr. Strick, the Nasher's director, said he was not surprised by the tactics. "Unfortunately, it's characteristic of the way the Museum Tower group has behaved since the beginning," he said. That they would feel it necessary to engage in that kind of deception just demonstrates their challenge in trying to defend the indefensible. Since the revelations, the pension fund has tried to distance itself from Mr. Snyder's conduct. "Mike is an independent consultant," Rebecca Shaw, a pension spokeswoman, said in an e-mail on Monday. Similarly, the pension system's outside law firm, Strasburger & Price, which hired Mr. Snyder last year as a consultant, said he was no longer affiliated with them. "Snyder accepted responsibility for his actions, he resigned, and we have accepted that," Gary Lawson, a partner at the firm, said in an e-mail. At no time did I or anyone at my firm know anything about Mike's use of screen names, and we would never condone it. Mr. Snyder's former firm's Web site now includes a disclaimer of any involvement; the company dissolved a few days ago, Mr. Snyder said. The Dallas Morning News obtained e-mails indicating that Richard Tettamant, the pension system's administrator, sent Mr. Snyder some of the information that he used in his online comments. But Mr. Tettamant and other pension officials have said that they did not know that Mr. Snyder was using fictitious names to defend them. In an interview on Monday, Mr. Snyder pointed out that he had posted several of his comments under his own name. Should I have done all of them in my own name? Yes," he said. Did I make a mistake? I was trying to get people to focus on the actual facts and on finding a solution - not on Mike Snyder being involved.