Keshini Ladduwahetty: Grassroots heroes rang the alarm on Jack Evans’ misbehavior
Jack Evans’ resignation as Ward 2’s DC Council member takes effect today. The history books will highlight the investigations by a federal grand jury, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the DC Council, as well as the media firestorm that culminated in the council’s determination to expel Evans. But if the powers that be had paid more attention to grassroots activists and independent reporters, Evans’ scandalous behavior could have been stopped a long time ago with substantially less damage to the public treasury and the DC government’s reputation.
It is not possible to name all the citizen activists who helped raise the lid on the viper’s nest of Evans’ corruption, but here’s a rough and partial sketch of the grassroots heroes who rang the alarm.
Independent journalist Pete Tucker and Dupont Circle activist Dave Mallof (then vice president of the DC Federation of Citizens Associations) were the first to scrutinize one of the biggest ethics scandals of Evans’ career: the $272 million public subsidy for the hotel near the Washington Convention Center. In June 2009, they testified at a hearing on the issue and asked whether Evans’ work for law firm Patton Boggs posed any conflicts of interest, given the firm’s potential involvement in the hotel deal. Their probing questions led Evans to recuse himself five times on votes related to the deal, but Evans was never held to account for failing to explain the role of his employer in the deal.
In 2010, Dupont Circle activist John Hanrahan joined the investigation of the convention center scandal after probing Evans’ efforts to offer $25 million in subsidies to Northrop Grumman Corp. for a new headquarters in DC. Hanrahan had noted the strategic relationship between Patton Boggs and the Breaux-Lott Leadership Group, and the fact that Breaux-Lott provided consulting services for Northrop. Hanrahan posted his findings in the digital newsletter DC Watch, then an indispensable platform for grassroots activism and government oversight edited by Gary Imhoff and Dorothy Brizill.
Hanrahan sought to expose pay-to-play corruption in the convention center hotel deal by making Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the DC Board of Elections and Ethics (BOEE), the Office of Campaign Finance (OCF) and the DC Council to ask for documents related to Evans’ recusals. All three offices confirmed Evans did not provide a written explanation for his recusals, as the law required; nonetheless, they took no action. In October 2010, Hanrahan wrote in DC Watch: “It is discouraging that our supposed watchdogs, our supposed enforcers of our conflict of interest laws, are remaining mute on this matter of vital public interest under which a private entity stands to benefit to the tune of $272 million from the city government’s largesse. And I remain dismayed, as I wrote here in June, that the city’s mainstream press, of which I was for many years a member, continues to give Jack Evans a free pass when his private law firm work becomes intertwined with his public duties.”
Hanrahan’s suspicions were finally confirmed in October 2011 via an email from Evans’ aide Jeff Coudriet showing that Evans recused himself because Patton Boggs’ client ING Group was an equity partner in the convention center hotel deal. Hanrahan and other Dupont Circle activists shared the email with The Washington Post and Washington City Paper, both of which ran short, little-noticed articles about the issue. However, there was no firestorm in the mainstream press about Evans’ earlier efforts to push the deal, his refusal to follow the law regarding recusal, his subsequent interventions to promote the deal, or the failure of OCF, BOEE and the council to hold Evans to account.
Hanrahan’s dogged attempts to find the truth were detailed from July 2010 to November 2011 on the website Steal a Little, which was maintained by another Dupont Circle activist, Rob Halligan. Meanwhile, Tucker continued to shine the spotlight on Evans’ convention center scandal, publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post and writing on his own blog, The Fight Back. Tucker drew attention to the contrast between the Post’s silence regarding Evans and its ferocious criticism of black officials such as Marion Barry, Kwame Brown and others.
The scandal that finally caught Evans began with the 2016 brouhaha over digital billboards. Activists Meg Maguire and Larry Hargrove of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City and George Clark of the Federation of Citizens Associations led the grassroots efforts to scrutinize Digi Outdoor Media’s violations of DC’s signage regulations. Also involved was Robin Diener of the Dupont Circle Citizens Association, who had previously fought Evans and developer EastBanc on the disposition of publicly owned land in the West End. Their collective efforts pushed the DC Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs — and later City Administrator Rashad Young and DC Attorney General Karl Racine — to enforce the law.
Of much greater consequence was that their work sparked the interest of City Paper’s “Loose Lips” columnist at the time, Jeffrey Anderson, who wrote a series of articles from late 2016 through early 2017 about the financial connections between Digi Media executive Don MacCord and Evans (Anderson stayed on the story as an independent journalist after leaving City Paper). His investigations uncovered Evans’ pivotal role in promoting Digi’s interests through emergency legislation (which he ultimately dropped after failing to find enough support), as well as the short-lived effort by Mayor Muriel Bowser and senior adviser Beverly Perry to intercede on Digi’s behalf. It was the federal investigation of Digi that finally stoked the long-overdue media firestorm in 2019 that finally ousted Evans. If the activists had been listened to, DC could have been spared a decade of pay-to-play corruption and crony capitalism.
Keshini Ladduwahetty is former chair of DC for Democracy (DC4D). In part two of this op-ed, she will cover the activists who organized in 2019 to push the DC Council to take action.
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As Ladduwahetty and others strain to pat themselves on the back, they miss the obvious point: it is incompetence and not corruption that leads to DC’s ills. One need only look at council and its continual failures of oversight and the activist community that thinks hugging its way through the forest is the fastest path to change.
I don’t know why you feel the need to insult the author and other whistleblowers in order to make your overall point. The incompetence and corruption you speak of are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they feed off each other, as anyone who’s interacted with many DC agencies and the Council can attest. DC is not unique among cities, states, or the federal government in this regard. Corrupt politicians (and lazy, incompetent, or crooked bureaucrats) depend on a passive and uninformed citizenry to enable them to get away with their malfeasance. Those who work to shine a light on these misdeeds — including, by the way, the rare legislator who actually conducts solid oversight — deserved praise, not scorn.