D.C. councilmember facing pay-for-play charges, could be too in jail to help with Washington NFL stadium

Washington, D.C., has put close to a billion dollars in public money into sports stadiums and arenas in recent years — for the Nationals, D.C. United, and a Wizards practice facility that doubles as a Mystics home court — and at the center of pretty much all of the spending campaigns is city councilmember Jack Evans. And Evans, according to a Washington Post report, is now in super-hot water, which I will hand it over to Deadspin to explain because they do it so much pithier:

The paper alleged Evans received an estimated $100,000 in stock from a private company just before introducing “emergency” legislation that would have directly benefited the gift horse firm. The story said the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability began looking into Evans’s play-for-pay behaviors earlier this year. The ethics board suspended that investigation and released no findings, which according to the Post typically happens “in deference to law enforcement investigations.”

Uh oh.

Serious uh-oh. The private company in question is billboard company Digi Outdoor Media, and it gifted Evans with the $100,000 in stock in October 2016, one month before Evans introduced emergency legislation to legalize large digital advertising signs that the company wanted to install. Digi had earlier worked with Evans on legislation legalizing large fabric ads on the sides of buildings, and had given the councilmember $50,000 in checks earlier in 2016, in what Evans said was a retainer for future consulting work. (Evans says he ended up returning both the checks and the stock.)

If Evans goes down in flames, notes Deadspin’s Dave McKenna, it will be nothing but bad for Washington NFL team owner Daniel Snyder’s attempts to get a new stadium on the RFK site:

In keeping with his no-billionaire-left-behind reputation, Evans was viewed as the leader among D.C. politicians in putting together a package to beat whatever Maryland and Virginia lawmakers were going to give the bumbling but moneyed Skins owner. One source with ties to the D.C. council tells me Evans’s package calls for the city to turn over the choice real estate to Snyder for free, and to take care of new road and parking lot costs, and Snyder would dip into NFL coffers and maybe even his own bank accounts to finance the actual stadium construction. I was at an election night function last month and saw Evans holding court and boasting about how the plan to turn over the federally owned, city-controlled parcel of land to the most despised man in the Nation’s Capital (yes, even in the Trump era) was all but signed, sealed and delivered.

“It’s a done deal,” Evans said, according to one of the folks in the court. So done, in fact, that Evans also said the city was already planning that the stadium building project would be “announced in March” of 2019.

Maybe not, now.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t note McKenna’s excellent disclosure at the end of his article that “Jack Evans once called me to berate me for writing that Nationals Park was being built with public funds; the dumbass argument Evans made repeatedly during his phone tirade was that all the money used to build the stadium, a tab that eventually hit about $1 billion, would come from new taxes implemented specifically for that project, and therefore those tax revenues can’t be called ‘public money.’ Huh?” Hey, I’ve heard that argument before! If it turns out that Evans had a hand in killing my Washington Post op-ed way back in 2012, then full disclosure here that I had reason for animosity towards him, though honestly I think any D.C. resident or person concerned about not lavishing public dollars on wealthy sports team owners has plenty enough reason already to be excited to see him hoist on his own $100,000 petard.