Jack Evans resigned from the D.C. Council in 2020 after being repeatedly accused of using his public office for private gain. Now, the former lawmaker is once again attempting a political comeback, seeking to return to the body that unanimously recommended his expulsion for ethics violations.
This time he hopes to lead the council, challenging the chairman, his former colleague Phil Mendelson (D). Evans, who said he filed his paperwork with the D.C. Board of Elections on Tuesday morning to run in the June Democratic primary, is so far Mendelson’s sole opponent.
Evans told The Washington Post in an interview that he would bring a steady hand to the city’s finances, offer new ideas about how to build affordable housing more efficiently, tackle public safety and education improvements, and strengthen the council’s oversight of D.C. government agencies. He argues that after time away following his resignation, he deserves another shot.
“I think in the six years since I left the council, I have shown a commitment to the city,” said Evans, who in the past two years served on D.C.’s arts and humanities commission and worked for a city housing department.
Mendelson, reached briefly by phone Tuesday morning after Evans’s announcement, said he was focused on his own campaign and how he would continue to serve D.C. residents — by helping protect the District against federal intervention, doing more to help residents with affordability and strengthening the city’s finances.
“Elections are about voter choice,” he said, “and I welcome that voters will have a choice with this election.”
Evans represented Ward 2 on the council for 29 years, making him the longest-serving city lawmaker. Known as a business-friendly politician, he chaired the council’s finance committee during the District’s economic turnaround as it went from having junk bond status to a triple-A rating, and development skyrocketed. He proudly worked with then-Mayor Anthony Williams to pass the deal that built Nationals Park and transformed the Navy Yard neighborhood.
Along the way, Evans faced some scrutiny for his use of campaign funds for travel, and for the way he spent constituent service funds, which are intended to help needy residents but in Evans’s case frequently went to sports tickets.
But Evans is most known for the scandal that ended his tenure on the council — a series of transactions with companies seeking to do business in the city that ultimately led to condemnation from all of his colleagues, one of whom called his actions “straight-up corruption.” Evans was never charged criminally, a point he emphasized in Monday’s interview.
“You always have to remember, at the end of the investigations, particularly the federal ones, nothing ever happened,” Evans said. “I was investigated. No question I made some mistakes. I apologize for those mistakes. I learned from those mistakes, and they won’t happen again.”
Public scrutiny of Evans’s business relationships intensified in 2018 when reporter Jeffrey Anderson of local news site District Dig reported on Evans’s relationship with a digital sign company that wanted his help to get business in the city.
Later, The Post reported that the founder of the digital sign company had given Evans’s consulting firm 200,000 shares of stock, worth an estimated $100,000, just before the lawmaker proposed emergency legislation that would have allowed the company to install its signs. Evans pulled the bill after he saw it would not have the votes to pass, and said he returned the stock shares.
Evans also fell under investigation for actions he took in his concurrent role as board chair for the D.C. region’s transit agency, Metro. The Metro probe found that Evans had violated the board’s ethics rules by taking actions to benefit his friend and the friend’s parking company; Evans also did not disclose the $50,000 annual consulting fee he received from the company, investigators found.
D.C. Council members are allowed to have outside employment but must avoid conflicts.
Federal agents searched Evans’s Georgetown home in June 2019, but their investigation into his business dealings never led to criminal charges. Investigations by the city’s board of ethics resulted in negotiated settlements in which Evans agreed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines; he said Monday that the settlements did not mean he admitted to wrongdoing. The D.C. Council’s investigation found that Evans had received $400,000 in consulting payments while failing to properly disclose his clients — a finding that led his colleagues to universally recommend he be expelled from the council in late 2019. Evans resigned before an expulsion vote was held.
Evans still insists his conduct was not corrupt, but said he regrets setting up an outside business that “gave the appearance of conflicts.”
“As chairman you can’t have outside employment,” he said, noting the council’s rules, “but I certainly would not have outside employment ever again in the government. That was the mistake.”
Evans tried to launch an immediate political comeback in 2020, when he ran for his old Ward 2 seat and lost, garnering 3.8 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. He now says that attempt came too soon and was a bad idea. “We were just sitting right on top of all the negative publicity,” he said.
But now, he said, he feels confident he could win.
“This is going to sound so politician-ish, but it’s true,” he said. “I’m out all the time, and no matter where I go in the city, people come up to me and say, ‘We wish you were back on the council. We really need your expertise.’”
Evans has remained active in city affairs since resigning from the council and has been a frequent sight at local events, retaining some of the ubiquity that defined his time as a lawmaker.
In 2024, Mendelson himself appointed Evans to the city’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which doles out millions in grants every year. At the time, Mendelson said Evans was never convicted of anything and it was time to move on from the scandal, which he said Evans had “paid mightily” for through public embarrassment.
Evans has for much of the past year worked at D.C.’s Department of Housing and Community Development — where he said he worked to monitor the implementation of government grants and loans to finance affordable housing — but said he resigned to run for chairman. He said the job gave him new ideas about how to approach affordable housing, including through better life-skills training for people transitioning out of homelessness, and a more efficient use of vacant buildings to construct new housing.
Evans is hoping to combine those new ideas with his years of experience. He touted his role in reviving the city’s downtown after economic turbulence and reducing homicides to a low of 88 in 2012, arguing that he would bring to the council “a really total understanding of how to do things to make the city work for everybody.”
At the heart of his strategy would be a more disciplined approach to budgeting, he said; Evans criticized the council for playing “shell games” with the budget, paying for recurring programs with one-time funds and borrowing from special-purpose funds to pay for other projects.
“Finances bore people,” he said, “but it’s what drives the whole city.”
Evans said he had not spoken to Mendelson, whom he called a friend, about his plan to run; they would have plenty of time for debate on the campaign trail, he said. But Evans said it is time for fresh energy. Mendelson has now been on the council for 27 years — two years less than Evans had served.
“I give Phil credit for his public service,” Evans said. “But it’s just time for new leadership, I believe. Sometimes you stay too long.”
The post Jack Evans, who left D.C. Council amid scandal, to run for chairman appeared first on Washington Post.
