D.C. Housing Agency Fires Staffer After Reports Of Misspent Funds

The D.C. Housing and Community Development department has fired an employee and placed another on administrative leave following reports that millions of dollars were misspent in a deal to build housing for troubled young men.

A front page Washington Post story yesterday detailed how a nearly $5 million deal with the nonprofit group Peaceoholics unraveled after allegations of questionable spending and lax oversight, and ended with the buildings now in the possession of a developer with what some call a checkered past.

D.C. Council member Jim Graham started looking into the deal last year and released the findings of his own investigation Monday.

"Number one, the at-risk youth are the losers," says Graham. "The winners are people who have been involved with this deal in the beginning and made big bucks with the properties that they sold, rehabbed and now operate."

Ron Moten, the former head of the Peaceoholics and a current candidate for the D.C. Council, released a statement Monday saying he was unaware of the claims outlined in the Post article, adding that he left the group in 2009.

The director of D.C.'s Housing and Community Development department says the city's attorney general and inspector general have been asked to investigate what went wrong and says the employee in question was terminated in an "abundance of caution."