The East Baton Rouge Parish Agency, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars of federal apartment financing during the Covid pandemic, issued too much for fees for developers, spent money before contracts were available and provided double payments for the same invoices as an internal audit stated.
According to several sources, the federal law enforcement examines the activities of the office under the former mayor President Sharon Weston Broome.
The examination, which was carried out last year under Broome's administration, shows a project for the construction of three small houses. The costs rose from 220,000 US dollars to almost 500,000 US dollars -and the developer has collected the amount of personal fees that he originally approved, so that the examination determines.
The developer, Jason Hughes from the Hughes Consultant Group LLC, says that his contract has more than doubled due to the increasing construction costs during Covid-19, and all excess fees paid to him are the mistake of urban parish, not the mistake.
“In my opinion, after returning to it, the existing people had no idea or an understanding of how this money worked and how it should be spent,” said Hughes about the urban development agency. “This has caused people like me and other developers to be moved in bad situations.”
This project is not the only one that is under control: another urban efforts, the development of $ 6 million “housing for heroes”, was the subject of the fortaking of the federal jury of the federal jury last year and has been frozen since its approval almost four years ago.
The examiners say that the problems go beyond a single project and indicate systematic problems in an office that has paid for grants of almost 250 million US dollars for over two and a half years.
Broome said the grants had a big difference in the community, “financed thousands of units that have now been completed or are underway”.
“One of my guiding principles for my administration and my staff was that all work should be ethically, morally and legally healthy,” said the former mayor. “I welcome the right exam and exam, but it is important to look at our work as a whole and not allow that an individual problem overshadow years of sensible advances for our community.”
A spokesman for the current mayor, Sid Edwards, said his office knew the exam findings and “had complied with all inquiries from the authorities”.
Three houses on the Central Road
In January 2024, the examination department of the Stadt-Parish examined the selection, award and payment procedures as part of the Home Investment Partnership and the Community Development Block Grant Programs of the Office of Community Development in 2021 and 2022.
The investigators selected seven contracts from hundreds of programs and found questionable payments and practices.
In particular, the Office of Community Development paid developer fees of USD 135,000 for a project, when the original contract only budgeted. The final version enabled developer fees for $ 72,000.
Jason Hughes, who was shown in 2020 outside of his Business Capital City Collision.
No project or developer is identified in the report, but urban records on payment amounts, data and fees correspond to the Central Road Rehabilitation Project, which is awarded Hughes.
The project was originally increased in 2021 of $ 148,000 in 2021 to $ 220,000. The project renovated three houses – a almost 1,000 square foot, the other two under 700 square foot – on the Central Road in Baton Rouge.
Hughes still has the houses and said that he had recently found tenants for two of the three houses. The recently available real estate records show that the houses have an estimated property tax value of $ 11,000 each.
For such projects, the Stadt-Parish enables developer fees to pay the developer 10% and 17% of the project's total budget outside of construction costs.
When the project was originally budgeted at 220,000 US dollars, Hughes's fee was set to $ 33,000 or 15%. However, the first payment showed that the city parish published a check of $ 72,000 for developer fees on February 3, 2022.
The total costs for the Hughes Treaty were more than doubled months after the start of the rehab project and have been changed to $ 450,000. In the case of the total cost of the total fee of the developer of the developer of $ 135,000, 28%, which “exceeds” the amount permitted by urban parish regulations, according to the examiners.
“For some reason, the payments sent to me were classified as developer fees,” said Hughes. “Back then I didn't pay attention to how it was marked.”
In an explanation, Broome said that she was drawn to concerns regarding Hughes project, “only when he personally turned me to me with inquiries that I could not grant”.
Broome said her setback against Hughes' project prompted the developer to publicly criticize her during the 2024 mayor campaign and to support her opponent Ted James.
The then assistant Chief Administrative Officer Courtney Scott, together with Tasha Saunders, who was director of the Office for Community Development at the time, monitored a large part of the grant implementation for the administration, records and emails from Broome.
Scott and Saunders did not respond to inquiries about comments.
According to Hughes, the federal housing authorities have contacted since completing the rehab project and asked about the developer fees he paid for.
Missing documents, guidelines not followed
The examiners say that the Community Development Office do not follow its own guidelines and procedures in several cases that have been examined.
In one of the seven certified office, the office began to pay construction costs before the contracts were effective. Once a developer, double payments were made for a single bill, according to the auditors.
In their review, the investigators found no evidence in the community of the Community Development files that project applications were assessed for one of the certified contracts before approval. They also found that the city parish had no process to evaluate whether a request for a change order was appropriate to the costs of a project.
The examiners also said that the office had no evidence that project monitoring for all 2022 took place. In two projects, the price was higher than the amount the developer demanded in the application – one by $ 800,000, the other by $ 72,070.
From the beginning of 2020 to April 2023, the office concluded 382 grant contracts via various programs, according to the municipal Parish recordings.
Real estate can be seen on Friday, August 1, 2025, in the Scotlandville district in Baton Rouge, LA, on the Scotland Avenue.
Last year, a federal jury gave out a summary of the town hall in which documents were requested in connection with the development contract “Living Space for Helden”.
At least two members of the U-Bahn councilor have handed over text messages with the developer, who, according to the lawyer's public records, received public records on the construction of low-income apartments in Scotlandville.
The then member Chauna Banks was a problem with Broome slowing the deal because the mayor's office was concerned that the developer had not followed any federal regulations.
The status of this investigation by the Grand Jury is unclear.
Lumps, few details
During the pandemic, federal programs broadcast billions from dollars to various communities such as Baton Rouge to promote the economy and to develop municipalities.
In Baton Rouge, ten million grant money came for approval in front of the Metro Council. Housing projects were on the agenda of the Council almost every month in 2022 and 2023.
On the agenda of the council, this financing generally appeared as a flat -rate amount of the mayor in order to distribute the approval of the council – without specific developers or projects.
On the online agenda, a link led to a separate document in which the grant programs and the amounts provided for for each developer are listed. Usually there was little breakdown of how much of these dollars for construction costs or developer fees.
In Hughes' case, when his contract was increased to $ 450,000, he appeared on a agenda as a further node for assigning grants without a changed original dollar amount being mentioned.
At his original price of 148,000 US dollars, Hughes' project was first approved by the Council on April 14, 2021. On February 3, 2022, his first check was issued for 72,000 US dollars, and another was issued on February 16 two weeks later for $ 63,000. On February 16, Hughes was paid 130,000 US dollars in development fees for $ 130,000.
On February 23, 2022, the Office of Community Development brought more money to the Council for approval, which included an increase in Hughes' budget to $ 220,000. In August, the Council would approved more money, which increases the total cost of its project to 450,000 US dollars.
The developer said that he was still due to an additional $ 220,000 from the city for the three houses in Central Road.