BATON ROUGE — One day after three homes renovated through a federally funded housing deal failed inspections from an East Baton Rouge Parish building code enforcement officer, another officer approved all three homes, despite the homes lacking running water, electricity and heat, The Advocate reports. 

The three homes on Central Road, renovated by developer Jason Hughes, also had hazardous wiring and missing insulation when the inspections were done in October 2022. 

Shortly after the inspection, city-parish officials reportedly went back and found 11 deficiencies serious enough to bar the three properties from receiving a permit. Grayson Washington, the chief code enforcement officer who conducted the second set of inspections, was then placed on leave and had his government-issued phone turned in. 

The Advocate reported that, inside the phone, they found evidence that he received a payment to his personal Cash App account from a permit applicant on a different property. The Advocate added that officials suspected he improperly passed that property through an inspection after being paid.

Washington, the paper adds, later resigned.

The status of a 2025 investigation into Hughes' federally funded project probe is unclear, the paper continued.