DISTRICT BRIEFING

CRIME

Ex-Supervisor Sentenced in Bribery Case

A former D.C. government employee, who was in charge of assigning first-time criminal offenders to do cleanup and other community service tasks, was sentenced yesterday to 13 months in prison for taking bribes from people who did no work, prosecutors said.

Eric A. Shannon, 41, was a sanitation supervisor for the D.C. Department of Public Works, which uses first-time offenders on weekends to help with tasks such as cleaning alleys, removing leaves and removing graffiti. If the work is done and the offenders commit no other crimes, their cases are dismissed.

Prosecutors said that Shannon took bribes on at least six occasions from offenders who did not do the work. In exchange for payments of $50 to $400, Shannon provided signed letters on city stationery falsely claiming that the work had been performed, prosecutors said. Last June, for example, he solicited and took $400 in return for providing a letter attesting that an offender completed 88 hours of community service, prosecutors said.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered that Shannon serve two years of supervised release after leaving prison.

CITY GOVERNMENT

Funding Plan for Soccer Stadium Denounced

Ninety D.C. residents and 17 organizations co-signed a letter to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) denouncing a proposal to use public tax money to fund construction of a soccer stadium in Southeast.

In a private meeting with the council last week, Fenty had laid out the possibility of using excess tax revenue that was being collected to service debt on the Nationals ballpark to borrow $150 million in construction bonds for a 27,000-seat stadium for D.C. United. The coalition said in the letter that city leaders should either pay off the baseball stadium debt faster or use the excess taxes for other city services.

"Every penny of public subsidy going into a soccer stadium is a penny that could be used to improve services that DC residents really care about -- health care, education, a clean environment, good libraries, decent housing, and healthy recreation spaces," the letter said.

-- David Nakamura