After insisting “the ethics committee at Metro found no violation of any ethics rules on my part,” Metro Board Chairman Jack Evans now says he did violate the ethics code.

Evans admitted the violation to the Washington Post late Wednesday night after Metro General Counsel Patricia Y. Lee released a memo outlining the outcome of a May 7 ethics committee meeting.

The committee found that Evans had conflicts of interest related to his $50,000 consulting contract with Colonial Parking and his actions lobbying for Metro’s Inspector General to look into LAZ Parking, the company that manages Metro’s parking facilities.

Evans was ordered to amend his disclosure forms and told not to seek re-election as board chair. Evans said he decided he wasn’t going to seek re-election a year ago, but the committee wanted to confirm that he would not.

But, the ethics committee did not keep minutes of the meeting, and the law firm that investigated Evans did not create an official written report of the findings. Those omissions left a gap about whose version of events was correct until the memo was released.

“Although it is not my recollection, it is clear from Patricia’s Lee’s memo that the ethics committee found that I violated Code of Ethics Article II. D by failing to disclose a conflict of interest, and that I agreed to not seek reelection as chair of the [Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority] board,” Evans told the Post. “I apologize for any misunderstanding, and I accept the committee’s findings.”

Evans told the Post he was more focused on amending his disclosure than the actual outcome.

Ethics committee chair Clarence Crawford told WAMU “there should be absolutely no confusion at all about what was found” on Evans’s part. Crawford said he outlined the violation with Evans twice after the meeting and hours later on a phone call.

Several public officials have criticized the Metro board for how it handled the situation. D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson said he was frustrated by the whole thing and wanted to get it sorted out sooner rather than later. The council is the only body that can remove Evans, who serves as a Ward 2 councilmember, from the board.

Evans is still facing a federal investigation into his relationship with the private sector. His colleagues on the D.C. Council, who formally reprimanded him in March, and Mayor Muriel Bowser have been subpoenaed as part of that inquiry.

The Metro board’s ethics committee launched a probe into Evans’s behavior in March, after the Washington Post released emails showing the long-serving legislator tried to leverage the prestige of his roles as councilmember and Metro board chair for personal gain.

The whole process, which concluded in early May, was under wraps until Monday, when Crawford released a letter outlining the committee’s findings. The letter was in response to requests from Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and other local officials.

Crawford, who is leaving the board next month, said he thinks the ethics committee rules need to be updated in order to avoid a similar situation in the future. He said he followed the instructions that are currently available, but they were unclear.

“It’s hard to change the process in the middle of the process because then you’d be accused of not following the rules,” Crawford said.

He said there should be a requirement for a written report to close ethics investigations. Crawford said the law firm did create a 20-page memo of the findings used for an oral presentation to the committee. That report is available to members of the entire Metro board as well as Metro’s state and federal funding partners.

“We also need a fifth member so we don’t get stuck in a 2-2 decision,” he said.

The majority of the committee agreed only on one of three ethics issues involving Evans. Crawford said it’s unfortunate that the ethics matter has clouded some of the work the Metro board has done this year, like eliminating turnbacks on the Red Line and extending the Yellow Line to Greenbelt.

“We’ve made a lot of progress this year,” Crawford said. “And unfortunately, this matter has had presented a little bit of cloud. But we’ve made a lot of progress.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU.