Mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson has paid off all city debts, official confirms
CHICAGO (CBS) – Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson said the thousands of dollars he owed the city for unpaid bills and files have all been taken care of.
As of Friday evening, the Office of Budget & Management at City Hall confirmed he's paid off all of his debts to the City of Chicago.
But CBS 2 Political Investigator Dana Kozlov learned those weren't Johnson's only past debts and talked to him about it on Friday.
It was all in black and white from the city – documentation showing Johnson owed $3,357.04 in unpaid water and sewer bills. That is in addition to the more than $400 his family owed for unpaid parking tickets. This comes one day after Johnson was first asked about it. He told CBS 2 that he was on a payment plan.
"It's paid off," Johnson said. "We took care of that. We didn't want anyone else to be distracted by a water bill."
But CBS 2 has learned that in 2016, Johnson ran into some other financial trouble. He defaulted on a Capital One credit card to the sum of more than $3,600. It ended up in court, but was resolved in 2017.
Kozlov: "If you've had past fiscal issues, how can you manage a massive city budget? Should voters be concerned?"
Johnson: "Look, having student debt and credit card debt, that makes me a Chicagoan."
But he's a Chicagoan who wants to oversee and implement a city budget of more than $16 billion.
Kozlov: "So voters shouldn't be concerned about your ability to manage a big budget?"
Johnson: "I've been elected twice. I've managed multi-billion dollar budgets."
Johnson said he's managed multi-billion dollar budgets before as a Cook County commissioner, but commissioners actually approve a budget handed down to them from the county board president and budget director. Johnson also said with school loans and mortgages, it's not uncommon for families like his to run into financial issues.
A spokesperson for Johnson's opponent, Paul Vallas, said in a statement:
"Brandon Johnson is a highly paid lobbyist who makes nearly $200,000 per year, and his excuses for owing thousands of dollars in city water bills are just not believable. He could have paid this debt at any time, but he chose not to until he was called out on it by the press. Yesterday he insisted he was on a payment plan that would satisfy the debt before Inauguration Day, today he says he 'tightened his belt' and paid it off in full. None of this makes any sense, just like Johnson's plans to cut the police budget by $150 million or raise taxes on the middle class and small businesses by $800 million don't make sense for Chicago."
