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Norwood, Bottoms trade ethics barbs

The Atlanta Press Club debate featured city councilwomen Mary Norwood and Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Keisha Lance Bottoms and Mary Norwood are in a runoff for Atlanta mayor.

ATLANTA -- The two remaining candidates for Atlanta mayor traded ethics barbs during a televised debate Thursday. The Atlanta Press Club debate featured city councilwomen Mary Norwood and Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Bottoms cheerfully admits that contractors from the Atlanta airport have been generous to her campaign for mayor. With similar cheer, Norwood says they haven’t been so generous to her.

Norwood said allegations against her are "infinitesimal compared to the number of contractors that have contributed to Ms Lance Bottoms' campaign."

Bottoms said there was nothing sinister in the donations to her campaign. "Contractors and business people look at polling just as voters do. They see there is momentum in a campaign," Bottoms said. "And they see there’s a qualified candidate who will best serve the city, then they donate to that candidate just as hundreds of others have across this city."

Norwood took issue with the reasons Bottoms gave for her contributions.

"That was not because she was the frontrunner. Those contractors and those airport vendors contributed back for months and months and months, when in fact I was the frontrunner," Norwood said. "And they were not lining up at my door because everyone knows my reputation."

But Bottoms says Norwood’s reputation is stained by her use, at city expense, of a robocall company she founded.

"Do you think it was ethical for you to pay your own company from government funds?" Bottoms asked Norwood during the debate.

"My company was a vendor for the city in the 1990s" before she was elected to the city council, Norwood said. "I then was a city council member and I could use any approved vendor. The reality is – and I did use that vendor to send out important surveys to citizens, to notify citizens because it was a technology that I knew and trusted. I got no salary from any of those calls."

Norwood says she sold the company five years ago. Bottoms pressed on.

"The taxpayers deserve to know that Mary Norwood has used her city council campaign account to enrich herself. Receiving contributions is not unethical. Paying yourself nearly $100,000 is," Bottoms said.

"This is astonishing!" Norwood exclaimed in response. "There is no $100,000. That is fallacious," she said, pounding the lectern in the studio.

Norwood invited Bottoms to bring documentation to the next debate.

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