On Thursday, the Times Free Press reported that Mark Herndon, the Democratic candidate for mayor in August’s Hamilton County election, is being sued by a bank for missing payments on a recreational vehicle he purchased.
(IN THE NEWS: Hamilton County mayoral candidate sued over missed RV payments)
The candidate talked on the phone with reporter Siena Duncan about why he missed the payments, about the difficulty he and his family had after his son died by suicide last year and about what all he has tried to do since then concerning the $236,900 RV. He has said one of his goals as mayor would be governmental transparency, so the fact he openly talked about the issue was a man walking his talk.
But then Herndon took to social media and said he “never expected transparency to look like this,” that his “most painful private struggles” were “paraded publicly just to score political points” and “intended to bruise my credibility.”
Unless we have experienced the type of tragedy that he and his family did, we can’t say how he feels. But we can say that by deciding to run for mayor, and by winning the recent Democratic primary, his words, his actions and his background become fair game for scrutiny.