Fact checking Paul Vallas on teacher pensions.

I watched the hour-long Chicago mayoral debate last night.

The format was awful.

Moderator Mary Ann Ahern required Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson to limit their responses to 45 seconds.

45 seconds.

They could have held the debate on Twitter.

In some cases Ahern did little more than ask the candidates to raise their hands if they supported an issue.

As if the future of our city doesn’t need nuanced discussion.

For reasons that are beyond my understanding, Ahern has a reputation as a great reporter on local politics. But like many of the almost entirely white city hall reporters her anti-Lightfoot bias has always been fairly transparent.

But even my jaw dropped when Vallas made claims about how he made timely payments to the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund and nobody, not even Johnson, challenged him.

In 1995, lawmakers in Springfield turned over control of the financially ailing district to Mayor Richard M. Daley, who put Vallas in charge.

But Daley and Vallas were working under new rules.

The legislature allowed property tax dollars, which had previously flowed directly into the pension fund for teachers, to go to CPS instead. And in 1997, legislators permitted the district to forego payments into the pension fund entirely.

During Vallas’ six years with the district, and for several years following his tenure, CPS paid almost zero toward teacher pension costs, leading to big deficits in the fund until Mayor Lightfoot began increasing the payments again.

Had Springfield not changed the law allowing Vallas to divert pension payments to operating costs the CPS teacher pension fund would have been paid $90 million in 1995 to cover the employer share of pension costs that year.

Instead, it got $10 million. Over the next decade, the fund was out $2 billion.

You can read that fact check in under 45 seconds.