Flanked and introduced by local establishment politicians, County Executive Armond Budish announced yesterday that he will seek re-election in 2018.

Budish spoke at the Pipefitters Local 120 union hall in Valley View. He told Cleveland.com that in a new term (which at this point he’s all but guaranteed to secure) he’d continue to work on the same initiatives he’s worked on thus far: reducing infant mortality, increasing funding for Pre-K education and promoting economic development.

Note 1: Pipefitters Local 120 is one of the more powerful construction unions in town, with financial ties to politicians and PACs, including the Council Leadership Fund. Its members were vocal and muscular supporters of the Quicken Loans Arena Renovation Deal. 

Note 2: You can read all about Budish’s early accomplishments, and how they stacked up against his vision for Cuyahoga County (“a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship”) in this story written midway through his first term.

In the meantime, feel free to reflect upon some of the major stories coming out of the county in recent months:

  • The County’s credit card remains maxed out while salaried employees were paid more than $1.7 million in unsanctioned overtime.
  • The Global Center for Health Innovation is still the leaderless husk of dying dreams and occasional corporate breakfasts that it was in 2016.
  • RTA’s death spiral is picking up serious velocity.
  • Infant mortality numbers are still abysmal, and in Northeast Ohio black babies die at three times the rate of white babies, (though to be fair, we don’t even have 2016 numbers, so there may be success to report soon!).
  • Budish, Frank Jackson and the Greater Cleveland Partnership’s Joe Roman have kept the details of Cleveland’s Amazon HQ2 bid secret, an anti-Democratic maneuver decried by Cleveland.com and Scene.
  • And my personal favorite Budish moment from 2017, from this Q Deal piece.
Cleveland.com’s Karen Farkas quoted Armond Budish saying that he’d managed to negotiate a seven-year lease extension as part of the deal — alleged, throughout the proceedings, to be the chief public benefit. When Farkas later reported, after a conversation with former County Executive Ed FitzGerald, that the lease extension had always been part of the Cavs’ offer (calling into question whether negotiations of any kind really happened), Budish responded with a new statement: “We think this is a great deal for the public and we stand by it.

This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2018.

Sam Allard is a former senior writer at Scene.

2 replies on “County Executive Armond Budish Announces Re-election Campaign”

  1. Armond. like most partisan politicians of his ilk, has bought into the corruption of his own Democratic Party’s Political Machines “livin’-large”public relations spin, and done it, Big Time !

    From using buckets taxpayer money to prop up Millionaires, and THEIR sports franchises, along with the taxpayer cash-sucking boondoggle formerly know as The Med Mart, to the Democratic Party controlled Shit-Show that is, and has been the democratic party’s pork-filled checkbook for almost a decade, and otherwise known as the County Juvenile Justice Center.

    Corruption, Graft and Subterfuge of truly Trumpian Proportions, is only getting WORSE under Buddish, with No Resolution, and worse yet, No “New Hope”, anywhere in sight.

    >>Jan 18, 2013 – The cost of operating and maintaining Cuyahoga County’s new Juvenile Justice Center exceeded informal estimates by more than 65 percent last year … Justice Center, which opened in October 2011 at East 93rd Street and Quincy Avenue, has been plagued by controversy, with multiple cost overruns.

    >>Feb 10, 2013 – Juvenile Justice Center tour riddled with questions about cost . County Council is reviewing the nearly $10 million cost of operating and maintaining the new building.<<

  2. Thank you Scene for this run-down. Please don’t forget shuffling of Nailah Byrd from Inspector General to Clerk of Courts and Andrea Nelson Moore of IG’s office who violated ethics laws by campaigning on office time, appointed to the law dept. The list goes on and on. We also don’t know how many people on Budish’s payroll get their percentage of PERS paid for out of county funds or whether County Land Bank employees get PERS in their quasi-governmental status. The latest insult to taxpayers – is the early reintroduction of the Health and Human Services levy intended to get passed on to voters as necessary, because of the “opioid crisis”
    Budish and Brady introduced this past week to get on the May ballot 2018. There is no accounting for how the millions allocated through this fund gets spent in Cuyahoga County.

    CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cuyahoga County voters will be asked to approve an eight-year renewal of a health and human services tax on March 15, 2016.

    Cuyahoga County Council voted Tuesday to place the 4.8-mill tax on the ballot. The Fiscal Office determined the renewal tax will generate $133 million a year, officials said. The proposal, which would cost the owner of a $100,000 home $147 a year, would not increase taxes.

    The same tax was approved in 2008 and 2012. The proposed renewal will be for eight years, instead of the standard four. Officials said they felt a longer term would decrease the number of times the county would have a proposed tax before voters

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