Ray Tarasuck:
Good afternoon, I'm Ray Tarasuck and along with my colleague, Mike Bowen. We want to welcome you to our round table discussion with Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish. Armond Budish has dedicated his life to serving the people of Ohio and Cuyahoga County, as County Executive. He has been able to display that he truly does believe that together we can thrive as... After winning the election in 2015, he invested in better medical care and transportation services for seniors, has worked to improve their quality of life. People suffering poverty were provided opportunities by these programs created by the county executive that he has launched for hundreds of businesses.
Michael Bowen:
In addition, in 2006 County Executive Budish was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives to represent the 8th district. Then Budish became the first Jewish speaker of the house in state history, and the first speaker from Cuyahoga County in 70 years when he was elected to the position in 2009. County Executive Budish attended Swarthmore College, where he was elected student government president and then went to New York University Law School, where Budish was able to hone in his skills and refine his mission to serve the people of Ohio and the County he was born and raised in Cuyahoga County. Thank you, County Executive Budish for joining us. I'm going to turn it over to Ray, he's going to give out the first question.
Ray Tarasuck:
County Executive Budish, thank you very much for joining us. Now, there've been a lot of things that have happened over the last few months that we as a community have had to deal with, COVID and with the events of the last week. So we're going to begin with talking about the COVID-19 crisis and there really hasn't been anything that's challenged us like coronavirus has. So how have these economic and social challenges posed by the coronavirus impacted your vision and your plan for Cuyahoga County?
Armond Budish:
Well, let me first start by thanking you for inviting me today and giving me the chance to talk to all of you. I have a lot of friends over there and I appreciate the chance to be with you. I'll be at by Zoom, and as you said, there's been a few things that have happened lately. We need an extra lifetime I think because we've had two once in a lifetime events, one on top of the other. Obviously the COVID crisis has been unique and terrible. And then with the killing of George Floyd and the resulting protests and what's happened here in downtown Cleveland over the weekend, it's been tragic terrible. So a lot's happened.
Armond Budish:
We had a very vibrant plan going into March before the COVID crisis hit, we've been working on a number of projects and those generally have been delayed a little bit while we focus on keeping the community safe. We have spent literally double time on the COVID crisis everybody is all hands on deck on the COVID crisis. And it's multiple parts, first is to make sure the community is safe. So we set up our emergency operations center which is, coordinates everything in the community, all the local police and fire and our health department, the City Cleveland Health Department everything goes through there. And so we've been running the EOC and we issued an emergency order declaring an emergency so that we could have faster simpler procurement process for the County. Which we've used well to obtain personal protective equipment, for example. And when we went into this we knew immediately there was not going to be enough PPE. You were reading about it, you can hear about it on the media. We knew that was the case.
Armond Budish:
So we started to... And we were told we were going to get some through the National Strategic Stockpile immediately that became clear that it wasn't going to be very much there for us. Certainly not for all the needs for the hospitals and nursing homes and first responders in jail and everything else that we have to cover. So we asked for donations, the community was great. They came in and gave us huge amounts of donations that still wasn't going to be enough. And we began aggressively looking to purchase PPE that you've read how difficult it is to find locate and obtain PPE. And we ran into that, but I personally actually got on the phone for about a week, called France in law firms around the country then I know over the years that relationships I built ask them for leads and loan... Most people had no leads, but a few did.
Armond Budish:
And one thing led to another, we've been able to... I don't think there's a county in the country. That's done more in terms of obtaining PPE than Cuyahoga County. So one of our primary goals was to immediately get into a position where we could protect the community. It doesn't mean we're abandoning our prior plans. We're still working on the microgrid. We're still working on getting set up for the Lakefront Project that we announced earlier. We're still working on a project to commercialize technology coming out of NASA and we have all kinds of stuff that we're working on and it's just been delayed a bit.
Michael Bowen:
So-
Ray Tarasuck:
Yes it did. Mike.
Michael Bowen:
So County Executive, on the economic development side of things is the pandemic started to progress. The county kind of stepped in and helped with both the business stabilization fund and then the debt person program, which was announced, I believe over the weekend. Can you provide us more details about those programs and how they'll look moving forward now that we've kind of got, we'll say pass phase one of the pandemic and what it looks like moving forward.
Armond Budish:
Sure. So just so people understand, we have zero money. The counties gotten hit, like everybody else, our revenues are way off, but we did get COVID money. We got $200 million in COVID money, which can only be used. It's very limited. It can only be used for things that are either mitigating or directly dealing with the COVID issues. So we've looked at ways that we can help the community using those funds. One of the things we saw immediately is the difficulties that our local small businesses are having. I mean, you looked out prospect Euclid 9th Street, everything's shuttered. It's not just because now of the curfew, but in general, it's been shuttered for months because of the COVID crisis. So we needed a way to try to help these small businesses survive. We've spent the five years, five and a half years that I've been in this office trying to build up these small businesses, support small businesses, get them going, and now we could lose them all.
Armond Budish:
So our goal was to figure out a way to help them survive while they were waiting for the federal money, if they qualified under the Paycheck Protection Act or the EIDL program. So we knew that they were going to be problems with the federal money. We've seen that before we knew there would at least be delays. So we came up with a way to help small businesses for at least a couple months while they struggled to survive. And that was the small business stabilization fund. We partnered with a lot of local partners to help us fund. We came up with a $4 million fund, in that initial fund 500,000 was for grants. The rest was loans, loans proved to be not as attractive to the companies. As you might imagine with the grants, we were able to support a couple of a hundred small businesses.
Armond Budish:
And if you saw the thank you notes, we got afterwards, it was really heartwarming. We know we were doing a service. The fact is though that we got something like 3000 applications in less than a week. So the need is tremendous. After going through the first round, we went ahead came up with more funds, partnered with the Cleveland foundation on the second round. And we're just closed that the funds, those funds will go out either this week or probably this week, that's another 750 grants that we'll be able to make out of that fund. And again we're helping a lot of businesses survive and that's critically important for this community.
Ray Tarasuck:
Along those lines. There obviously had been some very difficult decisions that your office and challenging decisions for offices has made over the last few months, with respect to employment services and the budget going forward. What do you see going forward as some of those other challenges you may be facing as a result of COVID-19?
Armond Budish:
Well, our biggest challenge is what you just said, it's our budget. Our budget primarily is funded by sales tax. And again if stores... If everybody's closed, there's no sales. If there's no sales, there's no sales tax. We also get admission taxes, there's no events going on. We get bad taxes, there's nobody in the hotels. So you can imagine we've projected a 20% loss and our sales tax that may be low looking for looking at what other cities and counties are now doing, what the state's doing, but we think 20% is usable right now for projections. That's a huge hit we're looking at , in our budget, probably somewhere between $75 to a $100 million when you take all our Taxes revenues together. So we've had to already imposed furloughs two week furloughs for employees. I just saw that the state just did two week furloughs.
Armond Budish:
Now for their employees, we imposed a hiring freeze. We asked all our departments to present to us 15% budget cuts, what they would look like. We haven't imposed those yet. There is a hope that, as I mentioned earlier, we did get a nice chunk of money from the Federal Government which had strict limits that could only be used for COVID. It couldn't be used to fill our revenue losses. There's been a heavy lobbying effort. We've lobbied, I've personally spoken a couple of times to both Senator Portman and Senator Brown and others. Even if they don't give us more money, it'd be nice to get more money.
Armond Budish:
But even if they don't give us more, if they give us the flexibility to use the COVID funds for the revenue losses, that help us a lot. And that's really the biggest issue we have right now is our budget. If we have to make the cuts and I've spoken to too, I had a good conversation with Congresswoman Fudge for example, and she's pushing hard for more SNAP money, food stamps and other things I said, that's great. But if we don't have employees to administer the snap program, it's not going to help. And so we need this flexibility. It's not that we need more money would be nice to get more, but we got to have the flexibility.
Michael Bowen:
[crosstalk 00:12:30] So Executive Budich it's along those lines of a major part of the county's budget is health and human services. And I would say, luckily in March the health and human service levy passed. So how were the funds received from that levy and I guess health and human services in general look moving forward.
Armond Budish:
Well, first of all that money, it was great. And I appreciate everybody who supported that levy. I know you all were very supportive , it's great. And we appreciate that. It's critically important. And that was before we knew what was coming and we-
Michael Bowen:
Right.
Armond Budish:
Needed those funds to keep our health and human services going the needs in the community are great. We're one of the poorest areas in the country, more poverty even though we've also... Our GDP is one of the highest, it's the highest in the state. So we have a great variation. We have some things we could point to that are really great. And we have some things that we can point to that aren't so great. The health and human services is the lifeline for people throughout this community. It is so, so important. And we have to keep that as a vital link to survival for our people. We got to have people to administer Medicaid and food stamps and we have to do the foster care their senior and adult protective services. I can go through the list our health and human services touch virtually everybody in this community.
Armond Budish:
So that levy is critical, but first of all the money doesn't even start to come in until sometime next year, because , it doesn't start. And then now with the loss of tax revenues, if we don't get that additional flexibility all those plans that we had to bolster and increase some of the services that we like to provide, we may not be able to do those for some time. Which would be sad. But if we're in the choice of... If we're in the position and we add a kinship care program, for example, which was one of the things we were going to do with additional funds that could actually save us money down the road, kinship care is in right now we have kids that are... Go into institutions that we pay for, if they can't get a foster family we try to help them with a foster family.
Armond Budish:
Foster parents get a subsidy, family members that take the child in do not get a subsidy. That's what kinship care would do is we provide the same subsidy for the families that take in family members that otherwise would be in an institution. So it's a great program. It's very important. We were going to do that for the first time. We think that would actually save money because the institutional costs are expensive. But if we can't, if we don't have the funds, we don't have the funds. So, , that's just an example of what this COVID crisis can do to our health and human services.
Ray Tarasuck:
Now let's pivot just a little bit as, as we begin to reopen. And as we started over the last couple of weeks now to reopen, explain to us a little bit and describe how is the County going to ensure that businesses are following some of the social distancing and the orders from the governor and from Dr. Act and going forward.
Armond Budish:
We're fortunate here in Cuyahoga County, our board of health is the centerpiece for the health administering the health decisions that go into this COVID crisis. And if any of , Terry Allan he's been there for years. Excellent. Probably the best in the country. And we have them right here in Cuyahoga County. So the board of health plays a critical role in all of this. For the last couple months with the orders that have come down from the state, people call in and have self policed, if you will. And said they're not social distancing, they're not using the masks. They call in to the board of health and the board of health send somebody out and talks to them. And so far people have been good about compliant when they're reminded that that's what they need to do in terms of the going forward.
Armond Budish:
One of the projects that we've been working on, we've got a lot of things we're trying to do here. Restaurants and other hospitality businesses have been some of the hardest hit by this crisis you look and you see all the restaurants closed and they operate generally on small profits. And it's not something where they have lots of money built up and they can just live on, on their resources. So we have been working with Destination Cleveland, excellent organization to come up with a plan to help the restaurants and that's focused on and be safe and feel safe. We want people to feel safe and be safe that will get them comfortable to go back into the restaurants. If they're not comfortable, if you walk into a restaurant and you see the cooks and data not wearing masks, not wearing gloves and sweating.
Armond Budish:
And I mean, , you turn around and walk out. You're not going to eat there. So we need the, the businesses, the restaurants to be able to show their potential customers. If you've come in here, you can feel safe and be safe. That means we've worked with the hospitals, come up with a set of [inaudible 00:18:28] practices for restaurants to be observant. They will make a pledge that they will follow those. That'll be posted on our website. It'll be posted on their window and a plan that they're following these. And they'll have... We'll be giving them the PPE's so that if somebody comes in and doesn't have a mask they can give them the mask sanitizer, they'll have that. Hopefully when somebody walks into a restaurant, they'll feel safe and that will help them get their customers back. And again, if a customer walks in and sees that they've made the pledge, and then they're not following it, you can be sure that we're going to get a hundred calls that next day to our board health.
Michael Bowen:
So, County Executive we would be remiss not to touch on this subject of, what happened Saturday and what is going on just really around this country. What are your thoughts on the most recent protests that happened in the city of Cleveland? And what's the county's role in responding both to the social justice issues. And there's also the whole economic development destruction of property going on. If you want to just share some thoughts on both of those subjects.
Armond Budish:
Well, I think I like everybody else was stunned to see the... What happened to Mr. Floyd. We expect more from a week to expect more, our law enforcement people have to protect us, not kill us. I mean, it's awful what happened. So I understand the frustration. And then you combine that with fact that we have higher unemployment than any time since the depression, we have people who are sick and dying all around us. And it's a tough, stressful time right now for people. And so I understand, and I understand the desire to protest, and I support the protest as long as they're civil, as long as they're not violent. But what happened on Saturday it... Actually the protest started out very peaceful, thousands of people came downtown and were marching peacefully and they were getting their point across. And I fully supported them when it turned violent. That was awful too.
Armond Budish:
The damage to the businesses here that have already been suffering for the last couple of months. And we're going to see some not recover going into the Heinen's and totally looting it going into the Geiger's and totally looting it. And breaking windows and all kinds of built buildings. I mean, that's... The destruction was awful, I can tell you that the county, we have a Sheriff's department, the protests were focused on the, around the justice center. They broke a lot of windows in there, and we have the jail, we have a thousand people in the jail. Those people are at risk if there were to be a fire or somebody, I mean, so we had to protect the justice center and our deputies did that. They did it in a very good way.
Armond Budish:
Nobody to my knowledge was any kind of serious injuries, either on the law enforcement side or the public side, but they were able to maintain the protection to that building. But there's a lot of buildings that weren't able to be protected our people, by the way... I can't say enough about our deputies and our corrections officers that are up in the jail and our public works people that came down to put boards up while this was all going on. I mean you can't leave windows open in any of these buildings. So they came down and they were boarding up. They were there from, I don't know, five o'clock when it first turned violent all through the night and into the next morning.
Armond Budish:
And then you saw what this community is really about the next Sunday, when volunteers, people who had no connection to any of this came downtown to help with the cleanup. They came down with a room and they came down with a sponge and a pale and work to clean up as much as they could. The damage that had been done the night before. That's what Cleveland is about. That's what keeps me going in this job, knowing that we have these kinds of folks in Cleveland that care so much about the community. So, while it was tragic and terrible to see what happened, it was also heartwarming to see the response.
Ray Tarasuck:
County executive Budish. You're obviously very passionate and very energetic about our community. And we're fortunate today to have a number of our Catholic clients. Number of our friends that are participating here in this discussion that we're having with you, we thank you for joining us today, but in light of the events of the past week. And as we continue to deal with COVID 19 going forward, what message would you like to leave our audience with today as we face the challenges that that tomorrow brings?
Armond Budish:
Well, I guess I would say, this all gives me a lot of reason to be optimistic, believe it or not. I think that looking forward, I think we're going to come out of this. We're going to come out of this strong, maybe better than ever before. I've seen, for example, people coming together in a way that I didn't see before. I mean, I don't think it's a secret to know that our three major hospitals didn't necessarily work perfectly together in the past. They were competitors here. They came together, I've never seen anything like it before they came together to help people in the nursing homes, they came together with help with the testing. They came together to help the homeless folks that needed to be treated or tested. They've been fabulous the three major hospital chains, and in a way that I've not seen before, it's not just the hospitals our philanthropic organizations, the Cleveland Foundation, the Gunn Foundation, the Mt. Sinai fou...
Armond Budish:
I mean, you go through all the different... They're working together better than ever. And in organizations like greater Cleveland Partnership and destination Cleveland and Team NEO and downtown Cleveland Alliance, they're all working together. It's... And of course the County and the city are working fabulously together. So, I think that there's a lot of reason to be optimistic about what this says about where we're going as a community. And while it's going to take a little while to get back on our feet. Our economy has been damaged. You can't have thousands of people out of work and not feel it, but I'm optimistic about the future. And that'd be my messages. Let's stay together and just keep going forward in a way that can help us all.
Ray Tarasuck:
County Executive Budish, thank you very much for joining us today. We were glad to have you and appreciate your time.
Armond Budish:
My pleasure. And thanks for having me again. And thanks for all that you guys have done for the County over the years, as well with the bond issues and the support for various things that we do. It's been a great partnership with Calfee, so thank you.
Ray Tarasuck:
Thank you.
Michael Bowen:
Thank you County Executive.
Armond Budish:
Thank you, Michael.