Ed Fitzgerald...

In creating the new charter government, we wanted a leader to have the single minded focus of creating jobs and economic development for the region.  This individual would be responsible for going out and getting the current companies to expand, consolidating municipalities, getting companies from outside the state and country to relocate to NEO.  In unfortunately, the sheep like behavior of the people of Cuyahoga County lead us to chose someone like Ed Fitzgerald who is beholden to the Democratic elite and most importantly has never created jobs and economic development.

Ed will use the excuse that he is taking time to clean up some of the departments within the county, which is a good thing but, he forgets that we have a County Prosecutor, a Inspector General (position created by Ed), Sheriff Department and FBI working closely within the region.  Also, Ed forgets that  he is suppose to be guided toward Economic Development not Law Enforcement.  Yet another reason why Ed was not only NOT qualified but, he was one of the worse people for this position out of the six candidates( I would put Ed fifth out of the six candidates).  Even the trimming of county staff hasn't been up to par, Ed has laid off around 300 people to this point, which pales in comparison to what was suppose to be done by now in eliminating thousands of jobs and taking the money and putting it towards economic development.

After one year since winning the election Ed has yet to merge the departments of the Treasury, Recorder and Auditor.  We still have a treasurer and recorder(weren't these positions suppose to be eliminated almost six months ago)??  He put out a five year economic development plan that stated what we already knew in terms of the resources we had and what we can do with them.  To this point Ed has yet to tell how, when and where he is going to use his $100 million economic development plan,   Ed has yet to put for sale the  county entities that can bring about much needed revenue to the region, one of the hallmarks of Ed's April state of the county speech was that he wanted to give Scholarships to college bound students but, it was later found that the council is to administer this process and not the Executive( Ed, did you read the charter)???   

All in all, Ed Fitzgerald seems like a fish out of water because soon we will be more than a year behind in where we are suppose to be in terms of where the charter demanded .  Ed is bad news for the region and us realizing the awesome potential we as a region have with proper leadership.