Pulaski County Judge Candidate Mike Rushin: The Man Who Couldn’t Balance His Own Books Wants to Balance Ours?

October 22, 2026 0

Pulaski County Judge Candidate Mike Rushin: The Man Who Couldn’t Balance His Own Books Wants to Balance Ours?

MAKE THAT MAKE SENSE!

Michael Rushin is asking Pulaski County voters to hand him the county’s books. His entire pitch rests on one claim: that he’s a businessman who knows how to manage money. He has said the county judge is really the county’s chief executive and chief financial officer, the person who handles budgets, and that handling budgets is what he does. He has promised a 90-day review of the county’s budgetary controls.

The public record of how he has handled money tells a different story.

The state found his firm couldn’t account for client money. In a disciplinary matter against Rushin and his father’s firm, the Arkansas Real Estate Commission found that the firm failed to remit or account for all funds that came into the broker’s possession, failed to keep proper records of deposits and disbursements, and failed to reconcile its trust accounts at least monthly. Trust accounts hold other people’s money. Reconciling them is the most basic duty a property manager has. The Commission also found the firm charged an out-of-state owner for carpet cleaning the owner had already paid for, and authorized repairs beyond what the owner had approved.

Rushin was fined and ordered to take the state’s remedial record-keeping course. He didn’t accept the finding. He sued the Commission in Pulaski County Circuit Court to overturn it.

The county’s central crisis right now is a failure of financial controls: spending money it didn’t appropriate and losing track of where it went. Pulaski County overspent its appropriations by some $50 million over three years. That is the trust-account problem at county scale. Voters are being asked to fix it by electing a man the state ordered back to bookkeeping class.

A bank sued him over more than half a million dollars. In July 2018, Simmons Bank filed a foreclosure suit against Rushin, individually and as trustee of his family trust, and against his company, MSR Investments. The suit covered seven loans secured by 13 properties. The bank claimed about $560,700 was due.

Before suing, the bank had given him a forbearance agreement, extra time to make things right. According to the complaint, he defaulted on that too. One of the properties pledged as collateral was the Cecil Drive house that the complaint lists as his own home, mortgaged through his family trust. That house is now owned by someone else.

This wasn’t one bad deal. It was a portfolio built on short-term balloon loans that came due and couldn’t be paid. That is the same kind of debt timing, cash flow, and maturity management that runs a county budget, except a county has 400,000 people depending on it.

His housing plan is his business model, and his business model ended in a foreclosure suit. Rushin’s signature proposal is for the county to buy distressed houses, remodel them, and resell them, with grants to cover any losses. He has been running a version of that model with borrowed money in the same part of Little Rock for years. The last time it was tested, his bank took him to court. Now he proposes to try it with taxpayer money.

“Transparent government” from a candidate whose record had to be dug out of court files. Rushin says he’ll bring transparency to county government. None of this record — the discipline, the lawsuit against the regulator, the half-million-dollar foreclosure suit — appears anywhere in his campaign. Voters had to find it in state disciplinary postings and circuit court dockets.

The bottom line. A county judge controls a budget in the hundreds of millions, signs contracts, and answers for every dollar the quorum court appropriates. The one public test of Rushin’s money management came from a state regulator and a bank. Both found he came up short. If he can’t keep a property owner’s trust account reconciled or keep his own loans current, he has no business holding the county’s checkbook.

ALL Power to ALL People.


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