Billy Boniface

Republican

Committee Name: Friends of Billy (William) Boniface

Address: PO Box 43

Forest Hill, MD 21050-

Email: billy@billyboniface.com

Website: www.billyboniface.com

Social: www.facebook.com/billyboniface4harford

Billy Boniface: Homegrown, Proven, Ready to Lead Again

Harford Chronicle

Harford County does not need another résumé imported from somewhere else. It needs someone who grew up here, works the land here, raised a family here, and has already shown he can run the Council without forgetting whose money and whose countryside he is handling.

That is Billy Boniface.

He is the Republican nominee for Harford County Council President. He won the June primary the same way he first won the job twenty years ago: on a record, not a slogan. In November he faces Democrat Mike Ciufo. The choice is not complicated. One candidate is a Darlington farmer who has already cut taxes, preserved tens of thousands of acres, and spent years inside county government making the budget smaller and the workforce leaner. The other is not that man.

Vote for Billy Boniface.

Homegrown

William K. Boniface was born in Havre de Grace on May 7, 1964. He has lived his life in Harford County. He went to John Carroll. He married his high school sweetheart, Barbara, in 1982. They raised three children — Billy, Benjamin, and Bethany — on the family farm in Darlington. In 2022 they became grandparents. Their grandson Brooks is, as Billy puts it, their favorite little farmhand.

Bonita Farm is not a campaign prop. It is a working thoroughbred breeding, boarding, and training operation the family has run for generations. Billy’s father, J. William Boniface, bred and raised Deputed Testamony, the 1983 Preakness winner, on that same land. The farm is part of what Harford still is when it is at its best: work, land, family, and a long memory of what the place looks like before the next subdivision map is drawn.

The family also knows loss. Billy and Barb founded and still administer the Ben Boniface Memorial Fund in honor of their late son. The fund exists to get people outdoors and to keep an appreciation of the Deer Creek Valley — and the rest of this county — alive in the next generation. That is not a press release. That is how a Harford family answers grief.

He has given the county more than a ballot line. He was a volunteer firefighter and fire line officer with Level Volunteer Fire Company. He coached soccer for the Dublin/Darlington Recreation Council. He has served the Harford Farm Bureau, the Harford Land Trust, the Deer Creek Watershed Association, 4-H, and the Maryland Horse Breeders Association, which he led as president in 2004–05. Governor Bob Ehrlich appointed him chair of the Maryland Young Farmers Advisory Board. He later served on the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation board. He is still a Farm Bureau director.

This is not a man who discovered rural Harford when the filing deadline arrived. He has been here the whole time.

The record as Council President

In 2006 Boniface ran for Council President because he thought the Council had lost the plot on agriculture, land preservation, and fiscal oversight. Voters agreed. He won. They sent him back in 2010. He served from December 2006 to December 1, 2014.

What he did in those two terms is the reason he is on the ballot again.

He voted to cut the property tax rate three times and doubled the Homestead Tax Credit. The campaign number he has used for years is more than $200 million saved for taxpayers. That is not a promise. That is a ledger.

He pushed land preservation hard enough that the county surpassed 47,000 acres of permanently preserved farmland and forest on his watch. Preservation is not a bumper sticker for him. It is how you keep schools, roads, and sewer from being asked to serve a county that no longer looks like Harford. Every easement is houses that will not be built, students who will not need another school, and cars that will not sit on Route 22.

He opposed efforts to accelerate development. He sat on the Agricultural Advisory Board, the Board of Estimates, the Board of Health, the County Auditor Advisory Board, and the Public Library Board of Trustees. He treated the presidency as a job of watching the money and protecting the land — not as a ribbon-cutting circuit.

After leaving the Council he became Harford County Director of Administration from 2014 to 2020. That is the job that actually runs the day-to-day government. Under that tenure, budget growth and debt were brought down to sustainable levels and the government workforce was reduced by 14 percent. He later served as chief advisor to County Executive Barry Glassman. He knows the budget book, the departments, and the difference between a talking point and a line item.

He ran for county executive in 2022 and did not win that primary. He did not disappear. He went back to the farm and to the same arguments he has made since 2006. In January 2026, after watching the Council drift toward upzoning and faster development along corridors like Route 22, he filed again for Council President. Republican voters chose him over Tony Giangiordano and Samuel Kahl: 12,492 to 10,161 to 3,010. The Harford County Deputy Sheriff’s Union endorsed him. That endorsement is not an accident. Deputies know who has funded the Sheriff’s Office and who has refused to play games with the office of sheriff.

What he stands for now

Boniface’s platform in 2026 is the same spine he ran on in 2006, updated for the threats Annapolis is actually sending this way.

He will not expand the development envelope. He has said so plainly, even when some in his own party call that “anti-business.” He does not support apartments or high-density housing as a growth model for Harford. Redevelopment of blighted or brownfield sites can make sense with planning and community input. Turning farms and rural edges into the next ring of rooftops does not.

He is fighting data centers on agricultural and forestry land, and he is skeptical of parking them near homes even on industrial sites. The water, power, and land they consume are not abstract. He has stood with Farm Bureau policy and with neighbors near Fallston who do not want a data center on a golf course that used to be open ground. He expects the state to try to override local zoning the way it has with solar. His answer is that the County Executive, the Council, and the state delegation have to stand together instead of fighting each other while Annapolis writes the map.

He wants the zoning code fixed so reckless sprawl is harder, not easier. He wants property tax rates cut to offset rising state assessments. He wants unwavering support for law enforcement so criminals and illegal aliens are not treated as a local management problem the Sheriff is forbidden to hand to federal authorities. He wants a conservative Board of Education that treats parents as partners, not obstacles. He does not want Harford tied to a county bus link into Baltimore as the price of state money.

He measures success the way a taxpayer can check it: tax bills that do not outrun inflation, acres moving toward a 75,000-acre preservation goal, schools where parents are not afraid of what is being taught or whether the building is safe, and Republican officials who stop the internal war long enough to push back on Annapolis.

That is a governing program. It is not a vibe.

Why you should vote for him

Council President is the person who sets the tone of the legislative body that writes local law, reviews the budget, and either holds the line on growth or opens the gate. Harford is in a season when the state is pressing solar, density, transmission, and — next — data centers onto counties that still have something left to lose. The Council can either be a speed bump or a wall.

Boniface has already done the job. He cut taxes. He preserved land. He ran the administration and shrank the workforce. He has spent forty-plus years arguing for agricultural preservation, most of them before he ever asked for a vote. He lives on the land he wants to protect. He buried a son and turned that grief into a fund that sends people outside into the same valleys he is trying to keep from being paved.

He is not a show pony. He is a work horse. That is his own phrase, and it fits.

You should vote for him because Harford still has a chance to remain a county of farms, towns, and neighborhoods instead of a spillover district for someone else’s housing quota and energy experiment. You should vote for him because he has already proven he will lower the tax rate when he has the gavel. You should vote for him because the people who wear the badge in this county looked at the field and endorsed him. You should vote for him because the alternative is another cycle of ribbon cuttings and envelope talk while the rural edge disappears.

Billy Boniface is homegrown. He is a farmer. He has been Council President. He knows the difference between managing a county and marketing one.

Vote for him for Harford County Council President on November 3.

Democratic

Committee Name: Friends for Mike (Michael) Ciufo

Address: PO Box 149

Bel Air, MD 21014-

Phone: (443) 307-0358

Email: ciufoforharford@gmail.com

Website: www.ciufoforharford.com

Social: www.facebook.com/mikeciufoforharfordcountycouncilpresident

www.instagram.com/ciufoforharford

Mike Ciufo is the Democratic nominee for Harford County Council President. He did not earn that nomination in a fight. He walked into it. No one else in his party filed. On June 23 he collected 13,473 primary votes against an empty chair and now asks the whole county to hand him the gavel that runs the legislative branch.

Do not give it to him.

Council President is not a participation trophy for a pleasant accountant who sat on a party committee. It is the person who sets the Council’s agenda, manages the floor, sits on the Board of Estimates, and decides whether Harford’s next four years look like restraint or like another round of “collaboration” with Annapolis. Ciufo has never held elected office. He has never passed a bill, never balanced a county budget, never fired a department head, never stared down a developer with a map and a lawyer. He filed for a district seat, then jumped to the countywide job when the seat looked empty. That is not leadership. That is opportunism with a website.

The résumé he wants you to remember

Ciufo is 39, of Bel Air. He will be 40 on Election Day. He is a CPA and small-business owner with two bachelor’s degrees from West Virginia University — accounting and finance. He is a husband and father of three boys. His father and stepmother taught in Harford County. His wife, Kate, is a first-grade teacher. His stepmother taught at Ring Factory. He calls himself a lifelong Harford resident.

That is the biography. It is also most of the argument. Family of teachers. Small business. Local guy. Repeat until November.

The public record underneath it is thin. He served on the board of The Harford Center, the county’s day program for adults with disabilities, and handled finance work there. That is respectable nonprofit service. It is not county government. It is not a vote on the budget. It is not a vote on zoning. It is not a vote on the sheriff’s appropriation. It is a board seat.

His actual political résumé is party machinery. He sat on the Harford County Democratic Central Committee from 2020 to 2024: associate member, then appointed member, then elected member and officer. In 2023 he was listed as treasurer of that committee — the same committee that has spent years trying to put Democrats back in charge of a Republican county. He is a member-at-large of the Harford Democratic Club. He is not a dark-horse civic volunteer who stumbled into a race. He is a party officer who decided the presidency was available.

He originally filed on January 5, 2026, for Council District C — Bel Air and Forest Hill. Two weeks later he withdrew and refiled for Council President. The District C filing is still on the state’s books as withdrawn February 19, the same day the president filing went active. The campaign kickoff was billed as a District C event at Das Bierhalle. Then the office changed. The slogans did not. “Leadership we deserve.” “Voice for education.” “Guardrails on development.” “Smart, responsible government.” He just pointed them at a bigger job.

Why the switch matters

District C is a neighborhood race. Council President is a countywide race with a different electorate, a different war chest requirement, and a different set of powers. Ciufo did not spend years building a countywide coalition and then file. He filed for the seat in front of his house, saw an open president’s race with no Democrat in it, and traded up.

That tells you how he treats the office. The job is a vacancy to be claimed, not a body of work to be judged against. Billy Boniface has already been Council President. He has already been Director of Administration. He has already cut the tax rate, preserved tens of thousands of acres, and run the day-to-day government. Ciufo’s counter is that current leadership is “dysfunctional,” that he will “restore professionalism,” and that he will “work across differences.” Those are phrases. They are not a record.

If he were ready for the presidency, he would have filed for it first. He filed for District C first because that is the race he thought he could win. The promotion came when the filing deadline made the bigger chair look empty.

The platform that isn’t one

Read his site. Then try to find a decision.

He will be a “voice for education” because people in his family teach. He will “champion small business” because he owns one. He will put “guardrails on development” because growth is outpacing planning. He will cut “wasteful dysfunction” because he is a CPA. He will improve “communication with county agencies.” He will prioritize citizens over self-interest.

None of that tells a voter what he will do when a solar farm lands on 44 acres of Jarrettsville farmland, when Red Pump Crescent adds traffic to roads his own family drives, when Annapolis pushes density into the development envelope, or when the Council has to choose between the Sheriff’s Office and the next round of social spending. He has shown up at solar meetings and spoken against industrial arrays on prime ground. Fine. Showing up at a public comment session is not the same as holding the gavel when the county’s letter to the Public Service Commission has to be written, funded, and defended.

He told the Baltimore Sun the most harmful thing current leadership has done is “infighting.” His first 100 days would be “restoring professionalism” and “setting a clear tone for collaboration.” That is the language of a man who wants the title without saying who he will say no to. Collaboration is how Harford gets rolled by the state. Collaboration is how “smart growth” becomes more rooftops and more classroom strain. A Council President who campaigns on tone instead of a no list is asking you to trust his manners.

The money matches the résumé

As of the early 2026 reports, Friends for Mike (Michael) Ciufo had raised about $4,882 for what was then still framed as a district race. He spent a little over $2,200. A chunk of it was his own money. The donor list was a handful of local names. That is not a countywide campaign. That is a committee checking a box.

Name recognition outside Democratic circles is low because there is almost nothing for the rest of the county to recognize. No elected term. No county department. No land-use fight he won. No budget he authored. A PO box in Bel Air, a Facebook page, an Instagram handle, and a slogan about the leadership we deserve.

Harford is a Republican county. Ciufo is the lone Democrat in this race because his party could not find anyone with a deeper local record who wanted the mismatch against Boniface. He is on the ballot because the other side needed a name, not because voters drafted him.

Why you should not vote for him

Council President presides over the body that writes local law and signs off on the budget. The person in that chair either protects the development envelope or helps peel it open. He either funds public safety first or treats it as one more line to “balance” against the priorities that come down from the state party. He either knows the difference between a working farm and a solar lease, or he learns it on the dais while the application is already at the Public Service Commission.

Ciufo is a party treasurer asking for that chair. He has counted money for the Harford Democratic Central Committee. He has sat on a disability-services board. He has a CPA license and a family of teachers. He has never been elected to anything. He changed offices in the middle of filing season because the bigger one was vacant. His campaign is underfunded, under-defined, and built on the claim that “dysfunction” is the problem and “collaboration” is the cure.

Harford’s problem is not a shortage of people willing to collaborate. Harford’s problem is a shortage of people willing to hold the line. A candidate whose sharpest critique of the current government is that it argues too much is not going to be the person who stops the next density dump, the next state mandate, or the next attempt to treat this county as a spillover zone for Baltimore and Annapolis.

Do not vote for Mike Ciufo.

He is not ready for the gavel. He just wants it.