The Detroit City Council held a budget hearing for the Detroit Health Department on March 20, 2026. The department presented its fiscal year 2027 budget request of $60.4 million, detailing programs, accomplishments, and future priorities. Council members engaged in extensive discussion, posed questions on a range of public health issues, and passed numerous motions to direct funding and policy actions.
Congratulations on your first budget hearing here. Thank you. We jump right in. Please introduce your staff and feel free to begin your presentation, sir. Just one moment, please. For your get here. Coordinate. Coordinate. We've been here all day. Coordinate. Coordinate. And we want to thank you for your patience as well as we wait for you. You've been uh patiently waiting. I know you're supposed to start at two o'clock. We've, of course, as you saw, had a budget hearing prior to you. And uh got a number, but we had two budget hearings earlier today and got a little late start. So again, thank you for your patience. And uh again, welcome. Thank you. Good afternoon. Um wanted to to be here to sort of present some of the mayor's um overall views um and uh priorities for the for the health department. Um the health department is an extremely important uh department, just like all of them are um to make sure that Detroiters have long healthy um uh lifespans. Um the mayor has objectives around chronic disease, around making sure that programs and resources are readily available. Um there we're talking about a process where you can possibly go pay a water bill and get connected to health resources that way. So, really a no-wrong door approach to making sure that health resources are available. There is a close alignment between the human services capacity that's being built right now and the health department because we know that when you have your basic needs met, such as housing, transportation, uh, we can then have you prioritize physical health needs. And so we both need a uh extremely strong human services capacity as well as a strong and connected health department capacity. And so really happy to be here to talk about what the health department is doing now, uh, and also to talk about what the health department will be doing in the future to make sure that all Detroiters are readily connected and have access to the resources they need uh for long and healthy lives. Through the chair, I would like to yield to the deputy director for public health, uh, Ms. Christina Floyd. Okay, everyone. Uh my name is Christina Floyd, and I'm Deputy Director of Public Health for the Detroit Health Department. So for the uh Detroit Health Department, we've been doing public health services, very essential services for over 100 years to uh all residents, visitors of the city of Detroit uh through our mission, uh which is to address public and population health priorities of Detroiters, because we want to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to thrive. Most of our services uh go from environmental health, maternal child health, uh, all the way to uh your uh smaller, most um social determinants of health type programs as well. And so uh throughout this, you will be able to see how those services intertwine with the new vision admission of our administration. Question We at the health department have uh really looked at how we can transform into a trusted partner uh within the neighborhoods for the entire city of Detroit. We have four critical buckets that we have services under uh that we provide for public health programs, environmental health, social determinants of health, as well as our clinical services. Most notably our HIV services, which have come through for multiple reasons. Uh those services have been provided from really the inception of the health department. Um we also have our safe roots programs uh and especially our behavioral health programs through our public health programs. Environmental health has two main uh capacities, one for food safety, but also for environmental health, where we also uh review pools, plan reviews, uh, and other uh such as tattoo uh institutions as well. We have programs that focus on social determinants of health, such as our communical disease as well as emergency preparedness, which allows us to be able to respond effectively and responsively to any public health emergency within the city of Detroit. Our clinical services range from reproductive health to women infinite children, as well as immunizations and a plethora of maternal child health services. We have several locations within the city of Detroit, not only for our main administrative building, which is at 100 MAC Avenue, our satellite center, which is at the Samaritan Center on the east side. Throughout last year, we were able to accomplish quite a bit throughout 2026. And so our rise to care program, which started in 2024, later part of that year, we've been able to have over 25,000 rides administered to mothers and those who are caregivers of children up to one year of age. We have distributed over 20,000 Narcan kids through our public health response for opioid as well as our behavioral health teams. And we have also throughout the entire services that we provide touched well over 70,000 residents. We did most certainly an astonishing be able to complete our community health assessment as well as develop a community health improvement plan to be able to see those activities through in order to address the priorities of the community. And we have integrated our community health worker type services within the city of Detroit through all districts to address those social needs as well.