Detroit City Chatter: Cash-handling concerns and AI updates
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Welcome back to our regular roundup of Detroit politics and policy.
🏦 Check-handling: Detroit's auditor general office found serious "weaknesses" in how the city Health Department's food safety unit handles money, according to a May 1 memo.
- The independent auditor general investigates waste and abuse issues and says these concerns could make it easier for fund misappropriation, fraud or theft to occur undetected.
- The concerns included staff not segregating cash-handling duties between multiple people, checks stored in unsecured areas and deposits being made outside of designated city bank branches. The food safety unit takes payments like restaurant licensing fees.
- The memo recommends that the city's Office of Treasury take over cash-handling for the Health Department until it can put in place "appropriate and adequate" processes.
- The health department takes the audit observations seriously, is drafting a formal response and has already handed over check-handling to the city's CFO office, director Ali Abazeed said in a statement to Axios.
🤖 Regulating the robots: A group of cross-department city employees has drafted a policy governing AI use.
- The next step is getting feedback from various department directors.
- The final version will be presented to Mayor Mary Sheffield and City Council for approval, per a late April memo to the council.
- City Council Member Angela Whitfield-Calloway has previously expressed concern about allowing AI use in a fragmented, patchwork way that would be hard to control and oversee.
⚒️ Safe walking: City Council approved an $8 million, state-funded contract Tuesday to finish a backlog of necessary sidewalk repairs that Sheffield promised in her first budget proposal.
- "There's no reason we should have generational Detroiters that have been in their home 30-40 years still waiting on the sidewalk to get fixed," Sheffield said in March.
📄 An ordinance meant to limit access to some city-owned spaces by federal law enforcement agencies like ICE unless they have a judicial warrant has been drafted. It'll be sent to the Law Department to review before being voted on by City Council.
- City Council Member Gabriela Santiago-Romero requested the ordinance in light of "reports of aggressive, quasi-legal tactics being deployed by (ICE)," she wrote.
- Context: City law officials noted earlier this year that any restrictions the city creates on ICE activity must be written carefully to not obstruct lawful federal activities or incite pushback from the federal government.