YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Duggan

lines on the record: 66
first: 2024-06-13
most recent: 2024-06-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I survived four years of Trump. We kept our heads down and tried not to be. Tried not to be noticed, but we could survive again, but it is so much easier. You look at the way the city's recovery has accelerated since Joe Biden's been president, the new rec centers, the new parks, the people being employed, the new auto plants, et cetera, this city's recovery is so much faster under Joe Biden. I'm just going to be consumed by that until the election.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I am so focused right now on the presidential election, which is, as you say, very tough in Michigan. And the day the presidential election is over, I'm going to focus on my own future. But right now, this city and this state would be so much better off if Joe Biden were the president. I'm just going to be continuing to focus on that.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we'll see. You talk about third terms. There's a lot of mayors don't make it to their second term anymore. No, I understand. And I got elected to the last term with 75%. The people of the city have just been. Enormously supportive of me. So I'm going to make a decision about next year. And the question is, I know what I came here to accomplish. And I'm going to assess, did I do what I came here to do? And that will determine whether I run again in 2025. And then after that, I'll figure out whether I want to run for another office or I want to go back to the private sector.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's an extraordinary talent, and the more pressure she's under and the more that she's bullied, the stronger she gets. And we saw her leadership blossom during COVID and then under the attacks from then President Trump. But she's done an outstanding job here. And she has got the kind of social media presence and instincts that I think will make her a very formidable candidate.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But she never endorsed Joe Biden four years ago. And even after he got the nomination. So I think everybody, I don't think that has any significant effect on people. I think it's pretty much what is expected. People are going to watch the president to see what he does.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michigan. It depends on how the president handles it. And I think everybody is very watching very closely to see the murder of the 1,200 Israelis by the terrorists affected everybody deeply. But the death just the other day in the school building in Gaza affects everybody deeply As well in a lot of people here say we should feel just as much pain for the victims in Gaza as the people who die to the hands of Sinwar, who is a terrorist.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a huge Arab American population, but it's more than that. The Arab American population has been here for decades. And if you're under 30 in southeastern Michigan, you grew up with Arab American friends. Ramadan is a celebration. You been to your friend's house for the Iftar dinners when they break the fast. This is and the pain, and we have a whole lot of people in this area who have lost relatives in Gaza. The pain that your friends are feeling, you are feeling. And under the age of 30 in this state right now, we have a lot of people feeling pain. And that defines a lot of the feelings toward the president. And I'm hopeful that we're going to get hostages freedom, a permanent ceasefire, which we need now. I'm hoping we get there.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've been involved in a number of millage campaigns over the years. If you run a millage saying, if you don't pass this, you're going to lose what you got. You lose your millage campaign. People want to know, what am I going to get next? And that's the ultimate message for any successful campaign. And I think the president has a lot to talk about. In Michigan, of course, what's going on in the Middle East is just hanging.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure, for sure. And of course, the 2016 campaign was a classic example of nobody was told what you were going to do next. And it caused a lot of people to stay home. And so there's no doubt he needs to do that.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money into cities in a great way. A lot of mayors are taking credit for all the improvements, and people have no idea Joe Biden did that new recreation center, did that school improvement. And I don't think that's, you know, I think that's not helping. We need to tell people that there are two choices and there are two visions of this country. And when Donald Trump was there, they took the housing money and steered it to the newer suburban parts of the country and took it away from cities and that elections have consequences.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The couch running against the couch. And so I think about 2016, and I was out in front of shopping centers trying to get people to register to vote when Hillary Clinton was running. And the lack of interest shocked me and the attitude was, if Barack Obama couldn't change my life as a young African-American man after eight years, what's Hillary Clinton going to do that's any better? And I'd say, do you want Donald Trump to be president? And maybe you could get him to register based on some of the kind of statements he makes and the David Duke endorsement and a lot of those things. But the question is for people who still feel left out of the economy, you know, if I still haven't been connected by now, how will I be connected? And that's the question that is going to decide whether people participate or whether they stay home. And certainly in Detroit, I'm talking about the scholarships that people have. Now, a lot of times, and this is the American Rescue Plan is put.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be very close. There's no question about it. And in Detroit, there's no doubt that Detroit is overwhelmingly for President Biden when he was vice president. He was here every six months. He helped us get money to demolish the abandoned houses. He helped us get money for the buses. He came and did backyard barbecues in East English Village. And he and I became very personally close during that time. At one point, I was in a meeting where President Obama said Joe's problem is he thinks he's the vice president of Detroit. But that's how much time he was spending here. And Detroiters are enormously grateful and loyal. But statewide, we've got the same dynamics we've got going a lot of other places. Trump's been very effective with this culture war stuff. The Democrats have bought into it in a way that's been very damaging. And it's going to be very close.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Folks who maybe have access to venture capital easier in other places in the country, and I got, I need to fix that, are coming here because of the support system. But for example, 14th Street that you came on to get here is the only public street in America that is a self-charging street. We have the inductive coils under the street so that if you park your electric vehicle and it's got an adapter, it'll charge while it parks on the street. I didn't do that because I want a bunch of people parking on the street, but in this building, anybody who's working on self-charging adapters or batteries can take it out on the street and test it out. This is what we're creating here in the city of Detroit and why we're back to being the center of the auto industry of the future.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, Bill, you need to look at Detroit because, well, the kids may graduate from the University of Michigan. They don't want to live in Ann Arbor. They want to live in Detroit when they graduate. And he said, all right, I'll put it in the mix. He called me a couple months later and he said, I've got the perfect place. I'm going to take the train station, but not just the train station. We're going to build out an entire campus. He says, I'm going to take that book depository building abandoned next door. And it's going to be a place for startups where anybody involved in mobility can come and start a company. And so he made this campus broader than Ford. And it's amazing.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Bill Ford's vision, but the building you and I are sitting in for decades was the book depository for the Detroit Public Schools where they stored the textbooks. Then it caught on fire in the 70s and it's been abandoned since. When Bill Ford said Apple and Google, this is 10 years ago, Apple and Google are supposed to be the cars of the future, and Silicon Valley is going to take over the future of the auto industry from Detroit. That was the whole national narrative 10 years ago. I was deeply engaged with GM and Ford and Stalantis about Detroit has to stay the future. And so Bill Ford said, I'm not going to get the engineers, the software talent that we need to compete with Silicon Valley in a traditional corporate headquarters. I want a place where we're going to design the electrical and autonomous vehicles of the future. It's going to be a different campus. And he was looking at Silicon Valley. He's looking in the Ann Arbor area near the University of Michigan.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Businesses open in the city. And in almost every case, they pulled plywood off a vacant storefront with businesses that are growing and thriving because of Motor City Match. Now we've got a number of cities that are copying this, but it's become tremendously popular as part of a whole ecosystem here that says, and I've had people move from New York, people move from Chicago who say, I can start my business in Detroit a lot cheaper and with a lot more support than where I came from.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Motor City Match. This comes from when I was campaigning and just sitting in living rooms, and I heard from one entrepreneur after another that their friends in the suburbs had parents and family members who could give them a check and get them started on their businesses, but they didn't have that kind of money in their family. And so we started something that started with philanthropy where we set aside $500,000 a quarter, and we had a citywide match, our citywide competition that we do 10 grants of up to $50,000 to start your business. We'd have 300 applicants every quarter. And we realized that we had to add things like help writing business plans, help finding locations, but we started awarding 10 a quarter. And everybody knew it was every single quarter. If you lost in the third quarter of 2014 because you didn't have enough finance skills, you could finance a finance partner and come back in the second quarter of 2015. Today, we have 160.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“high school classes will pay you to be trained to be a truck driver to be a brick mason to be an electrical worker to be a tech worker and we'll do it part-time so you can keep making your money because you need to buy diapers you need to put food on the table but we're going to raise your skill level and it has been just very powerful the unemployment rate in the city has gone from 20 to 7 percent But I'm going after that last 7%, which by and large our folks in many cases don't have a high school degree. Some cases can't read at an eighth grade level. We are actually raising the skills of our residents so that they will be able to earn good incomes for a long period of time.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those school districts were semi-online anyway. Students were turning in their homework by email. They were emailing their teachers at night, et cetera. In Detroit, we had to buy with charitable money from the corporations laptops and hotspots for our students just to be able to continue online learning. And then we realized the teachers had no training in an online curriculum. But they're coming back now, we're seeing signs of progress on the what I call adult scholarships. It was made possible by Joe Biden and the American Rescue Plan. And $827 million was made available to Detroit, which has accelerated our recovery dramatically. But we went to our folks and said, you think about your kids getting a college scholarship, you might be making $12 an hour washing dishes. You never got a high school degree. We'll pay you $10 an hour to go to your”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But their progress was interrupted dramatically by COVID and as you know across the country. In Michigan when they shut down the schools for COVID, the first school district could shut down where Ann Arbor, Gross Point, Birmingham, it turned out”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the Detroit public schools in Detroit are not under the mayor. Yeah, but I understand. They're separately elected school board. I think Dr. Viti, the superintendent, is doing a good job.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who come out in a way that is very common and they're having just extraordinary results? Every case is unpredictable, but they're having extraordinary results in resolving them not just with no shootings with the officers, but preventing suicides in large numbers of cases. It's been terrific.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who has a master's degree in mental health counseling and is a professional mental health counselor and he came to me about two years ago and he said you know the mental health system in this state is failing. We don't have long-term secure treatment beds. We don't have access to preventive care. He says, I want to set up a mental health division with the police department. And he brought me a proposal to create these units where basically two cops would go out with a mental health professional and we had to reorient dispatching because you have to dispatch the right car, but they call them co-response teams. And now when we have a call for a violently mentally ill person, which happens probably four or five times a week, we send out the co-response team who aren't in police uniforms, who aren't in red and blue fill ashing lights.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a barricaded gunman a week. What's happened here in the homicides are at sixty year lows, shootings are down dramatically. Fifteen, twenty years ago, a lot of the violent activity was gangs and drug turf. Now, it is beefs between people. And beefs between people where one is mentally ill turn violent in a hurry. We have a remarkable police chief, James White,”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we have done is taken 15,000 abandoned houses and moved families into them. We aren't pushing anybody out, and that has raised the property values on all the folks who stayed. We just finished a billion dollars in new affordable housing in the last five years because we are going to be a city where people of all incomes can live in all neighborhoods. And I think there is enormous pride in our neighborhood associations and block clubs with the way their neighborhoods have come back.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the University of Michigan, that complaint comes from non-Detroiters largely. The University of Michigan did a study earlier this year that Detroiters, Black Detroiters, have gained $3 billion in wealth in the increase in their home values in the 10 years that I've been mayor. There are 600 block clubs who are enormously proud of the way these neighborhoods came back. And nationally, for the last six months, we have been leading Miami and San Diego is the most rapidly appreciating home sale prices in America. And it took a lot of steps to get there. It took the new streetlights. It took getting rid of the abandoned houses. It took new parks. But it took partnerships with neighborhoods. And again, I am, I don't know if you have anybody who's fought gentrification more than I am. The definition of gentrification is people of lower income being pushed out by people of higher income. That absolutely has not happened in the country.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sixty thousand have now been sold. They are swing sets and they are gardens and they enlarge their yards because as you know, Detroit's a whole lot of little houses built for the expansion of the auto industry back in the first half of the last century. Now they have bigger lots. These side lots have been put to beautiful use across the city. But if you stayed, you love the fact you could buy that lot next door for a hundred dollars and now it's yours.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, sure, how long did it take? He said, two hours. I said, I feel really bad. He says, Oh, no. I've been cutting this lot for 10 years. When I got up this morning, I told my wife I was going up to the high school to get the deed. And she said, you're such a fool. They're not going to give you a deed to that lot. He says, I'm going to take her a picture of me and the mayor at my deed when I go back. And that's what happened. And”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the lamb bank when I came in owned forty five thousand abandoned houses and ninety thousand vacant lots. And if you wanted to buy a vacant lot in Detroit, it took a formal vote of Detroit City Council. You had to be the most tenacious person in the world that that side lot that had been empty next to your house for eight years that you've been cutting the grass out every week to actually get title to it. And so I had a fight with city council, but I said, I want to do something that says, if you own the house next door and you're current on your taxes, you go online, you pay us $100, and we'll send you the deed. And that was kind of a radical idea. We started off with fares and you come out to a high school gym and say the side lots are up for sale. Hundreds of people would show up. And it was powerful to have, you know, 84-year-old man came up to me. This cane, he had his deed in his hand. He said, will you take your picture with me?”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we will auction off the houses. And today we started at $45,000. Now we have $5,000 less, actually 4,000 as of this month left. We've knocked down $25,000, but we've had 15,000 vacant houses get fixed up and had families move into them. And this is the real hope. When you see that house and you now have a new neighbor, you're now calling your friends and your relatives in that other vacant house on the street. Somebody wants to come and buy and move in.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this city in twenty thirteen, you put somebody in the back of the car and you drove them to the hospital. You did not wait for the ambulance. It was typically an hour to show up. And these were the reasons that the massive population loss was occurring. And unfortunately, along with the real estate recession that put people's houses underwater, people walked away from beautiful houses in these neighborhoods. They had a $200,000 mortgage on a house they couldn't sell for $50,000. And so we had burned out houses in this city. We also had a lot of beautiful houses in this city that people had walked away from. And so I said to the neighbors, look, I'm going to target the demolitions at the best neighbors. The neighborhoods were 80 to 90 percent of the houses are occupied. I'm going to knock down the burned out one, but I'm going to take the nice one and put it on a website that we're going to sell like eBay.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a plan, and you got 45,000 abandoned houses. You got to clear out the blight. When most of the street lights in the city are out, you damn well better turn on the street lights. And so I started the same way I did at the medical center where I made people actually see people in the emergency room timely. If you were in my cabinet meetings that first year, there were metrics on the wall. We only had eight working ambulances in the city. Every week they had to report how many preventive maintenance checks they did on the ambulances till we got up to 40 being operated. How many buses got out?”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, to start with, the plan of attack was organized in the way I campaigned, which is I was running against the most popular African-American official in southeastern Michigan, Sheriff Benny Napoleon. When I got in the race, nobody thought I had a chance. And at the end of the day, I won by a significant margin. But the way I campaigned was I said to Detroiters, invite me into your house and I'll show up. And so people invite me in. I'd sit in the living room with six or eight people. And the next night it'd be 10 or 12 people. And eventually it got to be 100 people. We had to move to restaurants and churches. But I sat in homes and you want to get past our historic racial distrust, sit with people, break bread with them, listen to their histories, share mine. But I knew what Detroiters needed. I understood why folks were moving out. I understood what they didn't like. We had a lot of people who didn't want to leave. And so.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“45,000 abandoned houses. It was hopeless and I felt like I had some abilities that could turn the city around. And I felt like if the people of Detroit wanted to elect me, this was the city I was born in, and I'd give it a try.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the African American employees at the DMC kept coming up to me saying, You need to move to Detroit and run for mayor, which when I first heard it was the craziest idea I never heard, but when you think about it, if there's one place in America where we've started to overcome the terrible racial divisions in this country, it's urban hospitals. It doesn't matter if the patient coming in is black or white. It doesn't matter if the doctors and the nurses are Muslim or Christian. You see each other as people first and as stereotypes second and what the employees were saying to me was if people in Detroit could get to know you the way we did, you would be elected the mayor. And at some point, I just said the way the city is going, we were headed toward bankruptcy at the time I decided we were in bankruptcy before I got elected. People were moving out at the rate of $1,000 a month.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“running for mare had never crossed my mind, but the greatest job I ever had was running the Detroit Medical Center. You get to go to work every day with people who chose a career to help others. When you go to work with versus patient care assistants, these folks every day, it is a joy. And we turn that system around by basically saying that we are going to deliver just as good or better care in the city of Detroit than anybody gets in the suburbs. I'm not going to accept a lower standard. It was the culture change that made the Detroit Medical Center turn around. And as the city headed toward bankruptcy under Mayor Bing, I went out one night, left the hospital at six o'clock on a winter night, and the street lights were out. Now I'm trying to get suburban nights to come to our hospital, but nobody's going to come if they think their family's afraid to drive down and visit them. I was just so aggravated.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are by doctors and my allies. They're building a $2 billion facility with Michigan State University and building one of the finest hospitals anywhere in the Midwest. So it's the nature of the ebbs and flows of hospital systems. But right now there's no doubt medical care in the city is better, largely because there's a lot more primary care sites because of Obamacare. You can actually, as a doctor, get paid for seeing people who previously had been uninsured. And so health care is better, not necessarily because of Detroit Medical Center, but I think because of Obamacare.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the short term, they were terrific. There was a new owner now, unfortunately, tenant out of Dallas that doesn't have the same commitment to quality that we had back then. So I don't know about that the health outcomes are there. An interesting thing has happened. Henry Ford Hospital, which was my”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it was the only way to build the kind of first class facilities that we needed. Now, the way it's operating today is not what I would have hoped. But at the time, and this was before Obamacare passed. So if I didn't know Obamacare was going to pass and Detroit Medical Center would become enormously profitable because all the people we weren't being paid for were covered, if I had known a year later Obamacare was going to pass, we would not have gone private. I probably would have stayed at DFC and we would have bought everybody else, but it worked out the way it worked out.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's where we were. I had great board members like Roger Pensky and were sitting here saying, we're still making money. DMC was the only hospital system in Michigan that didn't lay off during the Great Recession. That's how well that we were doing. But Roger Penske said to me, you know, if you were a private company and you were putting up this kind of profitability year after year of these conditions, you'd have huge investors this. whole thing is a nonprofit where all you can do is do 30 million you know 30 year long-term bonds where nobody alone he says if we want to put money into this place we should think about being private and so we went private we got what was then an outstanding group out of Nashville called Vanguard put $850 million and rebuilt all of the emergency rooms put a new Hart hospital at Harper rebuilt children's hospital it was phenomenal but we did it”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For $150 million to do improvements because our facilities were way out of date. We were competing. We had kids with leukemia who were getting their chemo sitting on chairs in hallways. I mean, that's how outdated we were. We were still beating our competitors. But I wanted Detroiters to have the kind of first class facilities they deserved. The folks at Merrill Lynch told me it was 100% sure we were going to have our $150 million bond sale next week and the next week Lehman Brothers closed and Merrill Lynch almost went under it. And all of a sudden, there was no ability for anybody to borrow anywhere.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you don't, we're going to give you two tickets to a Tiger game, which Mike Illich was my friend, and the team had lost 104 games, so it was a really good deal. He made me on those tickets. When we stopped talking about being broke and medicated and closing and everybody put their mind to service, we were seeing 95% of the patients in 29 minutes. People came back in a huge way. I started to get doctors to come back. We upgraded all of our hospitals, ended up with more hospitals nationally ranked in U.S. News and Quality in any system except the University of Michigan. I ended up growing 3,000 more employees and everybody in the city, of course, how I got elected mayor, everybody in the city had a definite opinion on how I'd done running the hospital system. But the fact that we had gone from almost bankrupt to not closing any hospitals, but expanding was great. We were about to sell bonds.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I came in, the DMC had lost $100 million a year for five years, about $500 million. I think we had 14 days of cash on hand. But when I came in, if you walked into our emergency rooms, it was three hours before you saw a doctor. And I said to the people who were there, you keep complaining about the federal government doesn't support me, the state government doesn't support me. They're not the reason people are sitting in the emergency room for three hours. And so I said, instead of closing, how about we upgrade our service? And so I made a commitment. I came in January 1. I said by May 1, everybody is going to be seen in the emergency room in 29 minutes or less because one of the suburbs promised 30. So I said we're going to beat it.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hudsle Hospital, which handled all the high risk pregnancies, they were closing receiving hospital that handled one hundred thousand of the emergency room runs for the uninsured, and the Carmanis Cancer Center. They had hired bankruptcy lawyers, and they were closing down, and they had offered the job to a number of qualified doctors and medical people who all said the place couldn't be saved. And they decided I had turned around some operations of the county and they came and offered it to me. And I just felt like If I didn't take it, these hospitals were literally going to close within months.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I had worked for Ed McNamar, I'd been deeply invested in extending Indigen healthcare to working folks. A forerunner of Obamacare, but we structured a deal where the county paid a third, the employer paid a third, the employee paid a third, and we got 25,000 uninsured people who were getting insurance. And it was just a passion of mine and something I understood. I had been the prosecutor for three years. The Detroit Medical Center, it's hard to explain what it means. It was the largest employer in Detroit with 14,000 employees. And in the city of Detroit, 300,000 people a year go to the Detroit Medical Center emergency rooms for treatment. So in a city of 700,000, 300,000 a year, it's everybody, a quarter of all the Medicaid patients in the state came through those hospitals. And the DMC had announced they were closing.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I would say 70 to 80% of the graffiti arrests we've made have been white suburbanites, sometimes white outstators, who talk about their art. I said, well, if it's art, spray paint it on your own house in Hazel Park. Don't come into our city and spray paint up our town. And so when you say minor crimes, there is this attitude that it's only Detroit. We can trash it and we're entitled to on something we never dream of doing in our own neighborhood. So I'm very proud of the fact that we got a search warrant. We busted Beavis, found all kinds of Beavis stuff in his house, and arrested him. But this is the kind of tone we set. And Detroiters are on my side on this issue. They don't think people should be coming into this town and spray painting it up.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The city. You see almost none now. In the last two days, we just arrested the guy we call Beavis. He's been spray-painting Bevises across the city, and it costs a lot of money. We arrested him. He lived in”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say almost every single time I got a phone call saying, cut this guy a break, it was a Caucasian who had friends who were connected and saw Green was the US attorney. He told me the same thing, that nobody ever called him about a poor black kid who was dealing drugs, cut him a break. The system is does tend to be biased, and we were extremely disciplined when I was a prosecutor and make darn sure that we didn't give in to those kinds of pressures. And today, I think our police department, of course, we have tremendous police chief and James White. We have a prosecutor, Kim Worthy, who has a reputation as a very strong African-American woman who has fought hard for safety. I don't think we have the issues in Detroit. But I'll just tell you how I feel is we have cracked down on graffiti. It used to be graffiti. When I got elected graffiti in every...”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it has to be equitable. And when I was prosecutor, I saw this. I was very strong on prosecuting people who committed a crime with a gun. And there's a law in here. If you're a previous felon committed a crime with a gun, it's a two-year minimum mandatory sentence.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2003, we got out of the Justice Department Oversight in my first year as mayor in 2014. But that Justice Department consent agreement changed the Detroit Police Department, completely changed their use of force, policies, changed the accountability of the officers. And when the protests erupted across this country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the city of Detroit did not have a single fire, did not have a single store looted. Our activists stood up and said to largely suburban protesters coming into our city, go home. This is not about the Detroit Police Department. It was a remarkable transformation, but there's a very strong relationship between the community and the police here. But Mayor Archer in the Justice Department actually deserve a lot of credit. I've said this to a number of my fellow mayors who are looking at potential justice department oversight is it can be a really good thing.”
2024-06-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Mayor Mike Duggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source