Jessica Mathews / news@whmi.com


Some cuts and changes are being implemented at the Livingston County Health Department.

The Board of Commissioners met Monday night and approved a resolution to reduce and re-organize the Department’s workforce but postponed a resolution related to increasing fees for services.

Director Matt Bolang told WHMI the Department lost some federal grant funding, and staffing costs have exceeded funding - not just the grant funding cut, but overall funding. Thus, the Department is looking to increase fees, which hasn’t been done in 10 years, and reducing staff. Bolang said “We will focus our efforts on mandated service delivery and find ways to become more efficient while simultaneously investigating other funding sources”.

The resolution states that last April, a substantial amount of federal grant funding was cut from the Department; and over the last 10 years, employee and internal service costs have risen by over 50% while funding has only increased by 33%. It states the combination of the immediate cut to federal funding, escalating employee and internal service costs, and the relatively flat and in some cases reduced funding for other sources of revenue has created a significant and immediate deficit in the Department’s operating budget.

In order to reduce expenses in 2025 and balance the budget in 2026, the need was determined to reduce and reorganize the workforce.

The eight positions include public health nurses, a WIC program specialist, administrative specialists, an environmental health specialist, and health promotion specialists. The full list is available in the attached resolution.

The changes to the workforce become effective immediately, with positions eliminated working their last day yesterday – on Monday, July 28th. They’ll receive two weeks of pay in lieu of working with their last official day of county employment ending on August 12th - consistent with the Workforce Reduction Policy of the Livingston County Board of Commissioners. Benefits will also be extended until August 30th.


The larger debate during the meeting was a lengthy discussion centered on a separate resolution from the Department to increase and amend fees charged for services - mainly between Board Chair Jay Drick and Bolang.

Drick questioned if there was any imminent danger to public health by not approving the fees, asking “there’s no danger if we don’t do every single fee or every single amount correct?”. Bolang responded “I suppose not, the danger is to my budget”.

Bolang noted the vast majority of services are mandated fees and programs under the Michigan Public Health Code; including things such as wastewater management, drinking water quality, and food protection services. He said each health department charges its own unique fees based on what they do for business – which is permitted under public health code and falls within mandated programs the Department operates.

Drick also asked if the people who are paying for the increase would be getting more for their money.

Bolang stated they’re collecting money for services the department already provides and working to balance the budget. He said they didn’t want fees that would be overly-elevated based on their counterparts across the state, but also wanted to make sure they recover all the costs for doing the business of the service.

Bolang said they receive state funding for some programs that they charge fees for but the state doesn’t cover the Department’s cost of doing business – adding state funding has been flat where employee expenses have been increasing exponentially for the past ten years. Bolang said with some services they didn’t charge for before, they’re seeing extra need and more staffing time than before that they need to charge proper fees for.

Bolang clarified he interprets “flat” as a decreasing revenue source as their expenses are increasing and not covering costs – adding they also won’t know what state grants will look like this year until the state budget is determined and there could be additional reductions.

Drick further challenged the criteria used for the proposed fees, arguing he didn’t think the criteria in state statute was used, and that some exceeded the cost of service. He stated he also had a problem with other counties somehow telling them what to do, and “I really don’t care if other counties charge more or less than us, it’s irrelevant”.

Bolang responded there “is not a prescriptive recipe in the public health code that tells you how to do that”, but there is broad language that talks about recovering a reasonable fee. He said he feels the proper methods were used, and he’s not increasing fees for the sake of balancing the budget but to be competitive and recover employee costs going forward.

The County attorney later clarified there is no set criteria established by the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services and it allows local health departments to establish fees. He stated “the fee charge shall not be more than the reasonable cost of providing the service” – which is really the extent of statutory requirements for the fees.

Commissioner Jay Gross was the lone vote opposed to postponing the fee schedule resolution. He cited federal funding cuts and said the Department had a valid request to try and recoup fees going forward. Gross reminded the fees have not been changed in over ten years and “it’s mind boggling they we didn’t pay attention to that back a long time ago” – adding “it’s time to get caught up”. He also favored language included that would adjust fees based on CPI (Consumer Price Index) for the coming years. Gross said that would offer some protection that they won’t have a catastrophic differential in revenue versus expenses going forward, and felt the fee increases identified were reasonable.

Bolang commented that the issue with waiting ten years to raise the fees is that they look like a dramatic jump up – again noting it’s been ten years of not recovering costs for service and they’ve had dramatic increases in staffing and internal services expenses during that span so to raise fees incrementally every year might not be as painful for that end-user.

The resolution was postponed to budget presentations/requests with the board, which are slated to begin in August.