City Council Resolution Urges Detroit Mayor to Resign

DETROIT, Feb. 28 -- A City Council committee passed a resolution Thursday accusing Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (D) of using his office for personal gain and calling on him to resign or risk being forced from office.

The resolution accuses Kilpatrick of lying under oath when he denied during a whistle-blower lawsuit that he was involved in a romantic relationship with his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty. The resolution is expected to go before the entire council for a vote Tuesday.

If Kilpatrick refuses to resign, the resolution directs special counsel William Goodman to research how the council can remove Kilpatrick from office through the forfeiture provision of the city charter.

Kilpatrick has denied wrongdoing and vowed to stay on as mayor.

"Since I was 9 years old, the only job I ever wanted was to be mayor of the city of Detroit. I'll be here for as long as I can be here," he said.

The resolution came a day after the state's highest court rejected Kilpatrick's attempt to prevent being made public documents detailing a city settlement that helped conceal an apparent affair with Beatty.

A prosecutor is expected to decide by mid-March whether to pursue perjury charges against the two.

Their testimony came during a lawsuit by two former police officers, who alleged they were fired or forced to resign for investigating allegations that Kilpatrick used his security unit to cover up extramarital affairs. A third officer alleged in a separate lawsuit that he was harassed because he knew of alleged affairs.

The city agreed to an out-of-court settlement with the officers for $8.4 million.

Council member Kwame Kenyatta said a key factor in introducing the resolution was Kilpatrick's concealment of the reasons for his request that the council drop its appeal of the lawsuit verdict and agree to the settlement.

City lawyers said it was to save additional legal costs, but it later emerged that the deal also was designed to keep from becoming public the sexually explicit text messages from Kilpatrick to Beatty's city-issued pager.

"We thought we were approving an agreement for one reason, and in fact we were approving it for another reason," Kenyatta told the Associated Press.

The documents released Wednesday include an initial settlement agreement between the city and the former officers that makes reference to the text messages.

They also include a transcript of a Jan. 30 deposition of lawyer Michael Stefani, who represented the two former officers in their lawsuit, by lawyers for two newspapers that sued to get the sealed documents, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. In the deposition, Stefani said he thought Kilpatrick rejected the initial settlement agreement because the Free Press had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the settlement.