Detroit City Council Seeks to Remove Mayor

From the Detroit Free Press [HERE]

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick vowed again Thursday not to resign over the text message scandal, but some stunned City Council members began moving toward the unprecedented action of removing the mayor from office if he doesn't quit.

Kilpatrick, in radio interviews in the morning and brief sessions with reporters throughout the day, insisted that Wednesday's release of court documents his administration long sought to keep secret helped his cause and contained "nothing new."

"I'm trying to figure out what document you're talking about," he said when asked whether the documents showed a cover-up in the $8.4-million settlement the mayor reached last year with three cops who filed whistle-blower suits. "A lot of this inaccuracy and misreporting and misstating of the facts is unbelievable to me. ... If anything yesterday, the document helped."

Kilpatrick, asked on WWJ-AM (950) whether he would resign, said: "Nah. Not at all. I don't even understand how that is really in the public discussion."

And he later told reporters, "I'll be here for as long as I can be here."

Meanwhile, a City Council committee approved a resolution calling for the mayor to resign and threatening his removal from office if he doesn't. Council members Martha Reeves, Brenda Jones and Kwame Kenyatta make up the Internal Operations committee. The resolution, sponsored by Kenyatta, passed on a voice vote.

"It's incumbent on the City Council to take action, not just to research it, investigate it, but to act on it," Kenyatta said. He said he did not know whether he had enough support on the council to win approval of the resolution.

The full council is expected to vote Tuesday. And it potentially faces a tough battle in any effort to remove the mayor.

Council President Ken Cockrel Jr., who sat in on the committee meeting, said the mayor's dismissal of the documents' significance is at odds with the council's view and that of a growing number of city residents.

"I think on a certain level, the mayor just doesn't get it, or he's in denial," Cockrel said.

The documents show that once Mike Stefani, the attorney for the three cops who filed suits against Kilpatrick and former chief of staff Christine Beatty, confronted Kilpatrick's attorneys with text messages that showed the pair lied under oath last summer, the mayor moved to settle the suits in exchange for the text messages. The amount grew to more than $9 million with attorneys' fees.

The documents further show that Kilpatrick scrapped the original settlement in an apparent attempt to circumvent a Free Press Freedom of Information Act request for the settlement documents. The city then concocted a second agreement that had two parts -- one for public consumption and the second that contained the agreement to conceal the text messages.

The City Council never saw an agreement about the text messages when it approved the settlement.

'A level of skillful trickery'

Kenyatta said the council needs to send a message that it is dissatisfied with Kilpatrick's actions.

Settling a lawsuit for more than the $6.5 million two of the cops won at trial was wrong, Kenyatta said.

"That was not in the interests of the city," he said. "That was in the interests of the mayor and Christine Beatty."

Kenyatta said Kilpatrick's insistence that the documents are irrelevant is part of a strategy to minimize them and foster confusion.

"They know the majority of the people are not going to read the documents. There's a level of skillful trickery in this whole design," he said.

Cockrel said the resolution was premature with the council set to launch its own investigation.

But he said a proposed plan of action for a council investigation from Bill Goodman, the council's independent attorney, would be sweeping.

"In broad terms, very likely what we're going to see is the council is going to investigate the circumstances surrounding the settlement documents presented to us, the settlement documents that were not presented to us, and why there was a distinction made between those two, as well as questions such as who knew what and when, and who was directed to do what and when and by whom," Cockrel said.

Reeves said that she and other officials are being flooded with calls urging that the mayor leave.

"I have agreed that some action should be taken," Reeves said.

Councilwoman Barbara-Rose Collins said Wednesday she wasn't ready to call for the mayor to step down.

Councilwoman Sheila Cockrel said of the resolution, "I want to look at it carefully."

Referring to the council investigation, she said: "I'd prefer to allow the investigation to proceed to its logical conclusion. I want it to take its natural course."

The council is to meet today, in part to schedule a closed session to discuss making public the confidential document the city's Law Department issued last year in recommending approval of the settlement.

Charter is fuzzy on removal

Wayne State University law professor Robert Sedler said that short of a felony conviction, the City Council has an uphill struggle if it wants to oust the mayor.

General accusations of wrongdoing will not carry the day, said Sedler, an expert on constitutional law.

"They cannot rely on just some general thing," he said, and the specific offense "has to be consistent with the city charter, and that offense must have penalties that include forfeiture of office."

He also said that on its own, public outrage is not a mechanism to remove a mayor: "The remedy is recall, and there are provisions spelled out for that, or defeat at the polls in an election."

Jeffrey Blaine, who served as executive director of the city's Charter Commission, agreed that the charter may be an imperfect lever for removing the mayor.

The charter says an official can be removed for violating an ordinance that carries forfeiture as one of its penalties, but Blaine said ordinance violations are punishable by small fines, short jail terms or both.

"It's not like the council has powers of impeachment like Congress, but this is a serious matter nonetheless," Blaine said. "The very fact this is coming up is of great significance -- akin to a no-confidence vote in a parliamentary system."