Hometown Pride: Detroit Mayor’s Chief of Staff Resigns

January 28, 2008

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Oh what a proud day it is to call Detroit your hometown, or in my case, my former stomping grounds. Christine Beatty, chief of staff to Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, submitted her letter of resignation this morning, saying she could no longer effectively carry out her duties amid the text-messaging scandal which included “adult oriented” messages exchanged by the Motor City Mayor and Beatty.

“In spite of this, however, I believe that it is clear I can no longer effectively carry out the duties of chief of staff. Therefore, this letter serves as my resignation effective February 8, 2008, to allow for an orderly transition of my duties with the new chief of staff.

“I painfully regret the devastation that the recent reports have caused to the citizens of Detroit, to my coworkers, to the mayor’s family and to my family and friends.”

Both Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Beatty were married while taking part in the text message affair and it is unknown how if the relationship went any further then the electronic flirting. This is not the first run in with controversy for either Kwame or Beatty:

Mayor Kilpatrick and Beatty are subjects of a slander lawsuit introduced by two traffic cops who pulled Beatty over for speeding in 2004.
According to reports, Beatty told the officers, “Do you know who the (expletive) I am?”

Oh how the sounds of home, that pretty much sums up Detroit for any of you who may be unfamiliar with the Oasis of the Midwest. Kwame is well known around the metro Detroit area for his taste of the finer things in life, the Detroit Free Press reported that over the first 33 months of his term, Kilpatrick had charged over $210,000 on his city-issued credit card for travel, meals, and entertainment. Unfortunately his extravagant taste tends to keep him from his task of governing the City which elected him. One of Kwame’s high points came in 2005 when TIME Magazine named the hometown hero Kilpatrick one of the three worst big-city mayors in the United States.

One thing remains true, and that is Detroit’s proud Mayor is really building bridges in terms of race relations:

In August, 2007, Kilpatrick was sued by two ex-members of his bodyguard staff for violation of the Whistleblower Law. It was claimed that he fired them in retaliation for them investigating his personal actions. The trial ended on September 11, 2007 after three hours of jury deliberation in a verdict awarding the plaintiffs $6.5 million in damages. Minutes after the verdict for the trial came in, in an angry speech in front of City Hall, Kilpatrick blamed the “wrong verdict” on white suburbanite jurors. In a separate article, Kilpatrick is quoted as saying, “There’s race in this, and we run from it in this region. And I think it’s impossible for us to move forward as a region without confronting it head-on.

Oh…. Maybe he does reference race once and a while, but hey can you blame him, I mean he is one of the three WORST big city mayors. Fine I admit the guy has a couple shortcomings, but who doesn’t, last time I checked no one was perfect. And regardless of what he does for the City of Detroit, you have to give the man props, because man does he have game!