By Christina Hall and Matt Helms

A day after recordings were released purporting to be Warren Mayor Jim Fouts denigrating black people and older women, a groundswell of calls for him to resign poured in from Warren residents at a protest outside Warren city hall, politicians who represent the city in county, state and federal government and regional leaders at an annual event in Detroit.

But Fouts, in a Facebook post Tuesday, said he is not resigning and will continue to stay in office until at least 2019. He was not available at his office today at city hall, but here's what he wrote on Facebook:

"There is tremendous effort to force me out immediately by slander, by character assassination, lies, and by out right condemnation of me. This is an attempt to reverse the 2015 election results when I won with 85% of the vote. I won with 81% in 2011. This is despite solid evidence that I did nothing wrong whatsoever. My actions as mayor have been inclusive and no one can deny that. We are the best run city in the state when it comes to police, fire, and fund balance. I will not resign," according to Fouts' Facebook post.

"I will be here through at least 2019 as the people wanted me to. I will not capitulate to a rush to judgement by those who wish to take over city hall and hijack the 2015 election."

Throughout the day, there were calls for the mayor of the state's third-largest city to resign after Fouts denied the veracity of the audio recordings purportedly of him comparing African-Americans to chimps and using vulgarities to disparage older women that were released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

On Tuesday morning, a statement urging Fouts to resign was released by U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, State Sen. Steve Bieda, state Representatives Henry Yanez, John Chirkun, Patrick Green and Macomb County Commissioners Andrey Duzyj, Veronica Klinefelt and Marv Sauger. Green is a former councilman in Warren.

"We have listened to the audio tapes with the voice we recognize of Mayor Jim Fouts. These comments are hateful. They are racist and disparaging of women. The leader of our state's third-largest city should be a role model for how we treat each other and anyone that harbors these feelings and expresses them is not fit to lead," according to the politicians' statement. "We believe that these comments, and the previous comments about people with disabilities, do not represent the people of the City of Warren. Therefore, we believe that it would be best for the people of Warren for Mayor Fouts to resign, and we call on him to do so."

It continues: "It would have been our preference that the individuals making these audio recordings would have immediately turned them over to the proper authorities for investigation so they would have been handled in an appropriate manner and reduced the discussion about the motivation for the recording and the circumstances of the release."

Later in the day, the region's top four political leaders had harsh words for the embattled mayor, with some questioning why he's denying the authenticity of the tapes. The allegations against Fouts were among the first questions asked at the Detroit Economic Club's annual "Big Four" luncheon in Detroit today, an event that draws hundreds to Cobo Center to hear from the mayor of Detroit and the county executives of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said that Fouts' assertions that the tapes are fabricated would amount to a felony against whoever made the tapes. Duggan said that if Fouts really believes the tapes are fakes, he needs to pursue felony charges.

Otherwise, "he needs to resign because he's lying," Duggan said, calling the comments sickening.

Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel -- who has been in a feud with the Warren mayor over what Fouts has said was illegal dirt dumping at Freedom Hill County Park in Sterling Heights -- reiterated that he had nothing to do with the release of tapes, although Hackel did provide the media with tapes in mid-December in which Fouts allegedly disparaged people with disabilities.

While Hackel stopped short of calling on Fouts to resign, he suggested the U.S. Justice Department may need to investigate the tapes that Hackel said he believes genuinely captured Fouts' voice.

"It is his voice. It is his conversation. It's completely unacceptable," Hackel said.

The source and date of the audio tapes are unknown. They were revealed Monday on the Motor City Muckraker web site, operated by Steve Neavling, a former Free Press reporter who previously covered Warren City Hall. Neavling declined to reveal who provided the tapes, only saying that he believes they are authentic.

"Blacks do look like chimpanzees. I was watching this black woman with her daughter and they looked like two chimps," the male voice says in one of the tapes embedded on Neavling's website.

In another, the n-word is used.

In two other tapes, the male voice disparages older women, calling them "mean, hateful, dried up ..." and using vulgar terms for female genitalia to describe them.

"I'm not interested in any old ugly hag. I think after a certain age, they are dried up, washed up, burned out."

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, no stranger to occasionally inflammatory comments, used the occasion for one of his characteristic jokes. Asked what he thought of the Fouts controversy, Patterson quipped that he was at Fouts' office last week, and Fouts' proctologist called him to say that they'd found the Warren mayor's head.

Patterson said after the luncheon that, regardless of whether Fouts wants to stay, he will likely be forced from office amid growing public pressure.

"He's probably ended his career," Patterson said. "He's solely responsible. The criticism is going to mount, and the heat's going to get hotter and hotter. I think he will resign, under protest."

Wayne County Executive Warren Evans said that if Fouts didn't make the statements, he needs to make a much more forceful, convincing case.

"When you're a public official, you represent everyone," Evans said. "His statements do not represent everybody, and so there's a hypocrisy, I think, in sitting back not asserting more vigorously that he didn't do it, if in fact, he didn't."

Later in the afternoon, about 10 people -- led by The Rev. Maurice "Pastor Mo" Hardwick of Body of Believers Outreach in Ministry in Detroit -- shouted "Out with Fouts" and a few carried similar signs outside Warren City Hall.

Hours earlier at city hall, Gabrielle Stokes, the 19-year-old daughter of R&B singer Sara Stokes, recounted what was described as racist comments, police brutality and injuries to her arms and wrists by Warren police during an incident when she was arrested earlier this month for disturbing the peace and purchasing/consuming alcohol by a minor at her apartment during a going-away party for a friend who was moving to Texas.

Hardwick exchanged words with Jerry Bell of Detroit, who said he is a friend of Fouts and who talks to the mayor "almost every night." Bell said he supports Fouts and that "it's easy to digitally alter someone's voice."

phew with autism. She said she's voted for Fouts at least twice but today she held a homemade sign that read "Fouts out" on one side and "resign" on the other.

Hardwick said he and others, including Bell, had a meeting with Fouts after the first recordings were released last month. He said that Fouts said it wasn't him on the recordings, but "if it was, he might have been drunk or something and didn't remember it."

Staff writers JC Reindl and Zlati Meyer contributed to this report.

(c)2017 the Detroit Free Press