An official in Flint, Mich., who was recorded using a racial slur and insulting residents of the city during a private conversation, resigned on Monday.

Philip Stair, 63, was a sales manager at the Genesee County Land Bank, a government organization that develops abandoned properties in Flint, a majority-black city that suffered through a contaminated water crisis beginning in 2014.

In May, Mr. Stair, who is white, used a racial epithet to describe black people who “don’t pay their bills,” as part of an attempt to explain what he thought led to the city’s water crisis. He was speaking to Chelsea Lyons, a journalist and activist who was secretly recording him.

In audio clips first published on Sunday by the online media outlet Truth Against the Machine, Mr. Stair can be heard backtracking slightly, saying that he did not want to use the slur and had recently gone to the beach with a group of men who were not white.