Brian Manzullo, Robert Allen, Zlati Meyer, and JC Reindl

Detroit Free Press

The mayor of Michigan's third-largest city is facing calls for his resignation after multiple recordings surfaced the past few weeks of him allegedly making offensive remarks about African Americans, women and disabled people.

Jim Fouts - the mayor of Warren, the largest city in Macomb County and Detroit's largest suburb - has maintained that he will not resign and denies the recordings are of him. But many local officials are convinced Fouts was recorded making the explosive audio comments.

The backlash began in December, when Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel - who had been feuding with Fouts for some time over the dumping of dirt at a closed landfill in nearby Sterling Heights - released audio recordings of a man disparaging mentally disabled people, accusing Fouts of making the comments.

In the recordings, you can hear a man say:

"... Tonight I'm going to meet a group of retards. Tonight is retard night. "What good are they? They're dysfunctional human beings. They're not even human beings...I don't want any part of this. This is one of the worse things about being mayor. This is the bottom of the barrel... I don't want to be around them, and I wish them well in a cage."

Fouts called the recordings "phony" - "the contents of this tape DO NOT reflect my attitude towards the mentally challenged," he wrote in a Facebook post - and claimed it was released by Hackel because of his request for an investigation into the dumping allegations. But it didn't stop one local radio station, WFDF AM-radio (910), from yanking him off their radio programming.

Fast-forward to Monday, the same day Fouts attended a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Warren, when the Motor City Muckraker websitedropped more audio recordings, this time of a man alleged to be Fouts comparing African Americans to chimpanzees and making sexist remarks about older women.

In the recordings, a male voice says:

“Blacks do look like chimpanzees. I was watching this black woman with her daughter and they looked like two chimps."

In another recording, the N-word is used.

In two other recordings, 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.”

Fouts again denied he was the male voice in those recordings. "There is tremendous effort to force me out immediately by slander, by character assassination, lies, and by out right condemnation of me," he wrote today in a Facebook post. "I will not resign. I will be here through at least 2019 as the people wanted me to."

This is the latest chapter in a heated feud between Fouts and Hackel. It began when Fouts asked Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette to investigate what Fouts said is illegal dumping by a contractor and illegal actions by Hackel at the closed Freedom Hill County Park landfill in Sterling Heights, which neighbors Warren to the north. Fouts also questioned trips he said Hackel took on a private jet owned by the contractor involved in the dumping.

Hackel wouldn't talk about the Freedom Hill issue when confronted, saying he cannot explain Fouts' "bizarre behavior," calling him a "stalker" and saying that Fouts "obviously has a problem with Mark Hackel."

A few days later, Fox 2 WJBK-TV and Channel 7 WXYZ in Detroit both reported that Hackel had sent them the initial recordings. "That's the face of the city of Warren," Hackel told a WXYZ reporter. "I'm embarrassed by it. It's disgusting."