A longtime Republican consultant who was surreptitiously hired by Warren Mayor Jim Fouts has resigned after the city council launched an investigation into the hiring.

Fouts appointed Jamie Roe to serve as a “clerical technician” at least 10 weeks ago without the required approval of city council. On Tuesday, the city council agreed to investigate the hiring. Two days later, Fouts announced he accepted Roe’s resignation and commended the work he’d done.



"Jamie has been a very hard-working employee regarding organization and planning for the COVID-19 Vaccine Center last week as well as planning on the COVID Testing at city hall and, also the Forgotten Harvest food distribution every Monday," Fouts said in a statement Thursday. "He does an exemplary job. He's done the Census. He did work on COVID testing and he did a good job on that."

Council members said that while Roe was receiving a full-time salary, health care benefits, and a retirement, he was managing political campaigns on the side. By keeping the appointment a secret, Fouts was violating the charter, which requires the mayor to notify the city council.



“I am shocked that the Mayor would allow a full-time employee to operate a full-time service political consulting firm during work hours,” Council President Patrick Green said last week. “When Jim Fouts was on city council, he railed against political consultants working at city hall. He has become the very thing he swore to destroy.”

This is not the first time Fouts, a self-proclaimed independent, has come under fire for his hiring decisions. In June 2020, Warren City Council eliminated the job of Amanda Mika, whose salary more than doubled since she was caught holding hands with Fouts in 2014. Council members said they thought they were eliminating a vacant position because the mayor never notified them — as required by the city’s charter — that he appointed Mika to executive administrator. Mika had been the mayor’s executive assistant since at least 2011, when she was making $40,000 a year. Her salary jumped to more than $76,000 a year in 2019. When the council voted to eliminate the executive assistant position, Mika was making more than $90,000 a year.

Fouts also has come under fire since a string of recordings were made public, showing the mayor comparing Black people to “chimps” and calling women “hateful dried-up cunts.” In other recordings, the mayor mocked people with disabilities, said he wanted to have sex with “an abused woman," threatened to shoot his former chief of staff “through the fucking head,” called Rick Santorum’s daughter who has a disability a “mongoloid baby,” boasted about the ease of picking up teenage prostitutes in Amsterdam, and insisted that Black people commit crimes at a higher rate than white people.

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