Warren City Council eliminates job of Mayor Fouts' beloved assistant

Warren City Council eliminated the job of Amanda Mika, whose salary more than doubled since she was caught holding hands with her much older boss, Warren Mayor Jim 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. The council has the authority to reject appointments.

Mika was still using her title of executive assistant in emails, Warren City Councilwoman Mindy Moore tells The Detroit News.

Council President Patrick Green said there are no plans to restore the position.

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, 77, couldn’t be reached for comment. Mika is now in her early 30s.

This isn’t the first time Mika’s position has caused controversy. In September 2016, she took a job as an assistant planner in the Planning Department for six months – just long enough to get union protection. That made it possible to return to her civil service job in the Planning Department if she lost her job in the mayor’s office.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Mika is still employed by the city.

Mika has been one of the mayor’s staunchest defenders since Motor City Muckraker in 2017 began unveiling a string of recordings in which the mayor compared Black people to “chimps” and called 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.

While both Mika and the mayor denied on social media that he was the voice behind the recordings, Fouts was more reticent while under oath during a deposition in August 2018. During the deposition, which involved a federal lawsuit by a former city police officer who alleged racial mistreatment, Fouts refused to say whether it was his voice in the recordings disparaging Black people.

Despite all of this, the mayor continues to be popular in Warren and was re-elected to a fourth term in November 2019.

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