Detroit's mayor embraces upset win

DETROIT -- Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick called the voters of his downtrodden city ''brilliant" yesterday, and appealed for unity after his upset victory in a bid for another four years in office.

Kilpatrick, 35, also dismissed rampant speculation that Detroit, which the US Census Bureau ranked as America's poorest big city, is headed for insolvency.

''Detroit voters are very smart; as a matter of fact, they're brilliant," he told reporters.

Kilpatrick, the youngest mayor in Detroit history, was first elected in November 2001.

He spoke yesterday shortly after Freman Hendrix, a career civil servant and fellow Democrat, conceded defeat in Tuesday's race, which was not decided until early yesterday morning.

The results, with 99 percent of precincts reporting, gave Kilpatrick 53 percent of the vote compared with 47 percent for Hendrix. That marked a major comeback for Kilpatrick, who had trailed in polls by nearly 20 percentage points as recently as September.

The 6-foot-4 Kilpatrick, a stocky former college football star often referred to as the hip-hop mayor, has been dogged by controversy since his earliest days in office.

He has faced allegations of cronyism, charges that he failed to rein in excessive costs for a large and sometimes abusive personal security force, and widely publicized assertions that he ran up thousands of dollars in questionable charges on the city's accounts.

In remarks to reporters yesterday morning, Kilpatrick acknowledged past blunders but emphasized it was time ''to immediately turn the page" and get on with the business of a city that faces many challenges.

Hurt by the decline of the domestic auto industry and a shrinking tax base in this predominantly black city, where the population now stands at less than half its peak in the 1950s, Detroit is struggling.

Hurdles ahead include closing what Kilpatrick said was a $139 million deficit in Detroit's $1.4 billion general fund budget. He pledged to shore up the city's finances, and poured cold water on the idea that receivership, or state oversight of the city's finances, was somehow inevitable.

''The notion of receivership grew like wildfire throughout the course of this campaign, and I want to halt that," he said.

His victory may yet be tainted by legal challenges following reports that the FBI was probing the alleged mishandling of absentee ballots distributed by local officials ahead of Tuesday's vote.

An FBI spokeswoman yesterday confirmed the investigation but declined to comment further.

Among other winners in Tuesday's elections, Motown singer and legend Martha Reeves was elected to City Council.

In San Diego -- another major city with financial problems -- surf shop owner Donna Frye, a maverick Democratic councilwoman who nearly won the mayor's race in a write-in bid last year, lost to Republican Jerry Sanders, a former police chief backed by the city's business establishment.

In Cincinnati, four years after riots tore the city apart, voters directly elected a black mayor for the first time.

State Senator Mark Mallory defeated Councilman David Pepper, both Democrats, in a nonpartisan mayoral run-off Tuesday to lead Ohio's third-largest city.

Rioting had erupted in 2001 after an unarmed black man was fatally shot by a white police officer trying to make an arrest.

With all precincts reporting, Mallory had 52 percent, to Pepper's 48 percent.

''This is the beginning of a new era," Mallory told supporters. ''We are going to bring energy to this city like we haven't seen in a long time."

Information from the Associated Press was included in this report.