On Friday, The Arizona Republic reported that Maricopa County is currently attempting to settle the lawsuits generated by our elected officials, former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
The legal claims amount to at least $56 million and more cases may be forthcoming.
This is nothing new. Arpaio has been consistently gobbling up county money and hemorrhaging millions of dollars in lawsuits for years.
Just one of a plethora of examples occurred back in 1999, when Arpaio settled the Scott Norberg case out of court for $8.2 million. Norberg suffocated and died in a restraint chair in Arpaio’s jailhouse in 1996.
The FBI was investigating Arpaio then, and they are investigating him now. What else is new?
To be fair, not all of Arpaio’s financial losses are the product of civil rights abuses. Many of them are just the result of a disturbed, over-indulgent perception of self-importance.
Sept. 2010 articles by The Arizona Republic reveal that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office misused over $50 million of the county’s budget.
According to the articles, some of the “unusual expenses” include credit card charges of thousands of dollars for stays in luxury hotels, hotel-room upgrades and first-class airfare.
But the county still has to pick up the bill.
County Manager David Smith told The Republic, "It's just a monumental financial headache that (Sheriff Joe Arpaio) has created."
Perhaps Arpaio’s most potentially wasteful act was refusing to cooperate with the U.S. Department of Justice during their civil rights investigation of the Sheriff’s Office.
According to another 2010 article in The Arizona Republic, the federal investigation is attempting to determine whether the Sheriff's Office discriminates on the basis of national origin.
The probe started in 2008. It is unrelated to other abuse of power federal investigations, which Arpaio is currently the subject of as well.
As a result of refusing to provide full access to records and facilities, the Department of Justice was “unprecedentedly” forced to sue the Sheriff’s Office to get what they needed.
Meanwhile, $113 million in future federal funding for the county hangs in the balance.
The Board of Supervisors’ attorney Tom Irvine said, “We have no certainty that environmental, highway, health, federal monies will not be severely impacted. Hopefully, that doesn't happen."
As if the county wasn’t already in financial trouble.
One would assume that this would at least make the fiscally conservative taxpayers of our red state think twice before reelecting two public officials who cost us so much by simply doing their job poorly.
But no — no press is bad press. Arpaio has continued to be reelected Maricopa County Sheriff for nearly 20 years, while Thomas lost his race for Attorney General by just a couple hundred votes — despite being under investigation for criminal abuses of power by the federal government and the Arizona State Bar.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, what does that make the Maricopa County voters?
It seems the only way to get Arizona to stop electing criminals is to actually put them behind bars. Let’s hope that 2011 is Maricopa County’s lucky year.
Contact Danny at djoconn1@asu.edu
