Money Shot

Not the county attorney. Rick Romley tried, but he's since retired, and his replacement, Andrew Thomas, is more interested in making nice with Arpaio than declaring war on him. Thomas and Arpaio even formed an anti-corruption task force designed to target public officials who screw up. Clearly, they have no interest in using their authority to investigate each other.

What about the Justice Department? Its civil rights department doesn't just monitor jails; it could also look at Arpaio's treatment of his political enemies. And Justice has the distance to keep any investigation from getting mired in local politics.

Then again, that didn't happen in 1996, when Janet Napolitano made her deal with the devil. And though rumors are rife that Justice investigators are eyeing Arpaio again, it's not clear how much credence to give them.

That leaves the county supervisors.

The county's organizational chart is not a linear model. It's a series of bubbles, and Arpaio's bubble is shown answering directly to the people, not to the supervisors.

But the supervisors manage Arpaio's money. And with Arpaio's budget problems in the news, it's worth remembering what happened to Sandra Dowling.

County officials will tell you that Arpaio doesn't answer to them. (Remember those bubbles.) They may quietly express distaste over his abuses of power and the millions he costs taxpayers, but they say it's not their job to hold him accountable. He's elected by the people.

But Dowling was also a bubble on the county organizational chart. As Superintendent of the Maricopa County Schools, Dowling also, supposedly, answered only to the people.

Like Arpaio, only a few short years ago, Dowling seemed unstoppable. She had been elected to five consecutive terms without any real competition. Her big innovation, the Thomas J. Pappas Schools for Homeless Children, had been celebrated by everyone from Oprah to 60 Minutes. The much-lauded schools were actually failing badly, but the media didn't seem to care and neither did the voters. Dowling was flying so high, she actually asked the district's lobbyists to see whether George W. Bush was interested in her services.

That was then.

In 2005, Sandra Dowling's school district went over budget. She asked the county supervisors for an extra $2 million.

That's when Dowling's charmed political life came to an abrupt end. The supervisors demanded the district's financial records, and when Dowling didn't produce the detailed documentation they wanted, the board obtained a subpoena and sent officers to force her to turn it over. Even though Dowling had just been audited a few years before, in 2004, county auditors were again assigned to look at her books. By May 2006, they completed a 118-page report detailing a host of problems: misspending, faulty bid processes, nepotism. The supervisors then hired three educational consultants to help close the Pappas Schools — an idea Dowling bitterly contested.

In November 2006, Dowling was indicted on 25 felony counts. (Ironically, it was the Sheriff's Office that did the investigation.)

It's unclear what will ultimately happen with the criminal case. The U.S. Attorney, who's prosecuting, recently dropped a number of the charges; Dowling still awaits trial on the others.

What is clear is this: When the county supervisors chose to take on Sandra Dowling, Dowling was finished.

Contrast that with their treatment of Arpaio. Despite the sheriff's abysmal record in every area that auditors have examined, the county has yet to order a comprehensive audit.

There's reason for that. Because the sheriff's $241 million budget is the biggest in the county, such an audit would undoubtedly require the entire 18-member audit staff working for months on end.

"It would take the board to come and tell us they wanted us to spend our resources onto such a big audit," says County Auditor Ross Tate. "They haven't done that."

Jim Bloom, chief of staff for Supervisor Andy Kunasek, echoed Tate. "If we were to audit the Sheriff in totality, it would take not only our entire audit staff, but a lot of his staff, too," he says. "It wouldn't make any sense. If we did an audit that big on his operations, in the meantime, we wouldn't be doing an audit on anyone else."

New Times left repeated messages over a weeklong period with Supervisors Max Wilson, Don Stapley, Fulton Brock, Andy Kunasek, and Mary Rose Wilcox.

Not one of them called back with a comment.

The will to stop Arpaio simply isn't there. But Sandra Dowling's quick fall from power holds an obvious lesson: Whether the supervisors want to admit it or not, there is a way.