Arpaio Sets Record Straight on Spending
Arpaio Sets Record Straight on Spending
Setting record straight after the false claims of misspending
No criminal intent behind budget problem of County Sheriff’s Office
by Joe Arpaio
Special for the Republic
Recently much has been reported in the media regarding claims by Maricopa County’s Office of Management and Budget that this Sheriff’s Office has misspent tens of millions of dollars from the jail fund.
Their claims have been wildly accusatory and flamboyant. They even encouraged the media to report that some of my employees used taxpayer dollars to take personal trips to lavish resorts with fancy swimming pools. County officials led the media to believe that was the truth when, in fact, it was not.
Some of the local media have also been complicit in the board’s efforts to paint me as one who has personally benefited from this alleged misspending of taxpayers’ money.
These ridiculous claims were false and done simply for the purpose of stirring up public outrage.
The financial portrait of any organization this size is intensely complicated. My job as the elected sheriff is to provide law-enforcement services to a county that is 9,200 square miles and has a population of more than 4 million.
This office employs 3,450 people, we book more than 130,000 arrestees per year and we have a 3,000-member volunteer posse – all executed with an annual budget of $260 million.
This budget falls into two main funds: the detention fund, which goes to my jail operations, and the general fund, which covers the enforcement side of the office. And every day, those functions intersect. Every day my deputies arrest people on the street, then bring them to jail.
Our duties as a sheriff’s office cross over all the time. Deputies even respond to crimes committed inside the jails.
That we may have blended the detention and general funds to get the job done, while technically inappropriate, is hardly, to my mind, the serious infraction the board wants you to think it is. At the risk of sounding like I am minimizing the issue but to demonstrate the point: How serious a problem is it if a deputy who writes a report uses a pen that was purchased by jail-fund money?
The Board of Supervisors is now calling for a criminal investigation of my office for allegedly mixing these two funds – funds used in good faith and solely for one purpose: to protect the public. My office has always operated well within its budget and on many occasions, we have given millions of dollars back to the board at the end of each fiscal year.
I am going to admit something here: I have devoted over 50 years of my life to locking up bad guys. I’m a cop at heart. Give me the money and I’ll go arrest the bad guys and keep them in jail. I admit that running a law-enforcement agency of this size and scope is complicated. Always, in the 18 years I have been your sheriff, running the jails and patrolling the streets have gone hand in hand and I’ve done it as inexpensively to the taxpayer as possible.
When there is the demand from the public to solve problems involving criminal activity, illegal immigration or incarcerating criminals, I address those demands with everything I have been given by the voters in this county.
The most important point I want to make to you is this: Not one person in my organization personally benefited financially because of the alleged cross-funding discrepancies.
We are diligently trying to reconcile this budget problem with county government, and I intend to work with officials to correct what I see as administrative accounting problems.
But as a final word, let me be clear: I will not stand back and watch silently while these county officials lead you, the public, to believe that this issue rises to the level of criminal intent.
Joe Arpaio is sheriff of Maricopa County.
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