Yet another reason to be furious with tax assessor

We start the week with yet another reason to be alternately furious, astonished and downright exasperated by Maricopa County’s hard-working tax assessor.

Turns out Paul Petersen has shown up for work just 53 days this year.

Fifty-three days at his day job — the one you and I have been paying him $76,600 a year to do.

We are paying him still as he sits in jail on criminal charges in three states that he’s long been running an illegal adoption ring.

And there’s not a darn thing we can do about it until next year.

Clearly, our tax assessor has no shame.

But then, the rotten apple apparently didn’t fall far from the tree.

Perhaps you recall his father, state Treasurer David Petersen, who was forced to resign as a part of a plea agreement with the state Attorney General’s Office in December 2006.

David Petersen pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to report $4,200 in side income on his state financial-disclosure statement. Specifically, commissions he’d received for selling ... wait for it ... charactereducation materials to schools while working as the state’s treasurer.

The elder Petersen’s conviction capped a nine-month investigation into more serious charges of theft, fraud and conflict of interest related to his work for a nonprofit known as Character First!

All this while he was supposed to be running the state Treasurer’s Office.

The operative word here being “supposed.”

Petersen, the father, hadn’t worked regularly at the Treasurer’s Office during the 10 months he was under investigation, according to news reports at the time.

Petersen blamed his absenteeism on the stress of the investigation, which he said aggravated his health woes. But no worries, he said he was able to do his job managing the $9 billion in investments from home.

An aide at the time told reporters that Petersen came in “once, sometimes twice a week; sometimes for 90 minutes, sometimes an hour.” Like father, like son, I suppose. The Republic’s Jessica Boehm checked parking records and discovered that Paul Petersen logged into the county’s parking garage just 53 days from Jan. 1 through Oct. 2.

Those parking records show he spent just four hours in the office on most of those 53 days.

Nice work, if you can get it — and he got it because he was politically connected.

Petersen was appointed to the job in 2013, upon the resignation of then-Assessor Keith Russell, who resigned to replace a justice of the peace who’d

been arrested for shoplifting.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to give Petersen the job over 10 other applicants. This, despite the fact that he had no experience as a property appraiser. Petersen had long been the department’s public information officer and lobbyist.

At the time of his appointment, Petersen said he would continue working nights and weekends as an adoption attorney.

“I’m not going to just let it go,” Petersen said. “I have spent 10 years building it up.”

There is, after all, big money in the baby broker business.

Prosecutors say Petersen scored millions in fees by adopting out babies born to 73 women illegally brought from the Marshall Islands to Arizona, Arkansas and Utah.

By the way, a county spokeswoman said at the time of Petersen’s 2013 appointment that it is not uncommon for the county’s elected officials to have outside businesses and noted that all five supervisors at the time had side jobs.

Three things occur:

1. Why is the job of assessing the value of property for tax purposes a political one? Wouldn’t it make sense for the county assessor to be a professional rather than a political hack?

2. Why is it “not uncommon” for the county’s elected officials to have side jobs? If you want the county job and you’re elected to the county job, shouldn’t there be an expectation that you are present to actually do the county job? Wouldn’t it make sense for at least some of these county elective offices to be appointed posts, so that at least the officeholders can be held accountable if they don’t bother to show up for work?

3. And this is a biggie: If they haven’t already done so, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors needs to scour the law books to figure out if there’s any way to fire Petersen, other than by recall or the regulator election, neither of which can happen this year.

Our tax assessor faces 62 charges in three states and is now in federal custody, which means he’s headed to Arkansas ...

Which means he will be unavailable to do his job in Arizona ...

Which parking records show he wasn’t doing anyway ...

Assuming he was ever qualified to do it in the first place, given his background in public relations and, according to prosecutors, selling babies.

Surely, someone’s got a legal crowbar and can pry Assessor Petersen’s cold, politically dead fingers from his county paycheck.