County board should retreat on removing Petersen
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors should hastily retreat from their efforts to remove County Assessor Paul Petersen from office. They are probably playing a losing hand. Win or lose, it will needlessly cost taxpayers a bundle.
Petersen faces criminal charges in three states for alleged illegal activity in his adoption business, including defrauding Arizona’s Medicaid system.
This, naturally, provoked public outrage and calls for him to resign or be removed from office.
The publicly spirited course in these circumstances is to resign. The argument that people are innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply. Conducting the public’s business and defending oneself against major criminal charges isn’t a compatible mix.
But the truly public-spirited rarely face charges such as these and tend to want to cling to their office for whatever reason – pride, leverage, money – motivates them. So, the question moves to removal.
In Arizona, the most direct way to remove an elected official is through recall. But that’s a difficult political undertaking and results in a special election. Petersen’s term expires in less than a year. Voting twice for county assessor – in the regular primary and general election – is twice too many. We shouldn’t be electing someone to what should be an exclusively technocratic operation. What political judgment is it proper to bring to bear on setting the value of property for tax purposes?
Voting for county assessor three times in one year would be adding insult to insult.
There is another narrow path to removal that the supervisors appear to be trying to negotiate.
State law allows the board to suspend the county assessor for 120 days for “defalcation or neglect of duty,” which they voted to do.
The assessor can ask for a hearing before the board, which Petersen has done. But, regardless of the outcome of that, he gets his job back in four months.
The only exception is if, in the interim, he’s charged by a grand jury for “willful or corrupt misconduct in office.”
The board has asked the county attorney to conduct an investigation into Petersen’s conduct in office, ostensibly in preparation for the board hearing, but presumably also for possible submission to a grand jury.
County Attorney Allister Adel says that the investigation will be “extensive.” In this context, the definition of “extensive” is “expensive to county taxpayers.”
Adel announced the hiring of not one, but two, outside law firms to assist in the investigation. And it will be overseen by my John Stewart concert buddy Grant Woods, who, among lesser claims to acclaim, is a former state attorney general.
Now, Petersen has also lawyered up, and his lawyers promise a scorched earth defense, including ultimately taking the county to court. If the board loses at the end of the day, county taxpayers could be on the hook for Petersen’s attorney fees as well.
And losing is certainly possible, if not likely. The board can only precipitate Petersen’s removal for misconduct in office. Not the stuff he’s been charged with regarding his adoption business.
Now, the assessor’s office is functioning fine. Property values are being set on time and as prescribed by law.
There is evidence that, as the nominal head of the office, Petersen has been mailing it in. But, in cases where politicians are ostensibly in charge of technocratic agencies, mailing it in is what you want them to do. Their only real job is to hire people who actually know what they are doing. And Petersen seems to have done that.
Part of Petersen’s scorched earth defense apparently will be to document the extent to which other elected officials are mailing it in, to the indifference of the supervisors, some of whom may be mailing it in themselves. That might provide some voyeuristic political thrills, but at a potentially hefty cost to taxpayers.
Allowing Petersen to serve out his term until voters replace him in November wouldn’t cost much. His annual salary is $77,000. Trying to oust him through the route the board has chosen is likely to cost many times that.
The suspension was an act of political vanity, a way for the supervisors to express disapproval of what Petersen is alleged to have done with his adoption business.
Point made. Now is the time to retreat rather than saddle county taxpayers with paying the mounting cost of sustaining that vanity.