Doubting Thomas

That's an astounding increase from the year before Thomas was elected, when Wilenchik & Bartness received zero dollars from the county.

Lotstein claims that the ultra-conservative Thomas doesn't weigh political connections when choosing outside law firms.

"They are not chosen as a result of politics at all," Lotstein maintains.

Lotstein insists that Thomas is awarding contracts to his former law firm because county clients, including Sheriff Joe Arpaio, have demanded that Wilenchik & Bartness represent them in court.

"The sheriff has asked that every case involving his office be referred to Wilenchik & Bartness," Lotstein says.

Among such cases is a lawsuit filed against the sheriff's office by Buckeye Police Chief Dan Saban. Arpaio defeated Saban, a former Mesa police commander, in the 2004 Republican primary for sheriff following a contentious campaign.

Saban alleges in the suit that the sheriff's office improperly initiated a criminal investigation against him and then leaked it to the press in spring 2004 to derail his campaign.

Under pressure, the MCSO eventually referred the matter to the Pima County Sheriff's Office because of the obvious conflict of interest. Pima County quickly declined to pursue the matter because of a lack of evidence and the fact that the allegations were about an event that supposedly took place more than 30 years ago.

But the damage to Saban's campaign had already been done.

Saban filed the suit in April 2005. The County Attorney's Office initially was representing the MCSO. But Thomas withdrew from the case in August 2005 and hired his old boss, Dennis Wilenchik, to represent Arpaio's department in the matter.

Since that date, there has been extensive litigation in the case, and Wilenchik has easily billed the county tens of thousands of dollars. Exactly how much, I couldn't find out -- because the records the County Attorney's Office released to me in April didn't include payments to Wilenchik for the Saban case.

The records I obtained from the county finance department also didn't provide a breakdown of such payments to Wilenchik's firm case by case, although it appears that fees for the Saban litigation are included in the $326,000 paid to the firm in the past year.

Lotstein had no explanation for why the Saban case wasn't included in the records his office released.

Dennis Wilenchik is also representing the MCSO in a public records lawsuit filed by the West Valley View, a weekly newspaper based in Litchfield Park. His handling of this case has made me wonder if he has any expertise in public records law.

The View filed a "special action" suit in county Superior Court against the sheriff's office after the MCSO refused to provide the paper routine press releases that the MCSO's media relations department routinely distributes to other media outlets.

A special action allows a matter to appear before a judge far more quickly than filing a routine suit that can take years to litigate. Public records law clearly gives media outlets the right to file such special actions to obtain public records.

Wilenchik, however, argued that the paper has no such right.

"It just makes you stand back and scratch your head," Dan Barr, a highly respected public-records-law attorney representing the View, says of Wilenchik's argument (on which the court hasn't ruled).

Andy Thomas once proudly proclaimed that politics carries no weight in the County Attorney's Office: "It's a law enforcement office and, ideally, partisanship should have no place there."

On that I agree with him 100 percent. But this doesn't seem to be the way he's operating his office.

Because it smacks of the worst kind of partisan politics to refuse to fully disclose his business relationship with a firm that the county has paid more than $326,000 for outside legal services.

That relationship may not have resulted in the violation of any law, but it certainly raises ethical questions.