PHOENIX (By Yvonne Wingett and JJ Hensley, Arizona Republic) May 17, 2008 — Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio faces hefty budget cuts as he attempts to find money to continue his immigration sweeps, documents obtained Thursday by The Arizona Republic show.

The documents spell out proposed cutbacks to several sheriff's operations in fiscal 2009, which starts July 1.

Arpaio said he would continue making illegal immigration a top priority, and that the cuts would not affect public safety.

The sheriff said he will increase volunteer posse numbers and reduce services offered to other agencies to make room in his tight budget to continue the operations.

Earlier this week, Arpaio's office was cut off from state funds to help pay for some of those illegal immigration operations, but Arpaio vowed Thursday to continue the sweeps, despite the proposed reduction in county money.

"If I don't get it back, we're still going to do what we're doing," Arpaio said. "I've got news for them: I'm going to double the arrests. They can put that in their pipe and smoke it."

Under a proposal being worked on by Arpaio's administrators and county budget officials, the Sheriff's Office would take a 5 percent reduction from its requested budget, or about $4 million to its general fund.

The office is one of the county's largest, and the reductions are part of a larger effort to trim spending in the face of revenue shortfalls, caused by a slowing economy.

The sheriff's general fund primarily pays for law-enforcement patrol. Arpaio has spent about $35,000 of the money since January to saturate some Valley neighborhoods with deputies to identify and question people suspected to be undocumented immigrants.

Another $1.6 million in state funding helped pay for those patrols, and many of the sheriff's immigration-related operations, including drophouse investigations and enforcement of the state's human-smuggling law.

Earlier this week, Gov. Janet Napolitano signed an executive order that immediately redirected that money to a program to pursue nearly 60,000 open felony warrants to capture some of the state's most-wanted fugitives, including human smugglers and others in the country illegally.

Maricopa County administrators are proposing spending cuts through many departments.

Officials in the Office of Management and Budget declined to provide details about the fiscal year 2008-09 proposed budget until the Board of Supervisors are briefed at 10 a.m. Monday in a public meeting.

On Wednesday, the five supervisors are expected to approve a tentative version of the budget.

The county will hold one meeting for public comment at 10 a.m. on June 16, the same day the supervisors are expected to approve a final budget.

The supervisors must approve the sheriff's budget, and because he is an elected official, they cannot tell him how to spend it.

Generally, the supervisors approve a lump sum, and Arpaio decides how to spend the money based on his priorities, and state-mandated functions, such as running the jails and patrols of unincorporated areas.

According to the budget documents, the Sheriff's Office requested $76.6 million for its general fund. County officials came up with a proposal to give the office $72.5 million. The sheriff signed the agreement in mid-April.

On the chopping block, according to the budget documents, are mounted-horse patrols, motorcycle patrols, a program to assist in assessments for the seriously mentally ill, and a position that helps the office distribute surplus from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Other options include the elimination of canine units, reductions in the civil process (such as evictions and serving court paperwork) 15 percent reductions to each general investigations, central investigations, and special investigations, a reduction in computer crimes, and a reduction in overtime pay.

"We're going to be more streamlined, but we will continue our policies on illegal immigration," Arpaio said. "Nothing else is going to change."

The cuts won't impact Arpaio's plans to add an additional 500 beds to tent city, bringing the jail's potential population to 2,500, but the sheriff said he could reduce food prices for inmates even further.

The bulk of the sheriff's total budget covers the cost for transporting and jailing prisoners, which could take a $2 million cut, to about $186 million.

The state funding Napolitano redirected was part of a March 2007 agreement through which the Sheriff's Office provided 15 personnel to a state gang task force aimed at illegal immigration and human smuggling. For the effort, state police agreed to reimburse the Sheriff's Office for 85 percent of its deputies' salaries and other costs, including overtime.

The frequency and visibility of the sweeps have died down in recent weeks.

For three consecutive weekends in late March and early April, Arpaio deployed hundreds of deputies and posse members in areas of Phoenix and in Guadalupe in response to complaints from residents about crime in those areas, typically littering, loitering and trespassing.

The "crime-suppression operations," as Arpaio dubbed them, resulted in more than 150 arrests that cleared almost 50 warrants and resulted in the detention of 73 immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally.

The operations cost more than $35,000 in salaries and overtime and used an additional $24,000 in grant money.

Last week, Arpaio unveiled a more low-key approach in his hometown of Fountain Hills. The sweep was directed at traffic violators and used about 14 deputies to arrest 20 people, apprehend five fugitives in two days, and pick up 16 suspected illegal immigrants.