Pima County officials call for change, pay cut for constables

Pima County’s constables are facing scrutiny from some of the county’s top officials, who say the group operates inconsistently and bears uneven workloads.

Now, those officials are recommending constables take a significant pay cut unless they agree to a certain set of standards.

Constables are elected within each county precinct and charged with serving eviction papers and other legal summonses that come out of the courts, but not all of them approach their jobs the same way.

Assistant County Administrator Mark Napier, former county sheriff, submitted a report on constables’ performance in September. He called them a “fractured group” with varying philosophies toward the job, which can call for serious matters such as removing people from their homes or serving domestic violence protection orders.

“The county should be concerned that our citizens being evicted from their homes are treated differently based on where they reside within boundaries on a map,” Napier wrote.

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry reviewed Napier’s findings and recommended a 28% pay cut for all 10 of the county’s constables in an Oct. 6 memo.

He also recommended the constables be “phased out” as their terms expire and replaced with county employees, although as elected officials, it’s not clear if getting rid of the county’s constables is legally feasible.

“If we can’t get elected constables to cooperate with a uniform set of policies and standards that they should respond to as county officials, perhaps it’s time to hire civil servants to do the same thing,” Huckelberry said in an interview in October.

Approaches differ

Since the federal eviction moratorium ended in August, the number of countywide eviction filings has increased, causing the county to take a look into the constables who serve them.

“We’re seeing people treated vastly different in the eviction process between constables, and that can’t happen,” Huckelberry said.

While some constables take a black-and-white methodology of carrying out the task delineated on court papers, such as evicting someone when a court order calls for it, others exhaust available social services before making people leave their homes.

“Some constables convey the appearance of quasi-law enforcement officers, while others the appearance of urban social workers,” Napier wrote in his report.

All newly elected constables have to go undergo a mandatory basic training course, but there’s no handbook that addresses all the precarious situations that can arise when handling matters as sensitive as evictions.

Bennett Bernal, the constable for Justice Precinct 6 in central Tucson, said he ran for the position 12 years ago to “change in the way constables do a job.”

“There’s a lot of good that you can do from helping people get assistance: working with the landlords, with mental health issues. We’re dealing with that all the time,” he said.

Connecting evictees to social services and having conversations with landlords is a process that Bernal said can “take days, sometimes even a week.”

On the other hand, Constable John Dorer, who works in the rural northeast area of Justice Precinct 1, has a more clear-cut approach to the job. After working in law enforcement for 33 years, he sees the position as a transition to retirement.

“I would say I’m more conservative. The job is a law enforcement position. That’s how it’s described in statutes,” he said. “I think given my background and training, a lot of the stuff we do can be very dangerous, and I think people who are out there and treating this as something other than an enforcement position may be putting themselves at some risk.”

That stark difference in approach, Napier found, makes the eviction process for a county resident different depending on which constable serves in the precinct they live in.

Uneven workloads

The number of papers served within each precinct varies, too, resulting in differing workloads for each constable. Constable Michael Stevenson in Justice Precinct 10 has served a four-year average of 230 legal documents, while Bernal’s average is 1,814, according to the county. Both constables earn a $67,000 annual salary.

“Why should I work almost three times, sometimes four times more papers than other constables in Pima County, and get paid the same amount of money?” Bernal said.

But in some rural precincts, the number of papers served in a day is limited by longer drive times between more dispersed residences.

“I may be going from one end of town to the other and have an hour of travel time, where the city precincts that are much tighter geography may only have two or three miles between their papers,” Dorer said.

According to Stevenson, his count of papers served is low for similar reasons.

“The distances traveled are pretty expansive,” he said. “Not only is it the population of the precinct, but the demographics of the precinct are completely different. There are multiple jurisdictions, some of those cases can be handled by municipal courts instead of the justice courts.”

And according to Stevenson, who’s also the county’s presiding constable, the job involves other tasks besides serving court papers.

“I handle all the office duties, the financials, the budgeting, the purchasing, the fleet, all that type of stuff,” he said. “So there are other actions that the constables do to substantiate what their earnings are.”

Consolidated structure sought

The county’s constables don’t operate under a cohesive set of standards determining how they approach their jobs, and as independently elected officials, the county can’t force them to adhere to any. However, the Board of Supervisors can adjust salaries when a constable’s term expires, and the next round of constable elections takes place in 2024.

Huckelberry and Napier recommend all constables’ salaries drop to $48,294 a year, the lowest amount permitted in state statute for precincts with more than 16,001 registered voters, which all Pima County precincts besides Ajo have. Ajo’s constable makes $15,288 a year.

The county administrator wrote the change in constables’ salaries would occur “until their collective adoption of a consolidated structure, a more equitable distribution of workload and more consistency in appearance, approach and philosophy.”

Adopting a consolidated structure would mean all the papers that come out of the Justice Court would be divided evenly among the constables, regardless of the precinct the papers are served in.

However, with a disjointed approach to how they do their jobs, some constables don’t trust others to serve papers in their precinct — a process that can determine if a tenant is given resources before being served an eviction.

“I’ll be more than happy to give you my civil papers, criminal papers. But no way am I giving you my evictions,” Bernal said. “I ran on that, and I love the work that I do and I don’t expect them to do what I do.”

And the current system of splitting the work by precinct allows constables to stay within a defined area while they work.

“I could see an issue with the distribution if you’re just splitting them as they come in the door, the first one in goes to one, the second one in goes to two,” Dorer said. “You could have constables running to all ends of the county with increased travel time. I think that’s an issue that we’re already facing based on some of the numbers.”

Huckelberry said he’d make the recommendation for the board to lower constables’ salaries in the “near term,” and went a step further to suggest constables be replaced with “civil service employees.”

The county administrator asked the County Attorney’s Office for advice on whether or not this is legally viable, but that information is protected by attorney-client privilege.

According to Scott Blake, a member of the Arizona Constables Association, only the sheriff and constables are statutorily allowed to seize personal property pursuant to an eviction.

“The Arizona Constables Association strongly opposes any talk of the unlawful removal of elected officials by unelected bureaucrats or talk of replacing an elected official with civil servants who are not directly responsible to the people of that county,” Blake wrote.

Although Bernal and Dorer take different approaches to their jobs, they both take issue with being replaced by county employees.

“I think that’s a dangerous precedent to set for giving the county control over. There’s a reason it’s at the statute level and election level,” Dorer said.

Bernal believes raising awareness about the job and getting new names on the ballot is a better approach.

“I don’t have a relationship with a lot of the constables, but they all do work professionally. There’s a point where relationships stop and doing the right thing matters, and we don’t have that,” he said. “The better fight is bringing quality candidates that care about doing the job right.”