You remember the sheriff’s half-million-dollar bus. The county instituted a purchasing freeze last year, but the sheriff’s office, taking money out of its jail fund, bought it anyway.

It’s one of the many infantile points of contention between Arpaio and the county. Supervisors have kept the bus in a garage since they found out about the purchase in May.

Now an audit (which probably cost the county money to perform) shows the obvious: That Arpaio violated county guidellines when he bought it.

The EVT:

“There is no evidence that the bus was acquired for the best price, or that procurement controls meant to protect and account for public funds were followed,” the audit states.

Republic story here.

On a related note, PHXated was talking to some courts people recently and heard some anecdotal but plausible stories about the effects of Arpaio’s deliberate slowdown of his office’s work in transferring prisoners to the court system.

Arapio has a certain genius in smelling what ways he can essentially not do his job that don’t elicit public outrage or opposition.

According to the people I spoke to, the sheriff’s office brings prisoners to the court only two days a week, which makes scheduling difficult. Even with those limitations, prisoners frequently aren’t where they are supposed to be, creating cascading waves of delays. (The process also costs defendants, or the state, money, as lawyers sit around on the clock doing nothing.)

In fact, this happened at the case I was watching.

One lawyer said he’d seen judges deliberately let people out on bond who otherwise would not be when the likelihood of a non-appearance by a defendant could have hampered progress on a particular case or hearing.