The hope at the time was that with time, new hires, and rising salaries, this would change. But that didn't happen.

Turnover and vacancies remain intractable issues even as Conover seeks reelection in 2024. The Pima County Attorney's Office has 77 vacancies, 32 of which have been open for more than a year, according to a June 16 Pima County report. That's a 19.9 percent vacancy rate, one of the highest among understaffed county government departments.

Critics and observers of the office point to a range of impacts: The high caseload sometimes means plea deals are rushed, victims aren't always properly treated and more felony domestic violence cases are being sent to the city attorney's office as misdemeanors, they say.

When I spoke with her on Friday, Conover said she is unfairly criticized by people who fabricate facts to fit their own narrative. Certainly, there is one egregious example: a May 1 Goldwater Institute op-ed in the Star that claimed crime was surging in Pima County. As a May 19 editorial pointed out, the data used in that op-ed was incorrect, and the opposite is closer to the truth than the supposed crime wave.

“We're doing all the work we need to do,” Conover told me, “The county allocates us a budget for 5,000 felony convictions a year. It's our job to prioritize violent crimes, victim crimes. The results are amazing.”

Indeed, one of Conover's biggest arguments for reelection is that reports of the most serious crimes, such as homicides, have fallen significantly from their horrific peaks in 2021, despite the civil unrest we see periodically in Tucson.

But if the department is so successful, why is turnover so high?

Among the departures in 2021 and 2022 were several surprising names because they were top advisers to Conover, including Tamara Mullembo, who left the Federal Public Defender's Office to become Conover's chief of staff.

She left the company after just 10 months, leaving a rather scathing internal email about her old friend Conover, whom she accused of treating her like a black woman and of making ignorant, discriminatory comments and actions.

When I had lunch with Mulembo recently, I expected her to go into more detail about the flight from office she witnessed before joining the movement, but she signed a non-disparagement agreement when she left the Pima County DA's office, and she spoke only in general terms and about the candidates she supports.

“No matter what change you try to make, the culture of the place always wins,” said Mulembo, who worked as an intern in the county prosecutor's office while in law school a few years before returning in 2021. “The only way to change that is to consistently change the culture and lead from the top to the bottom and lead by example.”

Mulembo is endorsing Mike Jett, who he said he grew to respect when he was a public defender facing Jett as a prosecutor. Mulembo sat in the front row at the candidates forum Monday night at the Donna Riggins Center.

“You never know how someone is going to use power until you give them power,” Mulembo said. “So I had the opportunity to watch him use his power responsibly, fairly and honestly for almost 20 years.”

Another early ally who resigned was Joe Watson, a former journalist and ex-prisoner who became Mr. Conover's spokesman. Mr. Watson has supported Mr. Conover and has argued that Mr. Jette's candidacy is a return to the past and a departure from Mr. Conover's criminal justice reform efforts.

Many senior officials in former Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall's administration have supported Jett and regularly criticized Conover in the Star and other publications.

“I support Rolla for the same reasons I supported her in 2020,” Watson said. “I'm very happy to see two candidates talking about their commitment to reform, but Rolla is the only one who has committed to reform, and she was committed to reform long before she became county attorney.”

As for flying from the office, Watson said, “I think it's great that the office has become leaner.”

“As a result, public safety has not been compromised. Crime rates have decreased.”

When many employees were laid off in the early months of Conover's tenure, she blamed the firings on allies of the previous administration, but as time went on, turnover continued, though it fluctuated.

On Friday, she noted that turnover has also been a major issue under Lawall's administration, after Lawall acknowledged that in 2011, for example, the percentage of lawyers with five or more years of experience had fallen from 61 percent in 2008 to 38 percent in 2011.

During campaign rallies, including Monday night's forum, Conover highlighted the first across-the-board pay increase for county attorney's office employees since 1997 that he received from the Pima County Board of Supervisors.

But in an interview, she said it still isn't enough to stop lawyers from accepting job offers from private companies and other agencies. She argued that most lawyer departures are due to money and burnout.

“This is a decades-old problem,” Conover said, and the county attorney's office “will continue to be an informant to the U.S. attorney's office for the foreseeable future.”

But Jette, whose biggest selling point has been his 17 years of experience as a prosecutor, criticized Conover.

“I think it's personality that's responsible,” he said. “You have people who leave in the first, second, third year. You can't say they're people who are leaving because they were from the previous administration.”

The lawyers I contacted, some of whom left in the administration’s second and third years, were hesitant to speak publicly about their reasons for leaving: Once the election is over, most lawyers will have to work with each other in the county’s criminal justice system, and some worry about taking sides.

The patterns I'm seeing are broader patterns reflected in Conover and Jette's comments: certainly, people are leaving because they can find higher paying, easier work elsewhere; certainly, burnout from heavy caseloads is having an adverse effect; i.e., more vacancies mean more people are leaving.

But the departures reflect dissatisfaction with leadership — either with Conover himself or with the sometimes inexperienced managers to whom employees report as turnover rises.

I'm not sure if Jette will continue to hire more employees. He has the advantage of being a career prosecutor, which may be attractive to someone looking to work in a county attorney's office, but his supervisory experience is limited to an interesting stint working overseas for the U.S. Department of Justice in Pakistan and other countries.

There is no guarantee that prosecutors' caseloads or other personnel transfer pressures will decrease if either of them takes office.