Speaker Toma and Leader Cano update their offices

The caucus leaders in the Arizona House spent to update their respective offices. Let's see what they bought:

The Legislature, like any other government agency, receives millions of dollars in the annual budget and spends it how it sees fit. Sometimes that comes in the form of raises to its staff or capital improvements¹ or maybe even wasting the money on an outside attorney to take multiple public records lawsuits to court².

Republican House Speaker Ben Toma and Democratic House Minority Leader Andres Cano both spent a chunk of change to update their respective offices. It wasn’t that much money in the grand scheme of things (and I’ll have to look into how they spent their allocated money elsewhere too), but since it’s taxpayer dollars, we have every right to know what we are paying for.

In total, both leaders spent just under $50,000 on their updates and most of them seem practical, which is a positive sign we don’t typically see from lawmakers in this state. $46,000 came from Toma and the remaining ~$4,000 from Cano.

Toma spent roughly $13,000 on his own office and another $6,000 for the waiting room, but most of his spending went to the Speaker’s conference room. Here’s a breakdown:

I never knew leather swivel chairs cost so much. $1,218.50 per chair, to be exact. That was the largest expense and 17 only covers about half of his 31-member caucus.

Cano looks to have found a much more frugal chair option for his office, but I’m not sure what material they are… probably not leather. Here’s his breakdown:

That TV deal seems to be pretty good, too. I wonder if it’s 4K.

Send me suggestions about spending in other elected offices, or if you work for the Arizona government (statewide or other) and have the details to give to me without me requesting it that would be great and transparent of you.

1. Still no basement gym though… if you know you know.

2. Only to repeatedly lose, be forced to turn over communication records and then decide to exempt yourself from the state public records law.