Legislative auditor general John Schaff said he hired three additional auditors and one staff support person, reorganized the office, giving promotions to several people, and last year turned out 22 audits compared to 17 several years ago.

Mike Christensen, head of Legislative Research and General Counsel, said his budget is up because he hired five new employees over the past few years to deal with a greater workload.

The other main legislative office — the Fiscal Analyst, which drafts the state's budget — grew by 49 percent over that time frame — the same growth as the executive branch's main tax funds.

A review of salaries shows that legislative leaders and managers recently gave selected staffers pay raises that are double what the average Utahn was seeing, double what the average executive branch worker saw. Some legislative staffers got two or three raises in fiscal 2008 alone, which ended June 30, the documents show, while other staffers got raises that reflect what Utahns and other state employees averaged.

Legislative staffers who got the higher raises were reclassified, got wide-spread promotions or received pay in other adjustments, records show. The Legislature sets its own personnel pay scales, which are not administered by the executive branch's Department of Human Resource Management.

According to the state's Workforce Services economists, Utah wages overall grew by 4.6 percent from July 2007 to June 2008, the state's last fiscal year. Utah wages grew about 18.8 percent over the last four fiscal years, those economists say.

In the same fiscal years, state executive branch workers averaged pay raises (with promotions included) of 4.39 percent in FY 2005, 3.79 percent in FY 2006, 4.92 percent in FY 2007 and 4.44 percent in FY 2008, which ended June 30. Over four years, the average state executive branch worker has seen a pay raise of 17.5 percent, statistics provided by the state human resource office shows.

Some exceptions

With those numbers in mind, here are a few examples of some of the larger, or just odd, pay raises and pay scales in the Utah Legislature:

• Over the past year, Chris Bleak, the House chief of staff (the House's top political appointee,) has seen his salary go up 8.8 percent to $109,000. Over the same time, Ric Cantrell, the deputy of the Senate (the Senate's top political appointee), was given a raise of only 3.5 percent to $99,028.