Furniture for legislators: $20,000 per office

The state spent "around" $20,000 on furniture for each new office for most of the 104 part-time legislators.

House GOP leaders said Thursday that media had been asking questions about how much was spent on the lawmakers' furniture.

"We could have spent more. We could have spent less," said House Majority Leader Kevin Garn, R-Layton, of the $2 million expense.

Most of the furniture was made in the special shops at the Utah State Prison, but state agencies still have to pay for those products.

Garn said there may be news stories about the expense "that would paint" the Legislature as being irresponsible, spending money on new offices while cutting state programs. The state faces a $1 billion revenue shortfall this year.

However, Garn said Utahns should understand that the new offices and new furniture (including a moderate-size flat screen TV in each office) was originally approved years ago, when the award-winning $175 million reconstruction of the state Capitol was funded.

Most senators and some House members got new offices two years ago, when the Legislature moved out of temporary quarters on Capitol Hill back into the Capitol.

Now that the remodeling has been finished in the House and Senate buildings behind the Capitol, the other legislators have their own offices this session.

"I remember the days when a legislator had a few file drawers out in the hallway," said Garn. Now each legislator has his or her own office, with leaders and committee chairs having offices in the Capitol itself.

Legislators also got new laptop computers and BlackBerry cell phones this year — the money approved for those updates several years ago when the state was running revenue surpluses of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Lawmakers turned down an automatic pay raise this year, and after getting paychecks at their old salaries for the 45-day session, voted to cut their pay for the rest of 2009 by 10 percent. The Legislature itself also took a 3.5 percent cut in its budget, leaders said, along with other state agencies.