April 29, 2018

As Attorney General of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt Was a Big Spender in a Small State

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/12/scott-pruitt-spending-oklahoma-attorney-general/
"With fewer than 4 million people living in Oklahoma, Pruitt’s 2014 expenditures amounted to more than $14 per state resident. The 2014 budget for the Oklahoma attorney general’s office, which totaled $55.7 million, was more than double the $23.6 million spent that year by the attorney general of Arkansas, a neighboring state with a similar population. (In 2015, Pruitt’s office spent a total of $48.6 million.) Pruitt’s administrative costs for 2014 came in more than $10 million over the budgeted amount for administrative expenses that year and $16 million over what his office spent in the same category the following year. The Intercept contacted the attorney general’s office and the Office of Management and Enterprise Services, neither of which could clarify exactly what fell under the category of administrative expenses. “I do not know if we drill down to that level of detail in the budget system,” said Shelley Zumwalt, a public affairs director. A small part of the increased spending may be due to higher rents. Pruitt moved the Tulsa branch of the attorney general’s offices from a less expensive office building on the outskirts of the city into the Bank of America Tower downtown. The new office was more than twice the size of the old one and more expensive per-square-foot, so annual rental expenses quadrupled from $34,950 to $142,408, according to a 2014 lease. And while much of the rest of Oklahoma’s state government was growing smaller, Pruitt, an advocate of small government, added 58 staff members to his own agency, according to the Associated Press. By December 2016, the state attorney general’s office had 207 employees, up from 149 in 2011, when he assumed the position. Spending on personnel shot up from about $14 million to $19 million between 2008 and 2015, according to the audits. Pruitt also upgraded the office’s vehicles."