A board tasked with maintaining the Utah state Capitol Hill Complex voted Monday to relocate the state auditor’s office within the Capitol, prompting pushback from Republican State Auditor Tina Cannon.
The vote is the latest in a long-running dispute between top lawmakers and Cannon after the Legislature introduced a bill late in the 2025 legislative session that would have pushed her office out of the Capitol building. But Cannon said the issue is more than a squabble over real estate on Capitol Hill and that the efforts to move her office without her consent threaten the independence of her watchdog role.
“It’s not about the space,” she told KSL Tuesday. “The first, there’s historical significance. The second is the ability to move the auditor without cooperation or without input into the process violates the whole concept of an independent auditor, and that violation is the most important.”
The Capitol Preservation Board — which includes the lieutenant governor, several lawmakers, the state treasurer, attorney general and a state Supreme Court justice — voted Monday to relocate the state auditor’s office from its current suite on the same floor that houses offices for the governor and attorney general to the first floor of the Capitol building in a portion of space currently dedicated to the Visitor’s Center.
All members of the board who were present voted in favor of the relocation, which will also retain office space for Cannon’s staff in the nearby Senate Building on the Capitol campus.
While House and Senate leaders have offices in the main Capitol building, most lawmakers are housed in nearby buildings on Capitol Hill. Cannon’s current office will eventually be remodeled to allow more lawmakers to move into offices in the main building.
The board voted on the relocation in September, but Cannon alleged that the board did not follow Utah’s law requiring public notice of official public meetings. The board’s September agenda didn’t mention the auditor’s office and only referred to the discussion as “Visitor’s Center.”
In a lawsuit filed Friday against the board, Cannon asked a judge to void the vote, arguing that it was not listed with “reasonable specificity” as required by law.
Assistant Attorney General Paul Tonks on Monday acknowledged the questions about whether the earlier meeting met the requirements for open public meetings, and said the subsequent meeting and revote were recommended “out of the abundance of caution.” Cannon dropped her lawsuit later on Monday following the second vote.
“While we don’t agree with the vote that was taken, we must insist that it is done correctly and in the open and in the public,” she said.
But even after the second vote, Cannon still contends that the board didn’t follow a separate statute which directs state leaders to conclude an assessment of how office space in the Capitol is allocated and which transferred control of the auditor’s office to the board “until a substantially similar space in the state Capitol is assigned to the state auditor.”
Cannon said she has been denied requests to view the architectural renderings of her new space to determine whether the space is “substantially similar” and said she was not provided a copy of the space assessment. State Treasurer Marlo Oaks also said he was not shown a comprehensive assessment of the space.
“I was not provided a copy of a comprehensive space assessment; therefore, it was not shared with all executive officers, and I can only assume it was completed,” he wrote on social media Tuesday. “When I asked about the assessment, I was told it had been shared with the governor, speaker and (Senate) president, but the results were not shared with me or my staff.”
Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, disagreed with Cannon during Monday’s meeting, saying his “understanding is that requirement had been met.”
“The statute just simply says a study (and) does not require for people to sign off,” Tonks added. “Again, it is the board that has the authority as per space allocation, according to the statute.”
During the September meeting, when Cannon asked to be included “in the process of how you determine space usage” at the Capitol, Adams said he believed her staying in her current space would violate the statute passed by lawmakers.
“As I read the statute, the statute says that the office, when suitable space is found, will move,” he said. “Is there objection to following the law and following the statute? And that, I think, is a question, because what I’m hearing today is the auditor does not want to follow the statute and doesn’t want to follow the law, that she wants to remain in space that the statute says will be moved.”
Process concerns aside, Cannon said the public dispute threatens the independence of her office. She told KSL her office is in the middle of auditing the ongoing construction of the North Capitol Building, which will need to be redone by an outside contractor to avoid the results being tainted in the eyes of the public.
“Now they have damaged the independence of that audit because of that interference,” she said.
Cannon said she is not done pushing back and said she will “continue to look at what my options are and weigh what this means.”