Tina Cannon, the first woman elected as Utah’s state auditor, said Senate President Stuart Adams is moving — again — to evict her from her office in the Utah Capitol building.
“With everything going on in Utah today, the Senate President decided MY Capitol office space was the house cleaning Utah needed,” Cannon wrote on social media Monday afternoon. “WOW! The Office of the Utah State Auditor in the Capitol rotunda made someone very uncomfortable.”
Cannon, in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune on Monday afternoon, said she can do her job of auditing and oversight from anywhere, but the move to kick her out of her Capitol office alongside other statewide elected officials disrespects the checks and balances in Utah’s government.
“You don’t have to like me, you don’t have to agree with me,” Cannon said, “but you should offer respect to the office I hold.”
Cannon’s post follows a meeting of the Capitol Preservation Board — which Adams is a member of — on Monday.
While an agenda of the meeting, published Friday, did not explicitly indicate the board would consider relocating the auditor’s office, Cannon said the board did discuss moving her office. That item is marked “Visitor Center” on the agenda.
Under Utah’s Open and Public Meetings Act, an agenda “shall provide reasonable specificity to notify the public as to the topics to be considered at the meeting.”
“All we’ve asked is that these types of things happen in the sunshine, not in the dark, where nobody even knows what they did or when they were going to do it,” Cannon said during the interview.
Following the board’s vote, her office is slated to be moved to the current visitor space on the first floor of the Capitol, near its east entrance. Other executive branch elected officials have spaces on the second floor, positioned around the rotunda.
Of the board members present, Utah Treasurer Marlo Oaks was the sole dissenting vote.
Spokespeople for the Senate president did not respond to an email or a text message requesting comment on Cannon’s allegations or whether Adams was available for an interview.
Under a law passed in 2024, the auditor’s office was scheduled to be moved to a “substantially similar space,” and her current suite would be given to the Legislature.
“What I’m hearing today is the auditor does not want to follow the statute and does not want to follow the law — she wants to remain in space that the statute says will be moved,” Adams said during Monday’s meeting.
Expressing frustration that she was not consulted ahead of a proposal as to where her office should be moved, Cannon criticized the board’s process, saying, “It is not the transparency that was supposed to be depicted by the rotunda, and bringing in the light and the sunshine into Utah’s government.”
Cannon’s office is currently auditing the Capitol Preservation Board for its spending on a new building in the Capitol complex, which will house the Museum of Utah.
She worries pushing her from the Capitol will give lawmakers a reason to label an unfavorable audit as retaliation.
Both Adams and Capitol Preservation Board Executive Director Dana Jones said during the meeting that they were not aware that Cannon’s office was auditing its construction expenditures.
“We review the financial transactions of every executive branch,” Cannon responded. “So it is relevant. If you did not know we were looking at the cost, you should be aware that we are looking at the cost.”
In searching for a reason that Adams would again attempt an eviction, the auditor also pointed to her request that Gov. Spencer Cox veto a Senate bill earlier this year.
The legislation, SB37, would have diverted Utahns’ property taxes away from public schools and into the state’s general fund. Critics called it “money laundering.”
“The audits will go forward,” Cannon said, “and they will still be independent, and they will still point out waste, fraud and abuse where it is appropriate to point that out. And unfortunately, that is very common.”
She added, “I can do my job from anywhere, and I will continue to do my job from anywhere that it is.”
It isn’t the first time Adams has moved to evict Cannon from her Capitol office. On the last night of this year’s legislative session, Adams abandoned an earlier effort to boot the auditor from her office.
That came after Cannon publicly protested the attempt and held a news conference with supporters outside Senate chambers. Cannon accused the Senate president of “bullying” her out of the space.
“This is over office space and the rhetoric over it, I think, has been totally inappropriate, and I’m very disappointed in the auditor, I’ll tell you that much,” Adams told reporters in March.
At the time, Cannon also said she was not able to fight against the plan to move her because legislative leaders were holding up a $1.5 million budget request for her staff’s salaries, which left her “feeling held hostage, to not be able to say what I knew was happening.”
The Legislature ultimately agreed to fund a third of that amount.
The Utah Constitution tasks the auditor with scrutinizing the use of public funds in the state. Lawmakers in March approved a $30 billion budget.
Adams has previously indicated the space would be used as offices for more junior senators, who currently have offices in a building — referred to as the “Senate Building” — to the northeast of the historic Capitol.