Binging on bonuses
Is Kris Mayes the best boss ever? … No empty threats … And the most important endorsement in Arizona.
Over the last year, economists and budget analysts have cautioned, in increasingly frantic tones, that the state budget was bloating beyond sustainability and massive cuts would be required to keep the government afloat.
That message apparently didn’t scare Attorney General Kris Mayes, who handed out huge raises and millions of dollars worth of bonuses to her staff as the state ran deep into red ink this spring.
A review of public records tallying raises and bonuses within the state’s top elected offices shows that Mayes, a Democrat who took office in 2023, gave staffers more than $11 million in bonuses in the last year. The average bonus for the nearly 1,000 employees who received them was nearly $12,000, though several employees received bonuses totaling more than $30,000 in the last year.1
And many of those bonuses were on top of ongoing raises.
Nearly 500 employees received an ongoing raise this year. While the average pay hike was a healthy 10% increase, some of those raises were well above 50%. One assistant AG won a $46,000 pay hike with no change in job title. The same employee also received $23,000 in bonuses, for example.
In total, Mayes has handed out close to $15 million in bonuses and raises in the last year.
Meanwhile, lawmakers had to slash $1.4 billion in spending from the current and upcoming years’ budgets, including by sweeping $75 million from an opioid settlement fund in the Attorney General’s Office, which the office is now suing over.
The Attorney General’s Office says the most recent round of bonuses were handed out in March and April, which was long after it became apparent the state would be facing cuts. Mayes’ spokesman Richie Taylor noted that Mayes has not been shy about her desire to pay her employees more.
“We knew we were going into a budget crunch. … And it’s important to retain those highly qualified employees so that they can do the work that is important to the people of Arizona,” Taylor said.
Because the Legislature has “refused to adequately fund public safety” in the Attorney General’s Office, bonuses have become a critical tool for keeping employees, Taylor said, adding the bonuses are funded through savings from vacancies and it’s still far cheaper than hiring and training new employees.
“We think they’re defensible,” Taylor said, especially given crisis levels of vacancy.
Former Attorney General Mark Brnovich handed out some huge bonuses on his way out of office, Taylor noted, providing records showing that in 2022, Brnovich’s office paid out $16 million in bonuses for employees, including an astounding $78,000 bonus for Brnovich’s chief deputy and chief of staff Joseph Kanefield.
Mayes’ latest round of bonuses came amid a state hiring freeze and just as the state was heading into massive budget cuts.
While performance and retention bonuses of 5% to 10% aren’t unusual in government, bonuses of $30,000 or more in a year are pretty much unheard of, per Andy Tobin, who has been a lawmaker, the speaker of the House, a corporation commissioner, and the director of a couple of different state departments, including the Department of Administration, which oversees state personnel.2
“I’ve been just about everywhere, my friend, but I’ve never seen this,” he told us.
Mayes’ office wasn’t the only one handing out raises and bonuses as the state headed toward a financial downturn.
But it was the biggest splurger — by far.
The Arizona Supreme Court came closest, especially for its size. It gave out roughly $2.2 million in bonuses to about 500 employees, though most of those were below $5,000 and the largest bonus was just $15,000 to the director of the court. It spent another $1.8 million on ongoing pay raises for employees.
In the Secretary of State’s Office, about 100 employees received bonuses, all of $1,000 or less. The office spent another $365,000 on raises for employees, the data shows.
Only 16 employees in the Governor’s Office got bonuses in the last year, ranging from $2,000 to about $7,000, for a total of about $80,000 paid in bonuses. The office awarded employees another $800,000 in pay raises.
In the Treasurer’s Office, nobody got a bonus. Only seven employees received raises last year, per the data.
Fighting for drug money: Attorney General Kris Mayes made good on her promise to sue if state lawmakers approved a budget allocating opioid settlement money to the state corrections department. She filed a lawsuit and won a temporary restraining order stopping the sweep, which was scheduled to happen today. Gov. Katie Hobbs’ office said Mayes is “flatly wrong” and the money would fund “vital opioid use disorder treatment for a population that is disproportionately impacted by the opioid epidemic,” in an emailed statement.
Director of Death Row: Mayes is also trying to strike Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell’s motion to the state supreme court to proceed with a warrant of execution for a prisoner on death row, per the Republic’s Jimmy Jenkins. Mayes argues death warrants are in her jurisdiction, not Maricopa County’s. In other legal wrangling, Hobbs is asking the Arizona Court of Appeals to reverse a lower court’s ruling she has to go through the Senate confirmation process to appoint her agency directors, per the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers.
Investigate them all: Pinal County Democrats are asking the IRS to investigate The Save Arizona Fund PAC over allegations it operates “primarily for the private benefit of Kari Lake,” the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. The PAC was formed after Lake’s 2022 election loss and calls itself a social welfare organization, but Pinal County Democrats Chair Lisa Sanor filed a complaint arguing Lake is using the group to fund her election-challenging lawsuits. Meanwhile, Democratic congressional hopeful Conor O’Callaghan was once named an unindicted coconspirator in a criminal case against the securities company he worked for, and although he was never charged with a crime, it “was a turbulent period in O'Callaghan's multidecade career in finance,” the Republic’s Laura Gersony writes in a dive into the episode.
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Loss and agony: Two days after Gabby Giffords was shot in the head at a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, she had an embryo implantation appointment scheduled as part of her ongoing in vitro fertilization journey with her husband, Sen. Mark Kelly, the couple wrote in an essay for People. Gifford’s injuries forced them to leave their dreams of having a child together behind, but the duo warns of ongoing threats to IVF through abortion-related restrictions and fetal personhood bills that would make the procedure illegal.
“With everything the shooting forced us to leave behind, we weren’t ready to let go of our dream of having a child together. But eventually, we had to. That loss was its own agony,” they wrote.
Putting a premium on premiums: Arizona and Florida have some of the highest rates of uninsured children in the country, but vastly different approaches to providing health care insurance for children, The Washinton Post’s Daniel Chang writes. Both states adopted bills to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program (or CHIP), but Arizona has yet to reinstate the monthly premiums it suspended during the pandemic, while Florida plans to raise premiums by 3% annually. The monthly premiums don’t offset much of the cost of running the health insurance program, and the federal government pays 75% of Arizona’s costs.
“Premiums are more about an ideological belief that families need to have skin in the game,” said Matt Jewett, director of health policy for the Children’s Action Alliance of Arizona, “rather than any practical means of paying money to support the program.”
Correction: In yesterday’s edition’s Other News section, we said Hobbs signed three big water bills. She did, but they weren’t the ones we referenced. Specifically, the governor vetoed SB1172, which would have encouraged the transition of agricultural land to urban, and HB2127, which would have weakened groundwater replenishment requirements, both of which we said she had signed.
Arizona Twitter personality, lawyer and dive bar drifter “Clue Heywood” is officially flying a sign for Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer in his yard.
That alone is mildly funny, but the real laugh here is the degree to which politicians want approval from an anonymous Arizonan on the hellscape formerly known as Twitter.
Former Gov. Doug Ducey chimed in congrating Clue for supporting a Republican.
Richer’s democratic opponent Tim Stringham offered to buy Clue a beer to get a chance to earn his vote.
And former AZGOP spokesman Zach Henry accused Clue of “interfering in our primary.”
Clarification: Before we ran this article, the Attorney General's Office told us all of those bonuses were handed out this spring, and that Kris Mayes hadn’t given out bonuses last year because former Attorney General Mark Brnovhich had given out two rounds of bonuses in 2022. After publication, the office said they were wrong. The $11 million in bonuses was two separate rounds of bonuses within the last 12 months but across two calendar years. This piece has been updated to reflect that.
The Department of Administration didn’t immediately answer our questions about if bonuses this size are even legal, though the AG’s Office assures us it’s fine.
“Meanwhile, lawmakers had to slash $1.4 billion in spending…”
No, no they didn’t. They CHOSE not to do anything about the bloated ESA voucher program or the Ducey tax cuts.
What are base salaries in the AGs office like in comparison to other states?
Look, I'm an attorney who has worked in non-profit law and government. I went to a Top Ten law school, won school, won awards, had a prestigious fellowship and have 15 years of experience. I'm probably giving up a good half-a-million or more a year to do what I do.
I love it and consider my work my rent for being on the planet, but I do deserve to be paid commensurate with other attorneys in national non-profits and at the federal government level. So do the people in the AGs office.