When a new Secretary of State (aDemocrat in a Koch-owned State) was elected in November 2018 in Arizona, she discovered that her predecessor had signed a long-term contract with a private company to store public records.

The state’s storage facility sat empty while the private company collects millions.

One former state official described the warehouses as something out of “Indiana Jones,” with stack after stack of boxes.

A few years ago, the hulking facility just down the street from the Arizona Capitol was filled with government records, from the files of prison inmates to old meeting minutes.

Today, its three warehouses sit mostly empty.

Instead of storing records here, the state agreed in 2017 to ship each box to the warehouses of a storage and information management company, Iron Mountain.

Then-Secretary of State Michele Reagan, a Republican, touted the deal in a news release as saving money.

But her Democratic successor, Katie Hobbs, says the financial implications of the decision have been staggering. And the state appears stuck with the deal for years under a contract awarded without competition.

Hobbs published a proposed budget Thursday that calls for an infusion of funds into her office for 2020, the coming election year. She pointed to the Iron Mountain contract as a major drain on the office’s finances, describing the deal as part of what she called “severe mismanagement and irresponsible oversight of public resources” under Reagan’s administration.

Under the contract with Boston-based Iron Mountain, the price for each box is only going up. The Secretary of State’s Office says the costs of storing government records has nearly doubled from the year before the contract took effect.

At the same time, the state is paying to maintain its mostly vacant complex of warehouses, which remain government property.

The contract runs for 10 years.

In all, the records management program will cost the Secretary of State’s Office about $1.6 million this fiscal year, even considering that the state slashed the number of staff positions in records management from 11 to three after initially implementing the contract.

Meanwhile, the fees from other government agencies are expected to total $900,000.

In addition, the state pays $400,000 a year for its own empty storage facilities.

Under the contract, the price for storing each carton of documents will increase annually starting next year.

Not only do the fee schedules in the contract call for higher prices year after year, Iron Mountain could add a surcharge on the cost of each trip it makes to pick up government records if fuel prices rise over a certain level. And if the state wants to transfer the records to another company or to its own warehouses for storage, the government will have to pay for the move, too.

Do the math. The state is paying about $3 million a year to store its records. That cost is expected to rise in each year of a ten-year contract. The state saves by cutting the jobs of eight employees, who were probably making less than $100,000 a year, probably $60,000 a year, filing records.

In Arizona, this is a public-private partnership.

Guess who benefits?