The Money: What the Collier Center Costs Arizona Taxpayers

The two offers

Twenty-four dollars against thirty-seven

200 East Van Buren

Owned by Phoenix residents

$24.00

Per rentable square foot, per year. Full service. Operating expenses inside the rent. The entire build-out delivered by the landlord, at the landlord’s cost, with nothing billed back.

versus

Collier Center

Owned by a Sumitomo subsidiary

$37.00

Per square foot, the listed rate on CoStar as of July 13, 2026, captured by sworn declaration and filed as a court exhibit. Build-out terms unknown.

The difference is $13.00 per square foot, every year, for the life of the lease.

And Pivot discounted the square footage on top of the rate

The $24 was the rate. Separately, Pivot offered roughly 50,000 contiguous square feet while charging rent on only 40,000. Ten thousand square feet, free. That concession sits on top of the rate above, not inside it.

Source. Pivot quoted $24.00 per rentable square foot per year, plus $1.10 per square foot in CAM, on December 11–12, 2025. Declaration of Robert Inglhofer ¶ 9. The verified complaint describes Pivot’s all-in rate as approximately $24 per square foot, and the Collier Center rate as approximately $37. Verified Complaint ¶¶ 27–28. See the filings →

Step one

What the rent difference costs over five years

The ACA has not published the square footage of its Collier Center lease. So here is the arithmetic at each footprint that actually came up during this procurement, at $13.00 per square foot per year.

Rent difference only — no escalation, no other costs
Footprint	Where this number comes from	Per year	Over 5 years
35,000 sq ft	The size the ACA asked Pivot to reconfigure to on December 29, 2025, and the size of its old space at 100 N. 7th Avenue	$455,000	$2,275,000
40,000 sq ft	The footprint Pivot actually charged rent on	$520,000	$2,600,000
50,000 sq ft	The contiguous space Pivot was handing over	$650,000	$3,250,000

So rent alone, with no escalation and nothing else counted, runs $2.3 to $3.3 million. The verified complaint puts the total differential over the lease term at approximately $4 million or more.

Neither figure includes the item below, which may be larger than both.

Step two — the cost nobody can see

What is the Collier Center build-out costing taxpayers?

We do not know. Neither does any other member of the public. That is the point of this section.

Pivot’s offer included the entire build-out. Floors 8 and 9, finished to the ACA’s full eighteen-item space program — four executive offices, 24 standard offices, 80 workstations, hoteling seats, phone booths, an IT room, storage, meeting rooms, and a conference centre configurable to roughly 200 people. All of it at the landlord’s cost. No allowance, no reimbursement, no bill.

At the Collier Center, someone is paying for that work. The ACA has not said who, or how much. Office build-out in downtown Phoenix is not cheap, and a full turn-key fit-out to that specification runs well into three figures per square foot.

What the build-out would add, at 40,000 square feet
If the build-out costs	Total	Which would make the overall gap
$50 per sq ft	$2,000,000	roughly $4.6 million
$75 per sq ft	$3,000,000	roughly $5.6 million
$100 per sq ft	$4,000,000	roughly $6.6 million
$125 per sq ft	$5,000,000	roughly $7.6 million

These are illustrations, not findings. We are not asserting what the Collier Center build-out costs, because the ACA will not say. We are showing what the arithmetic does at ordinary rates, so that readers understand the size of the number the ACA is keeping to itself.

At $100 a square foot, the build-out alone would exceed the entire rent differential. One document — the lease — would settle it.

The total

Four to five million dollars, and that is the conservative reading

Put the pieces together.

$2.3 to $3.3 million in additional rent, on flat arithmetic with no escalation.
Approximately $4 million or more over the term, as pleaded in the verified complaint.
Ten thousand square feet Pivot was giving away free, which the ACA is now paying for.
An unpriced build-out that Pivot was absorbing entirely and that could run to several million on its own.

Four to five million dollars is the floor, not the ceiling. Every unknown in this transaction — escalation, operating expenses, tenant improvements, renewal terms — runs in the same direction, because Pivot’s offer had them all folded in at no extra charge and the Collier Center’s terms are undisclosed.

The ACA can replace this whole page with one document

Publish the lease. Every estimate here collapses into an exact figure the moment the ACA discloses the rate, the square footage and the tenant-improvement terms. Until then, a range built from public filings is the most precise answer anyone outside the agency can give.

A separate question

The legislature capped the ACA at 100 employees. The RFP asks for parking for 140.

Arizona law is explicit on this point.

“The authority may not have more than one hundred full-time employees, excluding any full-time employees that are funded with monies other than state monies.” A.R.S. § 41-1502(P)

Now read the ACA’s own Request for Proposal, in the Parking section:

“The proposed occupancy is approximately one hundred forty (140) full-time staff members.” ACA Request for Proposal, December 1, 2025

One hundred forty full-time staff, at an agency the legislature capped at one hundred. Pivot supplied the parking without argument — 140 spaces at no additional cost, plus fifteen reserved executive stalls. The parking was never the issue. The number is.

To be precise about what the statute says

The cap is not absolute. It excludes full-time employees funded with money from sources other than the state. An agency can therefore lawfully exceed 100 total heads if the extra positions are paid from elsewhere. A 140-person occupancy is not, by itself, proof of anything.

But no one outside the ACA can tell which it is. The agency has not published how many of those 140 are state-funded, how many are not, or how many are carried as contractors or co-employed staff rather than as employees at all.

Three questions, each answerable in a sentence:

How many of the 140 count against the cap in A.R.S. § 41-1502(P)?
How many are contractors, co-employed staff, or employees of an affiliated entity — and who pays them?
If roughly forty people sit in ACA offices, park in ACA spaces and do ACA work but are not ACA employees for headcount purposes, what is the arrangement?

We do not assert an answer. We do not have the payroll records, and the ACA will not produce them. We note only that a legislature which troubled itself to cap this particular agency at one hundred employees would want to know why its landlord was told to plan for a hundred and forty — and that taxpayers are funding rent, parking and a build-out sized for the larger number.

Why this is a legal problem, not just a bad deal

The Arizona Gift Clause

Article IX, Section 7 of the Arizona Constitution bars the State from making any donation or subsidy to any individual, association or corporation.

Arizona courts apply a two-part test. First, does the spending serve a public purpose? Leasing office space plainly does, and nobody disputes it. Second, does what the public gives far exceed what the public gets? Schires v. Carlat, 250 Ariz. 371 (2021); Turken v. Gordon, 223 Ariz. 342 (2010).

On that second question, courts count only direct, bargained-for consideration written into the contract itself. Indirect benefits do not count — not economic development, not job creation, not future tax revenue, not goodwill. Schires, 250 Ariz. at 377.

“Hard to compete with the value add – and brand – of Sumitomo.” ACA Board member Jack Selby, text message, June 3, 2026

That sentence is the Gift Clause problem said out loud. “Value add” and “brand” are not in the lease. Neither is a Hitachi investment initiative. Neither is demonstrating “good faith” to a prospective corporate partner. None of it is enforceable by the State, and none of it is consideration a court may count.

The same objection reaches the matrix line called “Space Consideration for Partners.” If the State pays a premium so that unnamed private parties can be housed, the benefit runs to those parties, not to the public, and the State gets nothing enforceable in return. More on that criterion →

Strip out what cannot be counted, and the comparison is stark. Millions of additional public dollars, for direct contractual consideration the ACA has never shown to be worth more than what it was offered for less.

This is the theory pleaded in Count III of the verified complaint. It is an allegation in pending litigation, not a finding. The ACA denies wrongdoing.

The point

Who actually pays for this

The Arizona Commerce Authority is not a private company spending its own money.

It is a public instrumentality of the State of Arizona, established under A.R.S. § 41-1502. It is funded with public dollars. Its board is subject to the Open Meeting Law. Its purchasing is governed by a procurement policy adopted under A.R.S. § 41-2501.

Its job is to grow, diversify, attract, expand and retain business in Arizona. It exists to help Arizona companies. Every extra dollar of rent is a dollar that does not go to that mission — and here it is a dollar taken from Arizona taxpayers and paid to a subsidiary of a foreign trading conglomerate, for a building the agency’s own scorecard rated worse on price than the local alternative it turned down.

The question the ACA has never answered

What did Arizona taxpayers get, in writing, in the lease, that was worth millions more than the offer on the table? Not goodwill. Not brand. Not a hoped-for investment announcement. What is in the lease?

See how the scoring was done And how the location was scored