Earlier this month, far-right Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson released a budget proposal with big claims about key investments — particularly in areas that have plagued the administration, like snow plowing — with a bottom line that was not only smaller but seeks to lower taxes.
But, as the Anchorage Assembly’s first work session on the budget proved, there’s a wide difference between talk and reality of what’s in the budget. Members spent the nearly five-hour session on Friday digging through each city department, pointing out flaws they say will not only undermine city services in the next year but well into the future.
One of the biggest issues that runs through nearly every department of city government can be found in budget lines claiming savings that range from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars due to “labor savings due to vacancies.”
Bronson’s term of office has included several serious allegations about ethical failures, hostile workplaces and political patronage. The city has hemorrhaged employees in just about every department, with the scope and scale of those vacancies sometimes amounting to more than half of a department’s positions. Now, the Bronson administration is suggesting most of those vacant positions, including director positions, will stay unfilled well into next year even though they remain on the books and even though the administration will at least go through the motions of trying to fill them.
That was highlighted in the Department of Health budget, where more than a third of all positions are unfilled, and the mayor expects to “save” $345,225 in leaving positions open. City Manager Kent Kohlhase said they’ll try to fill those positions but conceded they don’t expect to be successful.
“The reality is we know we won’t fill the 21 vacant positions in the Health Department in 2024,” Kohlhase said. “It’s just not going to happen. We will strive to fill the positions.”
None of that sat well with members of the Anchorage Assembly, who noted that it’s not their intention to leave gaping holes throughout city government that undermine the delivery of just about every city service, from parks to transportation to health and homelessness services.
Assembly Chair Christopher Constant made that point in a follow-up question to the acting director of the Health Department, Kimberly Rash, asking whether the department was “delivering services at the level they should be delivered.”
“That’s a great question,” Rash said. “No, because we don’t have the staffing to deliver all services. Do I believe that we are delivering the best services we can with the staff we have? Yes.”
Constant said it highlighted a key point with the staffing woes under the Bronson administration: Key services that the city is supposed to be providing are being routinely undermined, either delivered with far longer wait times or not delivered at all, by the failure to keep employees. He pointed to the city’s closure of intakes at the animal shelter and how “animals were suddenly being abandoned in the streets” because of it.
While Kohlhase spoke broadly about the challenges in finding workers, including the political uncertainty inherent in positions where a new mayor of any political stripe may make a change, Assembly member George Martinez said he believed the problems went far deeper than that, making a nod toward the embattled administration and its litany of damaging headlines.
“It’s hard to recruit when the brand of the municipality has been challenged,” he said, later adding, “So, we’re betting on not succeeding. […] We’re betting against ourselves.”
In other areas of city government plagued by vacancies, the Bronson administration has turned to outside contractors to fulfill services, sometimes at far higher costs than an employee. Assembly members also noted several of those contracts weren’t included in the mayor’s budget.
There were also several times in the hearing where the Bronson administration seemed out of step with its directors, like when Library Director Virginia McClure told the Assembly that she was not only actively recruiting but planned to fill the six positions that the budget envisioned keeping vacant for a “savings” of about $360,000.
Kohlhase leaped in to suggest that they’d cut some $360,000 from elsewhere in the library budget, to which Assembly member Meg Zalatel interjected to say she would oppose all cuts to the library.
The high vacancies in city government won’t only affect the delivery of services in the near term—resulting in longer waits and stretches where services aren’t available—but will also continue to affect how city government operates in the long term. That’s because the result of cutting funding for the unfilled positions means the city will collect less tax revenue, which has the effect of ratcheting down the tax cap for future years.
So, when positions eventually are filled, there won’t be the money to pay for them. Assembly member Zac Johnson said it was troubling that the administration was banking on hollow cuts rather than proposing meaningful changes to the structure of government.
“It feels like, potentially, we’re setting ourselves up for failure in the long-term, right? We’re not making fundamental structural changes that will actually reduce our costs. We’re just reducing the amount of funding will have available in order to meet this one-time goal,” he said. “If we get into this position next year, hopefully, we are fully staffed, but we won’t have the revenue to cover those costs, then we’ll have to have the difficult conversation about what actual changes we make, structurally. It feels like we’re just kicking the can down the road. It’s disconcerting what it means for a year from now.”
Other areas of the budget had less serious long-term concerns but raised questions about how honest the Bronson administration was being with the public. A tentpole piece of the Bronson budget is a claimed $1.5 million increase in plowing a year after the city was badly hobbled by heavy snowstorms and an anemic plowing effort by the city.
But, as several assembly members pointed out, that $1.5 million came on top of a proposed $1 million cut to plowing by the mayor of an increased appropriation made by the Assembly. The net impact of the funding, they noted, was $500,000 in additional money for plowing, not the $1.5 million claimed by Bronson.
“It just gets back to this conversation of what’s being said via press release and PR and what’s actually in the budget,” Constant said.
The Anchorage Assembly’s next work session on the budget is scheduled for Oct. 27. Public hearings are scheduled at the Assembly’s regular meetings on Oct. 24 and Nov. 7, with a final vote expected on Nov. 21.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
