With little chance of his vetoes standing, far-right Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson took the axe to the budget passed by a veto-proof majority of the Anchorage Assembly a week before.
The largely symbolic vetoes would eliminate all funding for the city’s Mobile Crisis Team — a unit in the Anchorage Fire Department that responds to people going through mental health crises — and several affordable housing initiatives proposed by the Anchorage Assembly. If let stand, Bronson would also eliminate more than $2.6 million in funding for hundreds of positions throughout city government, leaving them intentionally vacant in the next year.
Assembly leadership has already indicated an intention to override the vetoes. They’ve been deeply critical of the Bronson administration’s apparent disinterest in filling hundreds of vacancies throughout the city government and reliance on expensive contracts with private companies. A recent report showed that of the city’s more than 2,000 positions, 579 were vacant as of mid-August.
“The recent debacles with snow removal and emergency shelter have proven that the Municipality is starved of resources,” said Anchorage Assembly Chair Christopher Constant in a prepared statement on the vetoes. “The people of Anchorage demand better and we owe it to them to ensure delivery of vital services. Mayor Bronson’s vetoes cut positions across ten departments, and we cannot afford to continue to underfund the basics if we want to see our roads plowed and our citizens kept safe.”
Bronson’s veto to the Anchorage Fire Department’s Mobile Crisis Team, as well as the Anchorage Police Department’s Mobile Intervention Team, headlined the Anchorage Assembly’s response to the vetoes. In approving the budget, the Assembly changed the funding mechanism for the programs, with the thinking being that it’d provide more stable and certain funding.
Bronson’s veto document cites misgivings about that change, and at a news conference on Wednesday the mayor said that the program will revert back to being funded with alcohol taxes if the veto stands.
Assembly member Anna Brawley, who co-chaired the budget process for the Assembly, told The Alaska Current that that veto was particularly frustrating. She said there were other ways for the mayor to go about raising those concerns without leaving the program in the cold with no clear alternative.
“There’s no indication of how we’re supposed to fund it now. If it’s vetoed, then it doesn’t exist,” she said. “It’s on the assembly to fix it. If your goal is to object to us using that money in the general fund, then this wasn’t the way to do that.”
She noted, though, that the budget and a vast majority of the amendments passed with a veto-proof majority of the assembly. That includes votes approving about $1 million for various affordable housing initiatives, which Bronson vetoed. In one veto line, he claimed $150,000 for the Assembly’s Housing Initiative ran contrary to the goal of the city’s alcohol tax to prevent and reduce the city’s homelessness crisis.
The Assembly is expected to take up budget vetoes at the next regular meeting on Dec. 5.
The vetoes
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.