As expected, the Anchorage Assembly successfully voted to override the vetoes far-right Mayor Dave Bronson made to the city’s operating budget at its Tuesday meeting, with several members arguing the vetoes demonstrated the mayor’s distinct lack of understanding of the city’s budget process.
The vote reverses millions of dollars in proposed vetoes, restoring the budget to the version passed by the Anchorage Assembly in late November.
Some of the headline vetoes by Bronson targeted funding for the city’s Mobile Crisis Team and Mobile Intervention Team — two programs to respond to people going through mental health crises — several affordable housing initiatives and hundreds of unfilled city jobs that the Bronson administration sought to leave empty.
The vote to override by the Anchorage Assembly was essentially a foregone conclusion, which has been the case with many vetoes under the Bronson administration. However, it still made for some heated exchanges.
Bronson was particularly prickly over how his vetoes of the funding for the Fire Department’s Mobile Crisis Team and the Police Department’s Mobile Intervention Team have been received. He argued that this veto of the budget wouldn’t kill the programs because the funding source would revert to alcohol taxes, which he said should remain the funding source because he believes alcohol drives homelessness.
“This is a bait-and-switch, that’s what this is,” he said. “I’ve supported MCT and MIT — I always have. It’s the funding source that got struck, not vetoed.”
Several assembly members argued that’s not how the vetoes work and that there’s effectively no difference between cutting a program and cutting its funding. Cutting the budget for a program, they said, eliminates the program because there’s no mechanism for the funding source to revert to alcohol taxes automatically.
“Boy, there’s so much to unpack there,” Assembly Chair Christopher Constant said after Bronson’s statement. “It’s like the mayor thinks he knows, but he demonstrates over and over he doesn’t. He says, ‘It wasn’t a veto; I just vetoed the funding source.’ When you veto the funding source, you veto the thing itself. … The reality is that the money for the program is gone. You can’t just revert to money that doesn’t exist. And so once again, the mayor is demonstrating a lack of understanding of how the budget process works.”
Bronson tried to interject, arguing that he didn’t veto the funding; he struck the funding.
Constant also countered Bronson’s accusations that the Assembly was switching the funding source from alcohol taxes to property taxes, noting that the new source was income earned through Medicaid billing. Other members pointed out that the intention behind the change was to ensure that the program had dependable and stable funding well into the future.
“He just doesn’t quite get it,” Constant said.
Several assembly members also defended the overall response programs, arguing that they’re not just homelessness response teams as Bronson had suggested. Assembly members Anna Brawley and Meg Zalatel both pointed out that housed people can rely on the services because they’re for anyone experiencing a mental health crisis and are intended to be a safer response than the police.
“This state, for too long, has made promises about behavioral health and whittled it away or never fully funded it. This body has made a commitment to fully fund and be committed to it,” Zalatel said. “It’s so much more. It’s about where our priorities lie and how we look out for our fellow residents in their most vulnerable moments when they need a friendly face to show up. The right response at the right time. It saves lives and, ultimately, it saves taxpayers money.”
Some other key vetoes reversed on Tuesday night include more than $500,000 for affordable housing development initiatives, ten additional positions for the Anchorage Fire Department and more than $2.6 million in funding for currently vacant staff positions.
While Bronson had framed the cuts as upholding his promise to keep taxes low, members pointed out that the difference for the tax bill was minimal while everyone would feel the impact of undercutting city services.
“It is easy to frame a small reduction in property taxes as a win, but in the situation, we are in right now, the benefit really is nominal, and the cost of shortchanging public services is real for everybody,” Brawley said. “For a savings of less than $20 per $100,000 of assessed value, we would be cutting the budgets of key departments, putting critical services like the MCT in limbo and stalling out critical work on housing. Residents have asked us not to keep making cuts but to make sure the government works.”
The Anchorage Assembly’s vote on the veto override was 8-2, with members Constant, Zalatel and Brawley being joined by members George Martinez, Felix Rivera, Karen Bronga, Zac Johnson and Daniel Volland voting in support. Members Kevin Cross and Randy Sulte, the assembly’s two most conservative members, voted against overriding the budget. Members Scott Myers and Kameron Perez-Verdia were not present and didn’t vote.
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.
