In the mayoral run-off, Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson is leaning into claims that the mass tent shelter he proposed will solve everything from domestic violence and substance misuse to pedestrian deaths, and that the Assembly and his opponent, former Assembly Chair Suzanne Lafrance, are “woke.”
After three years of incompetence, scandal and controversy, Bronson is avoiding his battered record and campaigning largely by pitting himself against the Assembly, who he claims are “radical,” “woke” and “followers” of LaFrance, while also making the conflicting claim that she would “rubber-stamp every radical policy” they run across her desk.
“Without Mayor Bronson, our ultra woke assembly will have a rubber stamp at city hall,” one ad says.
The term “woke” found its way into the debates at a Chamber of Commerce debate, where Bronson stated that the difference between him and LaFrance is that he is normal, while Suzanne is “woke.” He has tried and failed to define it in subsequent debates, stating during an Alaska Public Media debate that woke is “kind of like the supreme court when it talks about obscenities, I don’t know what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it,” and evoking anti-semitism and men in women’s sports during an Alaska’s News Source debate.
“When I see Men in tutus gyrating in front of little boys in a public school, I think woke,” Bronson said.
“He’s trying to distract from the real issues, the fact that you know, the snowplowing didn’t get done for two years, that we’ve got a staffing crisis at APD — we are down over 50 sworn officers — and the books haven’t been closed now for two years, the financial audits aren’t done, we’ve not made progress on homelessness. I think this is a distraction,” LaFrance responded. “It’s intended to make people afraid, and to scare them.”
Other Bronson campaign ads rely heavily on the specter of “one-party rule” and say that only Bronson can “keep the Assembly in check.”
Bronson has most recently criticized the Assembly by politicizing a recent budget calculation error affecting about .01% of the budget. The error came about after a process of first quarter budget revisions that saw amendments to the budget from both the Mayor’s office and the Assembly. Although the error was quickly fixed, Bronson weaponized it as campaign fodder. While he stated in a press release that the issue was due to an “oversight” and a “calculation error,” he claims in a recent editorial in the Anchorage Daily News that the “Assembly passed a budget that illegally blew through the city’s longtime tax cap,” and that the Assembly disregarded the law. He continues by calling it a “preview of what’s to come” if LaFrance is elected.
After the budget matter became political, Bronson’s fifth Office of Management and Budget Director, Sharon Lechner, who was not employed by the municipality when the original budget was prepared, gave Bronson a resignation letter.
Currently the Bronson administration has not closed the books on the 2022 fiscal year, limiting the amount of information available on the municipality’s finances or even how much money it has available, complicating the budgeting process and threatening to cost the city millions of state and federal grant funding.
In addition to campaign ads and editorials, Bronson has brought public resources behind his attacks on the Assembly. After sending out only one press release in March, Bronson sent out nine in April, with five of those directly attacking the Assembly. The last time this many press releases went out from the mayor’s office was in November, when Bronson put out 11 press releases, mostly around issues related to the heavy snowfall.
During a recent debate put on by Alaska’s News Source, debate moderator Rebecca Palsha asked Bronson about the current acrimony with the Assembly and how that would affect the working relationship going forward.
“Now we are in a campaign and we’ve got to speak the truth because there is so much on the line … Hopefully this campaign will be over in a few weeks and we can kind of get back to normal,” Bronson stated “What I oppose is bad ideas, and for me to stand by and say nothing when they have half a million dollar toilets — someone’s gotta say something.”
Bronson has accused LaFrance throughout the campaign of supporting an unpopular public toilet bond proposal that the Assembly voted to place on the ballot six months after LaFrance was no longer on the Assembly — a proposal she was not involved in.
Also thematic to Bronson’s press releases and campaign is his proposal for a 500-bed mass shelter at Elmore and Tudor, which he recently tried to revive through municipality’s current shelter operator, Henning Inc.
The mass shelter project previously failed to move forward after the cost of the project ballooned and the Bronson administration started work on the project without the required Assembly approval, leading to a $2.4 million taxpayer funded settlement. Bronson previously agreed to reduce the size of the shelter to 150 beds in order to gain support for it, but he continued to plan for a larger capacity shelter and ordered a Sprung Structure that at 29,000 square feet, was about 5,000 square feet larger than his compromise proposal had shown.
One recent campaign ad stated that his proposed mass shelter “would serve the entire homeless population” and that he “secured an investor willing to construct this facility and an operator willing to provide services to manage it … but the Assembly rejected this remarkable opportunity.”
Henning Inc. recently asked the municipality to pay to bring up the tent so that they could begin seeking funds from grants, private donors or investors to construct it. During a meeting to discuss their plan, they indicated that they did not have any funding lined up, did not know how much it would cost, and did not know how they would pay for operations. They also said that they planned for the building to be able to “scale up to 500” people, a large number that has been strongly opposed by the community because of problems created by such large shelters in the past at both Brother Francis and the Sullivan Arena.
During debates, Bronson claimed that shelter would not only solve homelessness, but it would provide treatment and solve issues of domestic violence and pedestrian deaths.
“A lot of the violence against women is in the homeless community,” Bronson told Alaska Public Media debate moderator Tom Hewitt when asked how he would address domestic violence “It’s tragic and we certainly need to deal with it, however if we can get these people, especially the women into shelter, they can be supervised,”
In response to another question he also claimed that pedestrian deaths happen largely within the homeless community.
Homelessness has steadily grown worse over the past three years of Bronson’s tenure, which has seen record numbers of outdoor deaths and large encampments growing in Anchorage’s trails and parks, including encampments of hundreds of people at Cuddy Park, Centennial Campground and Third and Ingra. Drug use, police calls and crime has proliferated around these encampments, including a shooting at Centennial park that left a police officer injured.
Despite his dismal record on homelessness, Bronson’s campaign ads claim that voting for him is “voting for an actual homelessness solution.”
While Bronson continues to doggedly pursue a mass shelter, allowing homelessness to grow worse amid lack of support for his proposal, LaFrance has different ideas around homelessness:
“I do not support 1000 person shelters in East Anchorage, or anywhere in the community, so we are looking at smaller shelters, we are looking at places where people can connect with resources and supports, whether that’s treatment, and get into housing because we know that’s what works,” LaFrance stated during a Alaska News Source debate.
