The Anchorage Assembly approved the city’s operating budget for 2024, reversing millions of dollars in hollow cuts proposed by conservative Mayor Dave Bronson that would have left many city departments intentionally understaffed.
Assembly leadership said the changes approved on Tuesday night represented a meaningful investment in Anchorage and an intent to see the city’s departments return to being fully staffed. The budget was approved on a 9-2 vote with Eagle River’s two assemblymembers, Kevin Cross and Scott Myers, the lone opposition to the spending plan.
The state of the city’s workforce has been a particularly major issue under the tenure of Mayor Bronson, who has seen an exodus of long-time city employees amid allegations that he’s fostered a hostile work environment. Bronson has also frequently clashed with the Anchorage Assembly while trying to appoint hard-right political allies to lead city departments.
His proposed budget was rolled out with what he claimed were significant savings achieved by simply not funding many dozens of positions throughout city government that are currently vacant. The positions wouldn’t have been deleted, and because of how the city’s tax cap works, the city would have faced an uphill challenge to fund them in future years.
That didn’t sit well with a veto-proof majority of the Anchorage Assembly, many of whom have been critical of the mayor’s increasing reliance on farming out key city functions to private contractors.
“We’re paying for it one way or another. We are paying private firms that the municipal workforce has otherwise traditionally done,” said Assembly member Meg Zalatel, who co-chaired the budget, of an omnibus amendment that reversed the cut and added other labor-related spending back into the budget. “We have really centered the municipal workforce front and center in this budget. It’s because we not only appreciate the hard work but it’s because we know the city doesn’t run without it. Hard stop. Without a well-staffed municipal workforce, our city suffers.”
Zalatel said the budget still lands under the tax cap, leaving the city room to adjust the budget at the start of the next year to cover any other unforeseen costs. The Anchorage Assembly typically passes another supplemental budget document in the spring, covering unexpected costs and directing unspent money to new purposes.
Assemblymember Anna Brawley, who co-chaired the budget with Zalatel, said that the budget process shouldn’t be solely focused on cuts that will ultimately be felt by residents. Instead, she said it’s on the city to ensure that public dollars are spent wisely.
“It is clear that true fiscal responsibility does not necessarily mean cuts to core services because we end up paying more in other ways by emergency services and costs to residents and businesses,” she said, adding, “Instead, we will keep focusing upstream on prevention, routine maintenance and retaining our great workforce as the best way to manage our public dollars.”
Some of the other notable additions to the budget include $750,000 to boost pay for snowplow operators, $500,000 for affordable housing development (which can go in many different directions depending on the need), an additional $2 million for the city’s safety patrol and a more stable, permanent funding source for the Anchorage Fire Department’s mobile crisis team. While they ultimately voted against the budget, Cross and Myers saw a pair of their amendments approved that would add money for the senior center and parks in their assembly district covering Eagle River.
The Assembly also approved $2.4 million in additional spending to fund the city’s emergency winter shelters through next April.
For all the battles between the Bronson administration and the Anchorage Assembly, there were few sparks on Tuesday night, with the mayor largely agreeing to many of the spending proposals. He will have a week to deliver vetoes. However, it would largely be for show, given that everything passed with a veto-proof majority.
The one area of controversy was a $2 million proposal to set up a designated area for allowed camping in the city. It was pitched by its backers, Assemblymembers Felix Rivera, Karen Bronga and Daniel Volland, to get ahead of the unhoused residents camping on public lands next spring. The idea faced stiff pushback from other members as well as the Bronson administration, which led to an extended break during the deliberations.
Assemblymember Kameron Perez-Verdia said it’s not the assembly’s job to come up with programs on its own but the job of the Bronson administration, even though the administration has appeared either unable or unwilling to make meaningful progress: “We’re dealing with an administration that has not been doing the work.”
Rivera ultimately withdrew the proposal and substituted it with another plan, which ultimately failed on a 5-5 vote, with several members saying they needed more information before deciding.
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.
