Citing an “ever-shifting sea of bureaucracy” and a desire to help people more directly, Anchorage Assembly Member Kevin Cross announced he will end his term early and resign ahead of the April 2024 election.
Cross is one of the Anchorage Assembly’s few conservatives and represents Chugiak, Eagle River and Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson. He was first elected in 2022 to a three-year term, which would have put him up for election in 2025. The timing of his announcement allowed the Anchorage Assembly on Tuesday night to schedule the seat for the April 2024 ballot, meaning the remaining term will be filled via election rather than appointment.
Cross made the comments shortly after the Anchorage Assembly voted to extend the meeting to midnight amid ongoing debates over the city’s zoning policies. He opened by retelling a story about building an accessibility ramp for a woman in East Anchorage, saying he had “never felt so purposed in my whole existence.”
He said his time on the Assembly has come at the expense of working on those kinds of projects.
“What we do here on the Assembly is of great importance. Very few people realize the amount of work we do, particularly our staff and support,” he said. “My experience has been mostly hours and hours of code-reading, legal opinions, department comments, community emails, answering calls, deciphering graphs and making sense of flow charts to correct an ever-shifting sea of bureaucracy. Important as these actions are, this is not why God put me on Earth.”
Cross said he had been weighing the decision for several months, ultimately deciding to leave the Anchorage Assembly to spend more time with family and helping others more directly through volunteer construction projects, noting that he has “about 20 summers left in my life.”
“I will be going back to serving with my heart and hands at a personal level. I call it DeWalt therapy,” he said. “I will be reinvesting more time into my family and into the lives of those around me through humble service, free from politics. My heart truly believes there’s no amount of money, no program and no Assembly resolution that will ever replace the compassion of a human hand, and I want to be the set of hands that do that.”
In his time on the Anchorage Assembly, Cross has been one of the few allies of Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson and voted earlier this month to uphold the mayor’s vetoes to the city budget.
Despite their political differences, the other members of the Assembly said they were sad to see him go and would begrudgingly accept his resignation and schedule the seat to be placed on the April 2024 ballot.
Several members agreed that serving on the Anchorage Assembly is a demanding job, with assembly member Anna Brawley commenting that it should prompt some consideration of how to make the job more open and accessible.
“How do we make it possible for more people — not just the policy nerds like me and lawyers and those folks who that’s been part of our job,” she said. “How do we make people successful in this position so we truly have diverse representation in our community?”
The candidate filing for the April 2024 election will open on Jan. 14, 2024, and will run through Jan. 26, 2024. More information on filing and the Anchorage elections can be found on the municipal clerk’s website.
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.
