The Municipality of Anchorage has offered a $52,000 settlement to an employee who reported a hostile work environment and had been placed on administrative leave, documents provided to The Alaska Current show.
Andrea Nester, who worked at the Anchorage Health Department and testified about a toxic and misogynistic workplace last March before the Anchorage Assembly, was placed on paid administrative leave in July, where she remained through November.
At the time she was placed on leave, the Bronson administration had just settled one wrongful firing lawsuit, and was still battling it out with former municipal manager Amy Demboski, who attempted to settle with a letter before filing a wrongful firing lawsuit.
Nester told the Current she believed she had been placed on leave in retaliation for speaking out against discriminatory and unethical actions taken by her supervisors and for pushing back on contracts that she thought were not being properly monitored. As a non-represented employee, the municipality is required to hold an administrative hearing if requested by the employee before employment can be terminated. Nester said “they would lose the hearing” and not be able to fire her.
Nester was employed in the health department as a housing and homelessness program manager, handling homelessness response for the Bronson administration and reporting directly to Bronson’s homeless coordinator Alexis Johnson.
Nester said that she had six different supervisors during her two and a half-year tenure with the health department, including the disgraced former department director, Joe Gerace. She described a toxic work environment where expectations were unknown and always changing.
In early 2023, an initial look at Geraces tenure by the municipality’s audit department showed evidence of sloppy accounting, possible crony hires and a work environment that was hostile and unprofessional. Nester stated that the workplace remained hostile under other supervisors, and that none of her concerns about the management of millions of dollars in contracts and grants were ever addressed or investigated.
Nester provided the Current with pages of documents, including emails, recorded conversations, an Equal Rights Commission complaint she had filed, and the emailed settlement offer from the municipality, which she said she expected to result in a formal settlement soon. A chain of emails discussed the settlement for voluntary separation, reaching an agreement for $52,000 in November.
In December, Nester told the Current that she could not discuss her situation going forward because she was signing a non-disclosure agreement. When asked whether she accepted the settlement agreement from the municipality, Nester stated she could not comment.
The Alaska Current reached out to the municipality for comment and did not receive a response by the time of publishing.
