Anchorage’s new administration officer cites staffing shortages as major challenge to city services

Alaska’s largest city is facing staffing shortfalls across many departments.

That’s one of the key takeaways from a transition report put together by the outgoing administration of Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, which turned over the keys to City Hall to Mayor Suzanne LaFrance at the beginning of July.

That transition report was a “candid and sobering look” at the state of the city, says LaFrance’s chief administrative officer, Bill Falsey.

Falsey was city manager under the Berkowitz administration and says many of the challenges the city faces are not new.

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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Bill Falsey: I think what is different now is that it feels like the magnitude has grown significantly, and that the pervasiveness has also grown. So it’s gone sideways and wider and also larger in magnitude. And it’s affecting sort of all corners of the municipality. As I have tried to quantify these vacancies, you find them in the police department, you find them in Maintenance and Operations, which you can think of as the street maintenance folks who’re going to be removing the snow this winter, you find them in the utilities — Anchorage Water and Wastewater — in Solid Waste Services. And even in the municipal Attorney’s Office, which has historic levels of vacancies, at least in my experience.

Casey Grove: It was something like the city government has, like, 2,000-plus employees total, and that the vacancies currently are somewhere in the hundreds? Does that sound right?

BF: That’s right, it’s a little bit of a nuanced conversation, because you can either include the number of year-round employees or seasonal employees. You know, there are some departments like Parks and Recreation and Street Maintenance that staff up either for the summer season or for the winter season. One way of counting, which I believe includes everybody, is you can get up to 2,800 employees. And if we’re trying to quantify those vacancies, I think muni-wide, there were several hundred unfilled positions. And in order of department, that seem to be in the main located in the Police Department, then in Street Maintenance and Maintenance and Operations, in the Health Department, in the Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility, in Parks and Recreation, in Transit, and Solid Waste Services and the municipal Attorney’s Office. And each one of those has its own story for why that has happened and what impacts that’s going to cause, and that may require their own solutions. But it certainly is pointing the way into some future work for us.

CG: Gotcha. And I want to talk about that a little bit, too. But in broad strokes, I mean, why is staffing a problem? Or, you know, what are the reasons?

BF: What comes through in the transition report in a number of departments is that it’s a combination of several factors. But one of them is certainly market wages and how it has become increasingly difficult to hire bus drivers into the municipality’s public transit service system. It has been increasingly difficult to woo snowplow graders who hold commercial driver’s licenses away from the school district, who increased their salaries and benefits in response to, two summers ago, when the school bus system was starting to crash, or as compared to the North Slope or to the Association of General Contractors contract rates.

It’s also the case that in some of the departments that the municipality, in the COVID era, did what everyone did, and everyone went fully remote. And by and large, the municipality after COVID did what most employers did not do and called everybody back. And so there’s been some frustration, I think, with the lack of teleworking opportunities and remote working opportunities, and those are things that we can, that we’re looking into as well.

CG: I mean, certainly pay must be a big one for individual employees. And I know this is pretty simplistic way to ask this question, but can’t you just pay people more?

BF: Ah, can we just pay people more? The answer is, of course, yes, but with constraints. So the municipality has nine different unions, or at least nine different bargaining units, who represent our employees and our workforce. We have executives, non-reps and then IBEW, IBEW technicians, plumbers, local operating engineers, etc. So your question was, “Can you just pay people more?” The answer is, first, the mayor, any administration’s, ability to pay people more is somewhat limited by the process of having to go through collective bargaining agreement negotiations. Assuming you can get that to conclusion, you have to have Assembly approval and ultimately have to have a means to pay for it. And in our tax cap-limited jurisdiction, that can be a non-trivial exercise, to figure out how you can make those kinds of adjustments.

CG: Is that a way of saying, I mean, you know, for people that don’t know, the vast majority of money that the city brings in is from property taxes, right?

BF: That’s right.

CG: And do you feel, I mean, does the administration feel, constrained by that, in terms of being able to pay people more?

BF: Well, the tax cap is objectively a constraint. I don’t think it’s a constraint for this administration, it’s a constraint for every administration. There is no free hand to say, “I will, you know, incur expenses that meet market conditions regardless of the actual impact to taxpayers.” And in that regard, that tax cap definitely focuses some hard conversations about tradeoffs and what you can do with it and what you can do without. It does mean that if you look at the current level of vacancies and determined that there are some pockets of the municipality where it is difficult to bring people in the door because they can make a lot more across the street, that it is not simple, there is no magic wand solution to addressing that problem.

One of the other things that was also emphasized in the transition report is how the municipality is also dealing with the transition to a era where we just don’t get the level of state support that we used to. So I believe you can find in the transition report, and certainly it has been reported that, for instance, from the late ’90s to 2014, we received from the state almost half a billion dollars to build or maintain roads. And from 2015 forward that figure was $2 million. If you go back to the ’80s, a huge proportion of the municipality’s operating budget was just a grant that came from the state. That is not the case at all now, and the municipality, general government, is over half a billion dollars operating budget and some single digit number of millions comes from the state to support that. So part of what I think is coming home to roost is the municipality having to make do more self sufficiently and without the traditional state support that it received in the go-go era of the the higher oil price days in the ’80s and even in the ’90s.

CG: One thing I wanted to ask you, you know, because you were the city manager prior to the Bronson administration, and you’re coming back in as the chief administrative officer, so I mean, you’ve got a pretty, you know, deep experience, I think, with the city: Do these issues go back, you know, beyond the Bronson administration, before the Berkowitz administration and how far and how deep I guess?

BF: Yeah, some yes and some no. If you take for example, the Police Department, it was a big exercise in the early 2015, ’16, ’17 era to run a lot of police academies and try to bring the Police Department back to what was recommended to be full status. And by and large, that was accomplished. And now we find ourselves in the building here in 2024, and the Police Department is back at double digit vacancy. And so some of these things are what is old is new again. Some of them have been kind of constant challenges. So I mentioned the fleet, the fleet was a sort of known issue for a very long time. I think what is different about it now is that it seems like the magnitude of the challenge has grown. So it was an unsolved problem. … I think that has grown over time, and is now much harder problem to solve.

CG: And with that problem, in particular, with the aging fleet with like police cars, and snowplows, you know, I think we heard that some of the snowplows in particular are kind of at the max of the number of hours like the engine should have run. Is there capital money that comes from different places? And, you know, just in general, I mean, like, how do you deal with that?

BF: Yeah, that’s right. So we have, for example, 30 graders that plow the snow every winter, and the oldest of the graders is from 2002. We have a lot of graders from 2008, 2009, 2010, some that are as recent as 2022. A lot of those graders have a number of hours on them. So about half of the fleet has more than 10,000 hours, which, when I talked to the fleet maintenance folks, they say that’s about the time that you should expect problems to be arising in these machines. And that came home to roost for us. As I understand it, part of the challenge from last winter was that a lot of the equipment was breaking, and then it was out for service. So even though we may have had the manpower, the person power, to drive the grater, the grater wasn’t really available. How do you solve that? You know, that means finding money within the existing budget or going to voters and saying, “Do we want to issue a bond to buy some new graders?” And I think we’re exploring all of those options now.

CG: Are we going to get to name a grader, if we get like a new snowplow? Can we name it something, we vote to name that?

BF: That’s come up several times, actually, so maybe, maybe so, maybe so. What would you name the grader?

CG: I keep thinking Bladey McBlade face, but I think somebody…

BF: That’s, yeah, I feel that. Yeah.

CG: Well, I mean, again, you know, with your previous experience with the Berkowitz administration, and, you know, coming back in now with the LaFrance administration, you’ve read this report. Overall, how do you feel about the state of the city, and I guess, you know, the city’s ability to deliver services?

BF: Overall, I still am really optimistic about the quality of the people who are at the municipality and the dedication of those individuals to make it happen for everybody. And coming fresh back out of the bullpen and full of the enthusiasm of the relief pitcher now taking to the field, and so I feel like all of that is pointing in the right direction. And further, that even though the magnitude of the challenges is large, there are solutions to most of these problems. And so, you know, I don’t come in, read the transition report and then start to have buyer’s remorse and say, “Oh no, how is this ever going to work?” But I do think, “Oh, there’s not going to be a shortage of things to work on.”