Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance unveiled her first budget for the city on Thursday.
At a press conference, LaFrance said her main priorities are core services, improving public safety and investing in the city.
“While we have seen a lot of challenges in recent years, I remain fully optimistic about our future,” LaFrance said. “To get there, we need to build more housing, improve access to child care and deliver better economic opportunities.”
The proposed budget is roughly $645 million, about $20 million more than last year’s. LaFrance said it’s about $200,000 under the tax cap. It also includes the alcohol tax and, for the first time, marijuana taxes being dedicated to child care initiatives.
Of the roughly $4 million in marijuana tax revenue the city collected, half will go toward stimulus payments to help stabilize the child care sector while the other half will go to funding pilot projects to access and affordability of child care.
The budget includes a fully funded winter shelter plan, increases funding for camp clean up and boosts wages for snow plow operators. It also allows for the 24-hour operation of the city’s Mobile Crisis Team, which pairs a mental health professional and emergency responder together to respond to people having behavior health emergencies.
While the city faces short-term winter snow plowing troubles with an aging fleet, municipal manager Becky Windt Pearson said the administration plans to ask voters in April to approve a tax levy to pay for more snow plows and graders, as well as another levy for police vehicles.
“These levies address the reality we’ve been seeing over and over again across different areas of our fleet,” Windt Pearson said. “Under investment in our fleet and critical equipment for everything from snow removal to public safety, which has led to degraded service in those critical areas for the municipality.”
The budget was submitted Wednesday night to the Assembly. Assembly member Anna Brawley, co-chair of the body’s budget and finance committee, said she hasn’t had a chance yet to read the more than 800-page operating budget, but it looks like the administration and the Assembly have similar funding priorities.
“We do have, I think, good alignment on the Assembly and the administration as far as what we need to do to shore up the city and really look ahead,” Brawley said. “But I think the question is really going to be digging into the details, and then I imagine there will be some differences.”
The Assembly will hold two public hearings on the proposed budget on Oct. 22 and Nov. 6.. It will then vote on the budget and add possible amendments on Nov. 19.
Wesley Early covers Anchorage life and city politics for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at wearly@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @wesley_early. Read more about Wesley here.
