The Chugiak-Eagle River area used to be its own borough, after getting legislative approval to separate from the Greater Anchorage Borough in 1974. However, the newly-formed government was challenged in court.
“When they went to court, they actually won in the first court, but they lost in the Alaska Supreme Court, and they basically got drawn back into Anchorage,” said Catherine Margolin.
Now, more than 50 years later, Margolin and other Chugiak-Eagle River residents are trying to form their own government once again. Margolin chairs the Eaglexit movement, formed in 2018. She said many people in the area feel like they don’t have a voice in the wider Anchorage government.
“They also feel that there are a lot of decisions made that are kind of counter to what our culture and values are out there,” Margolin said. “We're a little different from Anchorage in a lot of ways”
Currently, the area is represented by two of the 12 seats on the Anchorage Assembly, and tends to be more politically conservative than the rest of Anchorage.
On Nov. 17, Eaglexit members sent a draft of their petition to detach from Anchorage to the Alaska Local Boundaries Commission. It includes a charter, a boundary map, plans for how to implement the new government, and a legal memo describing how to effectively separate from Anchorage.
“We feel like we're founders of the Constitution, in our own little area here,” Margolin said.
The Chugach Regional Borough, if approved, would comprise all of the communities in Anchorage Assembly District 2. That includes Eagle River, Chugiak, Birchwood, Eklutna and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, totalling about 47,000 people.
The draft petition includes a process for how a mayor and Assembly members would be elected, a series of local governance commissions in the place of community councils and even a school district that would be composed of publicly-funded charter schools.
“There's gonna be a core curriculum which will include the sciences and math and English and civics, and then each school will also have its own specialties, say STEM or language, things like that,” Margolin said.
Eaglexit advocates actually submitted a different draft petition to the Local Boundary Commission in 2023, and Margolin said commission staff kicked it back to them with feedback on what was missing.
“The main comments were that we needed to bulk up the school district and define how the schools would be run,” she said. “And the other main thing was the division of assets and liabilities, which they really didn't address in that first iteration.”
In other words, how do you divide up all of the facilities that are currently owned by the municipality?
Margolin said Eaglexit spent the last two years fixing the issues. She said she’s confident they’ll be able to address any small corrections on this draft.
“This is definitely the furthest we've gotten,” Margolin said. “We feel that we've answered all of the staff member’s questions and filled out the pieces that he felt were missing.”
In an email, Jed Smith, a staffer for the commission, said his team hasn’t had a chance to review the latest draft petition, but it “appears to be substantially different than the previous draft submitted.”
If commission staff decide that everything in the draft looks okay, Margolin said her group will then start collecting signatures. They hope to enlist a swarm of volunteers to help.
“They will be taking those petition books out for signatures, door knocking, standing in parking lots, you know, going to events, probably Bear Paw will at least get a ton of signatures there, I'm sure,” she said.
Once Eaglexit advocates get 25% of registered voters in the area to sign the petition, they would submit a finalized petition to the boundary commission for a technical review. If it’s approved, Smith said it would kick off a lengthy process that includes public comment, two staff reports and a final public hearing where the commission would decide whether or not to approve the new borough.
If approved, Margolin said, it would go to local voters.
“The voters are only in Assembly District 2,” Margolin said. “So the vote will be for what’s called a unified vote for detachment and incorporation as a home rule borough, all in the same petition.”
Margolin said even if everything goes as planned, the formation of the Chugach Regional Borough is still years away.
“My husband says three to five years,” Margolin said. “I would hope for sooner, because I'm kind of an optimist in that area, but we're probably looking at a few years.”
The most recent Alaska borough to be approved by the Local Boundary Commission was the Xunaa Borough in Southeast Alaska last March, though it’s being challenged in superior court. Before that, the Petersburg Borough was approved in 2013.
