Anchorage’s city attorney wants to end the practice of issuing quarterly reports on legal settlements the city approves.
The Anchorage Assembly was unanimous in passing a 2023 ordinance requiring the city’s top lawyer to produce a list of every legal claim the city settles out of court. That includes workers’ compensation claims and complaints to the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission. The reports are public and presented to the Assembly each quarter.
The move came amid a number of high-profile lawsuits filed against the city under the administration of Mayor Dave Bronson.
Now the Assembly is considering an ordinance written by the city attorney’s office that would remove the requirement to issue those reports.
Eva Gardner, the city attorney, wrote in a memo to Assembly members that her office has other ways to keep the Assembly informed of the city’s legal settlements, including the annual litigation review that is presented in executive sessions, which are not open to the public.
“Other means of communicating with the Assembly about settlements and indemnifications are both adequate and, when conducted in a privileged context, actually more protective and more useful than the cursory public settlement report,” Gardner wrote.
There’s concern that disclosing the settlements publicly could lead to more legal claims against the city.
West Anchorage Assembly member Anna Brawley spoke in favor of requiring the reports when the Assembly approved them in 2023. While she said she appreciates the transparency, Brawley said city attorneys have expressed concerns that disclosing financial settlements could harm the city’s ability to negotiate.
“It just puts more legal risk on the city if you're kind of broadcasting, like, ‘Here's what we settle for. Here's the type of case,’” Brawley said.
In a statement to Alaska Public Media, Gardner said city attorneys were concerned in 2023 that the reports could expose the city to increased litigation.
“The 2023 ordinance and discussion did not identify any other jurisdictions with a similar reporting requirement or indicate that this is a typical transparency measure commonly adopted by local governments, because it is not,” Gardner wrote. “It is an unusual measure that was imposed at an unusual time.”
The Assembly’s lawyer, William Hurt, said at the time that he was only considering whether the records should be public when he wrote the ordinance.
When Assembly members asked Hurt if he thought the reports might open the city to increased litigation, he said, “It depends.”
“Any attorney that’s willing to bend the rules or bring a flimsy claim was probably inclined to do that prior to the Assembly passing this ordinance,” he said.
Anne Helzer, the city attorney at the time, said during the same meeting that the proposal had both risks and benefits.
“We are opening up ourselves to the possibility that people are watching and seeing what we do,” Helzer said. “But there is a benefit as well, because we also provide the transparency and we inform the Assembly and we inform the community.”
Brawley said she’s working on an amendment to the new ordinance that could preserve some of the public reporting in the settlement disclosure code as currently written, while reducing legal risk to the city.
“Basically that there's still some kind of disclosure,” she said. “We're working on what the details would be, but taking the individual cases out of it, not including workers’ comp claims.”
Considerations for public disclosure could be made for expensive settlements, or if the city sees a high number of settlements in a short time period, Brawley said.
In the same 2023 meeting during which the Assembly voted to have the quarterly reports released publicly, members voted to pay a settlement of more than $270,000 to Heather MacAlpine, the city’s former director of the Office of Equal Opportunity. MacAlpine alleged she was wrongfully terminated for investigating claims made against Bronson’s deputy library director, Judy Eledge.
During the meeting, members also voted down a $550,000 settlement for Amy Demboski, the city manager at the time, who alleged she’d been fired in retaliation for bringing concerns of supposedly illegal and unethical activities to Bronson. The Assembly later approved a $250,000 settlement in October 2024.
The Assembly is set to take up Gardner’s proposal to do away with the quarterly reports during a special meeting Wednesday night.
