The structure of a new administration for the city of Anchorage has begun to take shape. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance rolled out her public safety team at the Anchorage Fire Department’s Regional Training Center. With a fire truck and police car in the backdrop, the mayor said her focus, since she was sworn in in July, has been on stabilizing the municipality.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” LaFrance said. “We have some big challenges in front of us when it comes to public safety.”
Most of those challenges, she said, were inherited from previous administrations, yet are critical to the city’s basic operations.
“There is a consistent theme of staffing and high vacancy rates,” LaFrance said, “and those high vacancy rates, like when we talk about snow removal, impact service delivery.”
LaFrance says the city maintenance and operations vacancy rate is at 30 percent. And while the city is working to fill positions, snow removal will still be a challenge this winter.
“We have underfunded our fleet needs for the past 15 years,” she said.
It’s a pennywise, pound foolish approach that LaFrance says has caught up to the city.
“Industry best practices recommends that after 10,000 hours of operation, the engine on a grader should be replaced or overhauled. Seventeen out of 30 graders are over that threshold.”
But there are no quick fixes. From order to delivery, replacing heavy equipment is a process that can take more than a year. Also, the State of Alaska, the city’s partner in road clearing, has an aging fleet.
In the interim, Becky Windt Pearson, the new municipal manager, says the city will have to make the most of what is has, which will require a more creative approach, as well as better collaboration with the state.
“We certainly are working to try and coordinate together as best we can,” Windt Pearson said, “in advance of snow events this year, to identify where there might be pain points, where we can come to each other’s aid, where we can smooth out issues in our overlap zones.”
The mayor also unveiled a new program Homeless Outreach Prevention and Engagement, or HOPE. It gives police a new role in helping connect people who need shelter with services. It teams up social service workers with police officers.
“We know that some camps reach a level where outreach organizations do not feel safe engaging,” LaFrance said. “The HOPE team is equipped to connect people in these unsafe situations to the resources to exit them from homelessness.”
While the change brings added responsibility for officers, Anchorage Police Chief Sean Case says it’s work that’s a good fit for police, because they’re already in contact with the city’s street population.
“There are a lot of concerns about the activities that are taking place in the homeless camps and within the homeless community,” Case said. “And by concerns, I mean, victimization, and I mean criminal offenses, so the police department is the right agency to deal with those.”
As the mayor pointed to a row of deputy chiefs alongside her, she said the police department’s leadership team is now fully staffed, and steps have been taken to bolster the city’s criminal law division, which has also been hampered by staffing shortfalls.
Former municipal attorney Dennis Wheeler will take over as lead prosecutor and Dustin Pearson, a longtime municipal attorney, will focus on training and mentorship.
Also, the city fire department now has a point person to address the risk of wildfires on the Anchorage hillside. Jon Glover will coordinate efforts to both prevent and respond to wildfires.
LaFrance hopes these first steps in her new administration will help keep the community safe, which she says is a mayor’s number one job. She says one of the most positive outcomes, as her administration approaches its first 100-day mark is the talents of the team that’s taking shape.
“We've got the best and the brightest, and we're going to make progress,” she said. “It's going to take some time, because our challenges are significant, but we are fully committed to doing that.”
