The Anchorage Assembly held a budget work session on October 10, 2025, beginning at 20:58 UTC, to review the proposed 2026 municipal budget. The session featured detailed presentations from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and several departments, including Fire, Police, Maintenance & Operations, Health, and Parks & Recreation. Discussions focused on historical funding trends, staffing challenges, infrastructure costs, and policy impacts. No formal votes were taken, but deadlines and future work sessions were established.
All right. We are now coming back. Miss Browse is here. We will dive back in. I think we're on department details OMB overview. Chris, I still leave that so that I don't have anything. Oh, we got it as well. So here's the deal. I guess we could do this and then skip the thing. Right, because we just dive in since they're coming. Yeah, and right, instead of going back to the end of the day. And as soon as since he was here first, we can start up with us through the histories and mysteries piece. Not directly related to the budget that we're talking about for 2026, but directly related to the municipal budget and our operations at large. We're in the 50th anniversary of our munification. What does that really mean for what our background has been? And as we're looking forward at our revenue conversation, our budget and our community infrastructure, where are we going to go? How will we get there? Where you know, where should we be going? What makes sense? So some of this is um just historical uh background detail and um and some is comparative uh community information, but we should be able to get through it relatively quickly. So um to begin as part of our you know assessment of our budget and how we have um used our budget in the past, uh, we went back through our historical files, and the mayor mentioned this um at the beginning of the meeting, but in 1984, our uh municipal operating budget was 181 million dollars, and 52.7 million of that was funded by the state. So about 30% of our operating budget at the time was state funded. And if you look at this um detail, you can see that it's about uh 60 million dollars in property taxes and 52 million, 53 million in state funds, and then the balance is other revenues. So that's about a third property taxes, a third state money, and a third other revenues. Um, this is interesting because the tax cap was approved in 1983 and implemented in 1984, and the tax cap was formed at a time when this was our budget circumstance. And I think that shapes the way those um policy decisions are made. And we it's important to sort of look back at how those decisions were made at the time when they were made under the conditions they were made, so that we can determine whether or not those conditions still exist today and if any um sort of revisiting is required. Um we did a look back on operating budgets and uh courtesy of uh Mr. Clauda and his economics background, we have um some comparative graphs on our operating budget spend over time. So between 2003 and 2025, this is um a representation of real dollars, constant dollars, not chair constant dollars, but um, of our operating budget between public safety and non-public safety spend. So the uh non-public safety spend is the orange line on the green, and the public safety spend is the blue line. And you can see that over time, when adjusted for inflation, that the spend is relatively flat. Um our operating budget across time is relatively flat because of the nature of our formula and our funding sources. So our tax cap is um only adjusted on an annual basis by you know a few factors, one of them being inflation. Um as uh uh Vice Chair Brawley pointed out earlier today, um, our tax growth this year is less than inflation. So it would be true that this line over time, when adjusted for that consideration is flat. Um, and this is our operating expenditure per capita over time, also flat. Um the sort of um expectation that because our budget numbers are getting bigger that we are you know spending more money than we have or we need to, or that our budgets are expanding when adjusted for real dollars is um relatively flat. If you go back one slide under the non-public safety, there's an increase from 2021. Is that my I hazard to guess it's snow? All the equipment and all that kind of major increase we've done. Um I don't I can't speculate immediately. I'd need to look at it specifically between let's see, do I get I think one of the challenges there has well, I don't want to, I don't want to speculate pandemic related and other things. So okay, I wouldn't welcome some information offline. Absolutely, yeah. Ms. Broly. Yeah, thank you. In that same spirit, um, and this is just a preview, I'll talk at the end of this meeting about another kind of way that we're tackling this big picture conversation. Um another couple data points that I think would be really helpful to have.