On October 16, 2025, the Anchorage Municipal Assembly held a work session to discuss Resolution AR2025-308 and Memorandum 759-2025 regarding the extension of the management agreement with the Alaska Center for Performing Arts (PAC) and the financing structure to support it. Administration officials provided a historical overview of the 1987 partnership, detailed a significant operational pivot in 2023 with the introduction of "Broadway Alaska," and proposed a solution to keep the facility open for the next 18 months without using general government tax dollars. The assembly members engaged in discussions regarding the sustainability of the current model, the adequacy of the reserve account, and comparisons to other regional facilities.
I'm here, thanks. I'm hello at the performing art center. I'm here. Okay, hold on, let's do this one at a time. Um, I heard somebody from the performing arts center. Is that Cody? Yes, this is Cody Castellar from the Performing Art Center. Okay. And I was that Ms. Baldwin Day as well. Yes, Karen here too. Thanks, and that's Mr. Myers as well. Yeah, sure, thanks. All right, and we're not yet doing introduction, we'll get to that in just a minute. But is there anyone else on the phone that we know of? Oh, okay, that's it. Okay. Um, it's a little bit tricky to park today because if it is occurring, we had intended to keep this uh time and space open for no meetings today and tomorrow, but life happens. And so um we needed this work session before the meeting on Tuesday. So I'm gonna go ahead and call to order this work session. We're here to discuss AR2025-308 and the associated memorandum seven fifty-nine-2025. It's a resolution of the Anchorage Municipal Assembly authorizing the use of MLP. So proceeds to retire ACPA roof bonding camera tax system municipal debt pursuant to municipal charter section thirteen dot one one part A. A memorandum from the mayor of the municipality of Anchorage seeking assembly approval to amend the management agreement between the municipality of Anchorage and the Alaska Center for Performing Arts by extending the contract term to June 30, 2027, increasing the management fee by one million eighty-nine thousand dollars to two million six hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars. We'll start with introductions in the room. We have Jared Kirker. Uh, by eighteen months, and then uh increase it by about a million dollars annually. And a related item, uh AR 2025 308, um, which goes to how we would partly pay for that increase. And my goal today is to sort of situate this in the larger context and give you a kind of uh administrative take on how we landed here. Um and so I'm gonna begin at the beginning and take you all the way back to 1987 and remind us that the performing arts center has been managed by a sort of purpose-built nonprofit that was incorporated March 25th, 1987, before the PAC was even finished and before it had opened. At the time, it was incorporated for the purpose of operating, maintaining, and promoting the performing arts center. This is the very first contract that we had with the performing arts center back in June of 1987. The assembly has always been involved in improving improving these contracts. And that framework has largely carried forward uh even through today. So the agreement that we are extending now or proposing to extend now was executed in 2015, um, and otherwise would expire at the end of the year. And so you see the same refrain that we have had since the beginning that we are hiring the uh Alaska Center for the Performing Arts Inc. for marketing, repair and maintenance, operation and management of the concessions and the commercial premises of the PAC. Um, we earlier had a presentation from the PAC at a work session where they were describing the capital needs of the building and also some of the operational challenges, and they showed you this graph, and I wanted to give you sort of an administrative take on this graph. The management fee that the municipality has paid has historically been one component of the overall annual operating budget of the PAC. And so this was showed to you before, and by way of reminder, our management fee is the red line, and the blue line is the actual operating budget. And so one way of looking at this graph is to say, well, how uh how did it all work? How did the PAC not go bankrupt? And the idea, of course, was that beyond the management fee, the way you get from the management fee the municipality is offering to the actual expenditures annually, is then you fill that gap with the revenue that the facility can generate. And we were actually just doing a deep dive on the finances over time, and it looks like uh at the very beginning, the Muni was paying about 60% of the overall operating expenses of the PAC that decreased over time to about 50% by somewhere around 2005, and it's been less than 50 percent since then. And that seems to have been the operating understanding from the beginning. So I think Mr. Parjetter was one of the first heads of the nonprofit, and when asked by Fred Dyson all the way back in 1987, how's this all supposed to work? He says, Well, we're hoping within four years the operating costs will be supported by revenues and about half of it will come from the meeting. So, a couple things to notice about this arrangement.