On Friday, March 20, the Assembly held a joint work session with the Anchorage School Board, something we do roughly once a quarter. The primary topic of discussion was the proposed ASD budget, already approved by the School Board and scheduled before the Assembly at our March 24 meeting.
With apologies to Jackson Browne, the songwriter whose lyric I’ve amended above, I’m not sure how to react to a recent KTUU story on the latest budget battle between Acting Mayor Claman and members of the Assembly. While the story focuses on a dispute as to what the Assembly can, or can’t, do to address Anchorage’s budget shortfall the real issue is the ridiculous lack of collaboration between the Acting Mayor and his former (and, likely, future) Assembly colleagues on this important topic.
After slowly wending our way through the consent agenda, the portion of Assembly business that’s supposed to be brief but often drags on – last week over lunch budget discussions, this week over garbage truck deliberations – we will ultimately deal with three motions that would rescind our previous approval of three labor contracts. What’s interesting about them is the differences between the seemingly similar motions.
In addition to our three-hour “special” meeting Tuesday night, we had another two-hour work session on budgetary matters on Friday, February 20. Despite that additional time we still haven’t managed to wade through the administration’s explanation of their cuts and the reasoning behind them, so we’ll have yet another work session this coming Friday. While excessive pontification by Assembly members certainly bears part of the blame for the amount of time spent on this subject, it’s worth noting that a fair amount of time at the Tuesday meeting was spent discussing the new IBEW contract.
This evening – Tuesday, February 17 – marked the first of two “special” Assembly meetings scheduled to address Anchorage‘s estimated $17 million budget shortfall. (I didn’t find it very special, mostly because I missed my wife’s birthday, but no one forced me to take this job.)
The Assembly meeting on Tuesday, February 3, will include the first major fiscal discussion of the calendar year when we take up eight bond proposals which, if approved by the Assembly, will appear on the ballot for our April 7 election. Here’s a quick summary of the bond proposals: (more…)
A recent discussion by the Anchorage School Board as to whether they should seek to place school bond proposals on the ballot in April’s election, coupled with economic uncertainty and dysfunctional financial markets, got me thinking about whether the Assembly should put any bonds on the ballot this spring. Instead, perhaps, we should take a “bond holiday” with no bonds proposed this year.
In the past few weeks I’ve received many e-mails and a few calls regarding fiscal matters. Some have focused on the 2009 MOA budget, others on labor contracts in general and a few on specific labor contracts. Some favor added spending, some want to see cuts but very few have risen to my challenge to describe how they would proceed from a macro perspective. So I’ll get more specific.
After a lot of discussion, questions and debate, the Assembly ratified two previously expired contracts last night. The first, which covers the Anchorage Municipal Employees Association (think clerks, librarians and planners), expired in 2007 and will run through 2012, with wage re-openers in 2011 and 2012. In other words, it’s essentially a two year deal with two one-year options.
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