My Eagle River colleague, Bill Starr, is rapidly becoming my favorite fellow member of the Anchorage Assembly. Not because we necessarily agree on things, or that we have started hanging out together, but because he has developed a penchant for advancing issues that draw lots of attention. My preceding post about his bear resolution, for example, has generated record traffic despite the fact that the Assembly has no jurisdiction over wildlife management!
As you may have read in this morning’s edition of the local paper my Assembly colleague, Bill Starr, plans to introduce a resolution at our October 28 meeting that calls for hiring a seasonal “Wildlife Safety Specialist…to manage nuisance and dangerous bears.”
In the 1980’s and early 1990’s Anchorage made a concerted effort to eradicate bars and liquor stores that catered to homeless alcoholics in and around the downtown area. One of the last to go was located at 14th Avenue and G Street and a high school friend of mine lived a couple blocks away. I remember his mom yelling at a group apparently headed for that store when they stopped in front of my friend’s house – for no good purpose, she was sure.
On Monday, October 6, I attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Glenn-Bragaw interchange. It was a nice event where I got to meet Frank Richards, the Department of Transportation‘s deputy commissioner, in person and exchange greetings with several folks I know through the Mountain View community council. I took away a couple observations about the project that inform some of my thinking about transportation planning for Southcentral Alaska. (more…)
[update] I received a call from Jason Lamb at KTUU, who read the post below and was looking in to doing a story on the subject. I recommended he review articles in the Prince George Citizen, that community’s newspaper, about the project. It’s a big issue in northern British Columbia and there’s lots to learn. [/update]
As regular readers of this site know, I generally try to focus my posts on issues related to Anchorage generally and the Assembly district I represent specifically. This one will be something of an exception.
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