News from Patrick Flynn

Thank you very much to my friends and neighbors who made my re-election campaign a success!  Your generous support means a great deal to me and I’ll do my best to meet your expectations.  In the meantime, you may be asking what’s next for the Assembly so here’s the scoop:

First off, just as with your spring cleaning, the Assembly has to get organized.  After each election we elect a new Chair and Vice-Chair and I suspect our current chairman, Dick Traini, will retain his role.  I’ve heard three different names floated for Vice-Chair and none of them are mine since, after spending almost half of my first term as a member of the leadership team, I’m ready to let someone else take on those chores.   All that will be decided after the swearing-in ceremony at our April 19 meeting.

After the leadership is selected the Chair appoints folks to various committees and liaison positions.  I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll remain as one of the two Assembly representatives on AMATS, and that I’ll continue to play a role in developing and advocating for Anchorage’s legislative priorities.  As for the Port Committee, we’re working to schedule our next meeting for later this month to hear from the recently-formed joint MOA/MARAD/ICRC project oversight team (Rudy, Moose & Randy – I haven’t forgot about this and I still love hearing from you guys, but I better get some good fishing tips from you one of these days!).  Once that’s done we’re discussing broadening the committee’s scope to provide added oversight of all five municipal enterprises (the Port, Merrill Field, Solid Waste Services, Anchorage Water & Wastewater and Municipal Light & Power) so we’ll see how that goes.

Next month my terrific intern, Tessa Bay, who authored the blog post on the Service High bond proposal and met many of you at various community council and other meetings, will graduate and prepare for her next adventure as a university student in Washington DC.  Working with Tessa demonstrated to me how an assistant can help me do a better job representing my neighbors, so I think I’ve convinced John Arrono to dim his otherwise bright future and take on the role as my Assembly aide.  John and his wife, Heather, are both UAA students who’ve worked diligently to get young people more involved in the political process and I look forward to introducing one or both of them at upcoming neighborhood meetings.

Finally, for those of you kind enough to place one of my campaign signs in your yards please feel free to keep and employ them as you see fit.  The stakes do an excellent job keeping your garden in check (I use them to tame my raspberry bushes) and the signs can be sliced up for use as spacers when you have a concrete cutting job to perform (don’t ask me how I know this).

Once again, many thanks for your support, and please keep the questions and comments coming.

Regards,

Patrick