$5.5 million for Anchorage public health nurses, WIC and child care inspectors

The Anchorage Assembly takes up more than $5.5 million in state health grants Tuesday, on the consent agenda, which means the money passes in a block without a public hearing unless a member pulls an item.

Nearly all of it is payroll. The largest grant, $2.8 million for the city's public health nursing program, is 96 percent straight-time labor. That program handles immunizations, disease surveillance and tuberculosis control. The money is a year of the people who do it.

A second grant, $1.4 million, runs Anchorage's WIC clinics, which serve pregnant and postpartum women and children under five in households near or below the poverty line. Participants get a benefit card and summer coupons for produce at farmers markets. Anchorage has run the program since 1977.

The third, $1.35 million, pays for child care licensing: inspections, complaint investigations and enforcement. Anchorage is the only municipality in Alaska that licenses its own child care facilities. Everywhere else, the state does it. The city's inspectors cover everything from Portage to the Knik River bridge, and their inspection reports are posted publicly on the municipal open data portal.

That last grant lands in a shrinking field. Anchorage has lost roughly a quarter of its licensed child care facilities since 2020, according to figures the Anchorage Health Department presented to the Assembly last year, dropping from about 250 to about 180. Voters set aside the city's marijuana tax revenue for child care and early education in 2023, an estimated $5 million a year that began going out in 2025.