An ordinance would tighten oversight of Anchorage's staffing overruns

Anchorage's government has ended each of the past five years with more positions than its budget approved — and three Assembly members want to make any future overruns get the mayor's sign-off and be reported to the Assembly.

Their ordinance, up before the Assembly this week, would set a maximum number of positions for each general-government department. It wouldn't be a hard ceiling: a department could still exceed it, but only with approval from the budget office, human resources, and the mayor — followed by a memo to the Assembly within 30 days. The point, sponsor Jared Goecker wrote, isn't that such increases shouldn't happen, "only that they should be approved by and reported to the highest levels of municipal government when they do occur."

The overruns have been modest but consistent. Against roughly 2,370 budgeted positions, the city finished 15 over in 2025, 18 over in 2022, and a few over in each of the other recent years. Salaries and benefits eat up 55 to 60 percent of the budget, so even small position changes carry real cost — which is the sponsors' argument for tighter oversight.

The measure is a revival of an earlier version Goecker floated alone this spring, now with two co-sponsors, Erin Baldwin Day and Zac Johnson. It's changed in a couple of ways since. The first version would have automatically eliminated positions left vacant for a year or more; the new one instead requires the mayor to report long-vacant jobs and justify keeping them in the budget — a softening made, the sponsors say, after pushback from the administration. The revised version also explicitly exempts the city's self-supporting enterprises — the utilities, the port, Merrill Field, the community development authority — which don't run on tax revenue.

With the next budget cycle underway, the ordinance would require the mayor to hand over that long-vacancy list by Oct. 31 and direct the Assembly to build department-by-department position caps into the budget before its final vote. It would take effect immediately if passed, and it skips the usual personnel-rules committee review on its way to a public hearing set for Oct. 6.