Anchorage approved three ice-arena contracts. The office that oversees them has one employee.

The Anchorage Assembly voted unanimously Friday to hand three city ice arenas to two new managers — then acknowledged, in the same meeting, that the office meant to make sure those managers follow the rules is run by a single employee, with no finalized policy for how to do it.

The 12-0 vote put Anchorage Community Ice Management in charge of the Ben Boeke and Dempsey Anderson arenas, and All In 49 LLC — tied to the Anchorage Wolverines hockey club — in charge of the George M. Sullivan Arena. Before the vote, Assembly member Erin Baldwin Day pressed whether the city can keep tabs on the deals at all, noting past audits had flagged contract administration and staffing as recurring weak spots. The answer was candid: the Office of Venues has been staffed by one person for its entire existence, an administration official said, with a contract-administration policy still working through approval. "It is a very fair question to say whether we have sufficiently manned that office," the official said. As if to prove the point, the official conceded the city couldn't reliably track how many surcharges the Sullivan owed it under the old system — a gap a new auditable deposit is meant to close.

Hanging over the Sullivan deal is a blunt admission. There's no formal useful-life study, an official said, "but we do know that it's 40 years old" — and probably not a facility "that has 20 more years in its life." Yet the contract can run up to a decade. The city is already planning a "post-Sullivan future," through a new Chester Creek Sports Complex master plan and talks with UAA about a community ice complex; redeveloping the Sullivan site for housing has already come up.

Anna Brawley used the vote to raise the questions the city still hasn't answered: what to do with aging recreation facilities whose major maintenance no operator can cover — "the story of the PAC and the Sullivan" — and whether such venues should be self-sustaining, publicly funded, or privatized. With buildings like schools and the Mountain View Community Center now coming back to the municipality, she said, those are decisions the Assembly will have to make together — just not Friday.