Anchorage child care fund squeezed by programs moved from alcohol tax

The fund Anchorage voters created to strengthen child care says it can't fully do that job — because two other early-childhood programs are eating into it. But the fix its board wants isn't as clean as it sounds.

When voters passed Proposition 14 in 2023, they dedicated cannabis-tax money — about $5.2 million a year — to the Anchorage Child Care and Early Education Fund, built to grow the city's child care system. Since then, the Assembly has shifted two programs onto it: a $2 million allocation for eight pre-kindergarten classrooms in Title I schools, and a $125,000 grant for Best Beginnings' Imagination Library, which mails free books to young kids. Together they claim more than $2.1 million before the board funds a dollar of its core work — the subsidies and grants that help keep child care providers open.

"We do not have enough funds to do what we want to do," board chair Trevor Storrs said. His goal is to move both programs back to the alcohol tax, where they were funded before.

Here's the catch: that pot is shrinking faster than his. Alcohol-tax revenue has fallen from $21 million in 2022 to a projected $14.2 million in 2026, the city's finance director told the Assembly — and the cannabis tax feeding the child care fund is softening too, as Anchorage's marijuana market saturates. There's no flush account to move these programs into; both are tightening at once.

And not everyone agrees the programs are misplaced. The Assembly chose to fund them, and member Daniel Volland, who moved the Best Beginnings grant, has argued the body can back good community work where it sees fit. Member Erin Baldwin Day, meanwhile, sees a real line being blurred — between uplifting the child care sector, which she calls the fund's purpose, and educating children, which she calls something else.

The board's June 17 numbers were only preliminary. The harder question — who pays for what, out of two funds both running thinner — heads to the Assembly's fall budget.