Anchorage cuts a top City Hall job it just created

Anchorage is quietly dismantling a top City Hall job it created only a couple of years ago — and the reason is a small vote of confidence: the administration thinks it finally fixed the mess the position was invented to clean up.

Municipal Manager William Falsey told the Assembly on Wednesday that the city plans to eliminate its chief administrative officer post, pocket the salary, and shift the finance department to report straight to Mayor Suzanne LaFrance. Falsey would absorb HR, IT, and purchasing himself, with other functions folded into the economic-development director's portfolio.

The telling part is why. The LaFrance administration resurrected the CAO role specifically to fix broken internal operations — the unglamorous machinery of purchasing, hiring, and IT that keeps a city running. Now, Falsey says, that job is essentially done. "A lot of the major lifting that we intended to do in the internal services functions has largely been accomplished," he said. "We have rewritten the purchasing code." With the crisis handled, the position that existed to handle it is no longer worth its cost.

What makes it workable this time, he added, is help he didn't used to have. Running these functions solo would be brutal, but Falsey now has a deputy — Mark Stafford — to share the load. "I did not have a deputy in the austerity times of 2016 to 2020," he said. "The workload just becomes much more manageable."

Two questions from Assembly members drew out the rest. Moving finance under the mayor isn't a power play, Falsey said, but a return to a structure he's run before. And the city isn't doing a formal reorganization — which would force an entirely new budget mid-year — but a "web of acting assignments" it'll formalize through the 2027 budget cycle instead.

The Assembly takes up Falsey's confirmation as municipal manager July 7; if approved, he'd start July 14.