Anchorage faces $1.3 billion stormwater infrastructure deficit

The Municipality of Anchorage faces a $1.3 billion deficit in failing stormwater infrastructure, with more than two-thirds of the system already deteriorating and no dedicated funding source to address the problem, officials told the Assembly Infrastructure, Enterprise and Utility Oversight Committee of the Whole on Thursday.

Kenan Billups, watershed manager for the Project Management & Engineering Department, reported that 400 of the municipality's 590 miles of storm pipes (68 percent) are currently failing, causing sinkholes, road damage, and flooding across Anchorage. The deficit grows each year as infrastructure continues to degrade, and some failing systems have been on maintenance lists since 2013 with no resources to repair them.

The American Society of Civil Engineers released the 2025 Report Card for America's Infrastructure in February, assigning U.S. stormwater infrastructure a D grade and warning of aging systems, increased flooding, and a growing funding gap. The report's findings parallel concerns raised in Anchorage about failing storm pipes and inadequate dedicated funding.

The stormwater system is currently funded through annual Anchorage Roads and Drainage Service Area (ARDSA) bonds, which address only emergency repairs and immediate failures. Officials described a structural funding mismatch: emergency bonds cover failures as they occur but not the backlog of deteriorating infrastructure, so the deficit keeps compounding. The number of locations requiring stormwater capital project repairs far exceeds what the capital program can complete each year, Billups said; the storm system in ARDSA is deteriorating faster than it is being repaired or replaced.

Billups characterized these temporary, reactive repairs as costly and said they substantially add up over time. The municipality fixes problems one year but returns three years later to fix them again, creating a revolving cycle.

Assembly Member Anna Brawley remarked, "I'm glad we have yet another billion-dollar liability. We keep adding them up." Assembly Member George Martinez noted recurring maintenance problems with flooding in his district and asked whether the municipality has analyzed alternative development strategies such as permaculture and food gardening that could offset stormwater concerns. Billups said the municipality has had programs in the past that incentivize such approaches, but limited resources prevent the municipality from supporting those programs now.

The infrastructure problems reflect years of deferred maintenance tied to declining state funding. Assembly Member Erin Baldwin Day noted that Anchorage received $1 billion less from the state between 2015 and 2025 than in the previous decade, a shortfall that coincides with roughly $1 billion in deferred maintenance on city infrastructure. "We have a lot of legacy infrastructure that we have built, roads and pipes, things that are not indefinite resources, they do not have an indefinite lifespan," Baldwin Day said. "And so there is a lot of repair and maintenance that is now required because the new stuff is now old stuff. And unfortunately, that puts us on the hook for maintenance that we did not necessarily plan well for back when times were really good and the cash was flowing."