Anchorage weighs $528,000 for addiction, homelessness, and disability care

The Anchorage Assembly is set to accept about $528,500 next week to put toward three of the city's hardest problems. The largest share, $285,000, funds opioid-addiction treatment — staff training and the medication used to treat opioid use disorder, work shared by the city's health, fire, and police departments.

A second grant, about $145,000, pays for a care coordinator embedded with the Anchorage Police Department's homeless-outreach team, connecting people living on the street — many struggling with substance use, and including Alaska Native residents — to services.

The third, roughly $98,000, props up the Health Department's Aging and Disability Resource Center. The city describes it plainly as a workaround: a funding fix made necessary by three straight years of state cuts to the program's base funding. The city is backfilling what the state pulled back.