Anchorage wildfire mitigation would be paid for citywide, researchers say

A University of Alaska team will recommend that every taxable parcel in Anchorage help pay for wildfire mitigation, rather than concentrating the cost on high-risk neighborhoods.

The recommendation is preliminary. It came in a progress report to the Assembly on Aug. 18, with a full report and formal recommendations due by the end of October, before any measure could reach voters.

Wildfire risk is "not confined to a single neighborhood or district," the report says, but runs across the whole Anchorage area.

Four funding mechanisms are still under evaluation. A uniform areawide assessment carries a preliminary estimate of less than 0.1 mills, against the 0.36 mills set for areawide general government this year. A tiered version would set three rates by risk level. A third would create many small service areas, which the researchers call impractical and say they included mainly to show the limits of that approach. A fourth would tax by parcel size rather than assessed value, which the report says may be restricted by state law.

Multiple service areas would each require separate voter approval, and the report warns that voters could approve some and reject others. It also flags a question it cannot yet answer: whether money collected in a low-risk service area could pay for work in a high-risk one.

The team found no comparable funding mechanism anywhere in Alaska, and looked instead to counties in Utah, Colorado and California.

The report comes from Margo Fliss and Ian Mills of the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development and Jennifer Schmidt of the UAF Geophysical Institute. The Anchorage Fire Department contracted the work for $31,717 after the Assembly approved the evaluation in April.