Anchorage's Assembly voted to review fewer contracts. August shows what that means

Last year the Anchorage Assembly voted to stop reviewing city contracts under $500,000 when they are competitively bid, and under $50,000 when they are not. The old lines were $150,000 and $30,000. The change more than tripled the threshold for bid contracts and raised the no-bid threshold by two thirds, and replaced Assembly approval below those lines with a monthly report.

August's reports are the first clear look at what that means. The city signed 24 contracts that month, and the Assembly voted on none of them.

Fourteen were competitively bid. The largest was $450,000 to McKenna Brothers Paving for concrete work, which would have needed a vote under the old rule.

Ten were sole-source, awarded without bidding: $10,510 for traffic counters, $36,824 for bear-resistant trash cans, $29,000 to the Anchorage Daily News for advertising through December, and $48,466 for real-time mapping software, among others. Two of the ten were above the old $30,000 line and would have come to the Assembly before. Eight would not have.

Before the ordinance, the $30,000 sole-source limit was not in city code at all. It came from a 1988 Assembly memorandum. The ordinance put a limit into law for the first time, and set it higher.

The city's auditors had flagged the category twice in the two years before the vote. A 2022 audit found 22 sole-source purchases between $10,000 and $30,000, totaling $384,944, that went unreported, and seven above $30,000, totaling $272,326, that were never sent to the Assembly. It found 11 percent of the justifications it sampled questionable. "The Purchasing Department needs to improve some controls over sole source purchases," internal auditor Michael Chadwick wrote. A 2023 follow-up found purchases misclassified as sole source.