Anchorage's hockey community moves to take over its own arenas for $10 a year

On June 23, the Anchorage Assembly decides who will run the city's three ice arenas — and the deals on the table amount to the city conceding something it long denied: municipal ice can't turn a profit.

What forced the reckoning is a collapse. The current for-profit operator, O'Malley Ice Management, has been in uncured default since March, has let staff go, and has booked almost nothing past July 1. A February audit found it repeatedly out of compliance with its contract, on profit-sharing and recordkeeping among other terms. So the city is moving to hand all three rinks to new operators — fast, before July's ice-scheduling season locks in the fall calendar for every youth league and figure skater who depends on them.

The two deals point in opposite directions. Ben Boeke and Dempsey Anderson would go to the hockey community itself: a new nonprofit spun out of the Anchorage Hockey Association — the group Dempsey Anderson founded in 1961 — taking over the arena that bears his name for $10 a year, pledging to plow every dollar back into the ice. Sullivan Arena would go to All In 49, the team behind the Anchorage Wolverines, and there the city drops the pretense entirely, agreeing to absorb up to $613,500 a year in losses at a building that hasn't profited since before COVID.

Both new operators are the arenas' own dominant users — the hockey association running the hockey rinks, the Wolverines' people running the Wolverines' arena — a conflict the city says it will police by requiring that deals with major tenants be made at market rates and disclosed.

Meanwhile the buildings are fraying in plain sight. A refrigeration valve at Ben Boeke has failed and been reset repeatedly in recent weeks, one breakdown from losing the ice. The city can't fully say what it even owns inside the arenas — there is no complete equipment inventory — and the outgoing operator has flagged hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs nobody has verified. "I would hope that our new contractor would begin with an accurate inventory that could then be maintained," Assembly member Erin Baldwin Day said.

None of it is free: approving both contracts means finding an extra $400,000 in the venues budget this year, on top of the Sullivan subsidy. For half a century the city ran its arenas as a business expected to break even. On June 23, it's poised to treat them as what they've become — public infrastructure someone has to pay to keep cold.