Assembly chair drafts ordinance to cut 24 of Anchorage's 51 comprehensive plan documents

Anchorage Assembly Chair Anna Brawley is drafting an ordinance that would repeal 24 of the 51 documents that make up the city's comprehensive plan, she told the Anchorage Planning and Zoning Commission on Monday.

Every one of those documents is considered equally valid now, Brawley said, so land-use decisions have to account for all of them, even when old and new plans conflict. "We are stuck in an elaborate trap," said Brawley, a planner who represents West Anchorage.

She plans to introduce the ordinance at the Assembly's Nov. 17 meeting, and said the list would come to the commission for discussion well before it goes back to the Assembly. In choosing what to cut, she said, she looked for documents more than 30 years old that had never been amended, or ones that newer plans could replace. The list is at 24 for now.

To show what the city is working with, Brawley brought almost all of the comprehensive plan to the meeting in a suitcase. "I want to demonstrate it is full of paper. This is not a joke," she said.

Much of it came from the Planning Department's library of old plans. She had 15 documents reprinted. Eight more, she said, apparently no longer exist in any physical or digital copy the city can find. "How are we supposed to refer to those if they don't legally exist?" she asked.

City code essentially says the most recent plan governs when plans conflict, Brawley said. But the city's big plans, going back to the Anchorage 2020 plan, also send many decisions down to more detailed neighborhood plans. In Spenard, for example, she said, a policymaker has the West Anchorage District Plan from 2012, the citywide land use plan from 2017 and the Spenard Corridor Plan from 2020, and has to work out which one to follow.

Girdwood is another example. Both its 1994 plan and the Girdwood Comprehensive Plan the city adopted in 2025 are still adopted parts of the plan. Brawley's draft lists the older one for repeal. "Why would we need this 1994 plan?" she said.

The plans are slow and costly to make. A district or neighborhood plan costs about $300,000 and takes about five years, Long Range Planning Manager Daniel McKenna-Foster told the commission, based on 14 plans the city has completed since 2010.

Many of their bigger ideas never happened, he said, and many implementation items were never tracked. The Hillside District Plan called for a new service area for roads and drainage. The U-Med District Plan wanted a special village area and a park-and-ride. The East Anchorage District Plan called for turning mobile home parks into small-lot housing.

Monday's work session was called on a narrower question: whether neighborhood and district plans should become advisory, guidance the city could weigh rather than policy it has to follow. "They could still be referenced, but they wouldn't carry that potential regulatory weight," McKenna-Foster said. A 2025 Assembly resolution asked the commission for a recommendation by September 2025. The commission first took it up in September, when planning staff said the majority of the plans had not been updated.

Brawley said making those plans advisory would essentially mean anything passed before 2017 would be advisory. She told commissioners not to feel pressure to answer that question Monday. "This conversation around the comprehensive plan is one that will not be resolved quickly," she said.

Commissioner Radhika Krishna, who said she would rather wait for legislation from the Assembly, urged a broader look at "whether our comprehensive plan elements have grown so large that they're unable to be updated on the schedule we'd like to keep them updated at."

Later in the commission's regular meeting, Commissioner Jeff Raun suggested recommending to the Assembly that neighborhood and district plans be advisory. He wanted to limit it to those plans, leaving out others in the comprehensive plan such as utility, transportation and parks plans. Krishna and other commissioners said they were open to it.

Staff said they could bring the question back as a formal case in about two months, when the commission could vote on a recommendation.