Auditors found no central list of Anchorage's state agreements

Anchorage has taken on $17.2 million worth of work for the State of Alaska over the past five years without keeping a central list of what it agreed to do.

The city's Office of Internal Audit reported that no single agency tracks the agreements under which the state hands off responsibility for a project and pays the municipality to carry it out. The Assembly appropriated money for 47 such projects between January 2021 and December 2025.

Part of the problem is that the city does not call them the same thing twice. Auditors found the same arrangements labeled transfer of responsibility agreements, grants, or memorandums of understanding, depending on who wrote them up.

The city also does not track what the work costs, and auditors singled out the electricity to run traffic signals. Without those numbers, there is no way to tell whether what the state pays covers what Anchorage spends.

Managers who administer the agreements agreed to build a catalog of active ones, settle on a single name for them, and look specifically at whether the traffic signal money covers maintenance and operations.

The report went to the Assembly for its Tuesday meeting.