Researchers weigh broadening who pays for Anchorage wildfire work.

University of Alaska researchers are preparing to recommend that Anchorage fund wildfire mitigation across the whole municipality, not only the wooded hillsides most at risk. Exactly how property owners would be charged, though, is unsettled.

The researchers want the wildfire service area to cover the entire municipality, so the burden wouldn't fall on hillside neighborhoods alone. But they are weighing four ways to charge for it — a uniform areawide assessment, a tiered one scaled to risk, a highly localized one, or a uniform assessment on some other basis, such as parcel size. Under the simplest, a flat areawide charge on taxable property, preliminary estimates put the rate under 0.1 mills. By comparison, Anchorage property owners pay an average of 8.97 mills this year — $897 per $100,000 of assessed value — for general government and debt.

The report reaches the Assembly on Tuesday as an information memorandum from the Anchorage Fire Department, a consent item with no vote or hearing that night. It was written by Margo Fliss of the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development, Ian Mills, and Jennifer Schmidt of the UAF Geophysical Institute, under a $31,717 fire department contract. They caution that a design using multiple service areas would likely need separate voter approval for each. Final recommendations are due by the end of October.