Two Assembly members want Martinez out. The removal law may not reach him

Two Anchorage Assembly members spent Monday calling for their colleague George Martinez to resign — and threatening, if he won't, to test a removal procedure the Assembly has never used before.

The fight that's coming will not really be about whether Martinez behaved badly with his campaign money. The state already answered that. It will be about whether the Assembly has any tool for the job.

Donald Handeland and Jared Goecker, both representing Eagle River–area seats, want Martinez out over an Alaska Public Offices Commission order that fined him $5,305.70, ordered him to repay the campaign, and concluded that his sworn testimony about a year-end trip to Fort Lauderdale paid for with campaign funds was not credible. APOC found the travel and a related carbon-offset purchase were not real campaign expenses, and concluded the spending personally benefited Martinez's travel account and airline status. The commission imposed the maximum penalty.

It lands squarely in the part of Anchorage's removal law that has never been tested.

The one sentence that matters

Anchorage Municipal Code 2.70.030 lets the Assembly remove one of its own members for "breach of the public trust." That sounds broad until you read a little further. Subsection G of the same ordinance carves out a quieter rule: wrongful acts done while an officer was acting in a private capacity, rather than in their capacity as a public officer, do not count as a breach of the public trust.

That sentence is the entire fight in miniature.

Martinez was not casting Assembly votes when he booked the Fort Lauderdale itinerary. He was a candidate running a campaign, and a campaign committee is a private legal animal, even when the candidate happens to hold office.

The same ordinance flags filing false reports and substantial breach of a statutory duty as possible breaches of public trust, and Martinez was an incumbent seeking reelection to the same seat he now holds. A hearing officer could read those provisions to reach his campaign conduct. But that argument has to fight subsection G uphill.

The Assembly has another tool that could be used: censure. Censure is a formal, on-the-record vote of disapproval. It does not remove anyone, it does not require shoehorning a campaign-finance case into a breach-of-public-trust framework, and the U.S. Supreme Court has already said elected bodies are free to publicly rebuke their own members. Handeland and Goecker did not indicate why they reached past it.

What Martinez has said

Martinez had not addressed Monday's resignation demand on his George for Anchorage campaign page at the time of publication. He has, however, already said where he stands on the APOC order itself.