Our Muni Our Budget

All right, now let's do it. Great. Um, well, good evening, everybody. Thanks for being here at Our Muni, Our Budget, the, uh, the first virtual version of, of this workshop. Um, we have done our very best to try to transition this from an in-person event, which can be a little more interactive, to something that's still interactive but available on Zoom.

So thank you in advance for for helping us to test drive a different format. We would love your feedback on how this goes, so please feel free. We'll, we'll just tell you up front, feel free to email us your feedback. We'll have a slide up at the end with our email addresses, and we'd love to know what you thought about this version of the presentation. I'm Erin Baldwin-Day, Assemblyperson from Midtown, joined by Vice Chair Anna Brawley from West Anchorage, and we're just delighted that you decided to take time on a super Snowy Tuesday to join us to talk about municipal budget.

So thank you for that. Anna, would you mind throwing our slides up and we'll dig right in? Yeah, let's do that. Okay.

Alrighty. And then for folks online as well, just keep an eye on the chat because we're going to put some other links there as well, and then we can share them out afterwards if you I know some folks on a phone or iPad, it might be hard to juggle. So, so yeah, let's go ahead and get started. Do you want me to go to the next slide? Yeah, let's, let's do that.

I suppose I've already sort of kind of done the intro, but we should give credit where credit is due. We do have several members of the Legislative Services staff with us tonight, two members, Allie Hartman and Jennifer Venneklasen. Clara Ross is our Leg Services Director. She's not able to be with us tonight, but she was really instrumental in getting getting all of this put together. Uh, so, uh, we always want to thank the folks who do the work of supporting the legislative branch, and we would be remiss if we did not introduce these two.

You'll see them popping in and out of breakout rooms later. So lots of gratitude to Claire, Ali, and Jennifer.

Yeah, so next I'll cover the group agreements tonight, or our ground rules for this meeting. Um, first, and they're up on the screen there as well, just a reminder, this is a public meeting. Um, obviously we're online, but we also are going to be recording at least the presentation part. So as it's noted, we'll be in breakout rooms a little bit earlier. Those are not recorded because we can't record 6 rooms at once, but, but just keep that in mind as well.

So we're also going to have time for question and answer, Q&A, and group discussion, as I mentioned. But in the meantime, we're asking folks to stay muted. You're welcome to turn your camera on or off. We'd love to see your face if we can, and I encourage faces during, during the discussion, but please make sure that we can have everybody listening in and doing that. You can write your questions in the chat.

So as you're listening and as something comes to mind, please feel free to put it there. We're not going to address questions kind of as they come up. We're going to have Q&A, but we are collecting all of those and then we're going to have time to dive into that after the initial presentation. So staff are going to be helping us with that. So as questions come to mind, just put them in there.

And then, of course, the usuals that we remind folks, being respectful of everybody who's participating tonight. We want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to be heard, especially in the breakouts. Please keep your comments brief, constructive, and on topic. And we want you to bring your curiosity, your ideas, and your solutions to the table. So, of course, we're not going to walk out of here with a final budget or any specific decisions, but we're really trying to open up and, and start asking these questions and having you think about it as well.

So I'll go to the next slide. So go ahead, Erin. Thanks. Um, so tonight we're really going to talk about why we budget, how we budget, and what the implications are for not only the present moment but the, the future of Anchorage. And we really have envisioned this as a conversation about Anchorage's fiscal future with a look toward the past to give us perhaps some guidance about what we could do moving forward.

Uh, so, um, the first thing we want to chat about is just what the Muni budget looks like in general, and it is a really complex budget. If you have ever— if you've ever seen the budget in real life, it's actually multiple 4-inch binders worth of paper, and that's because the municipality contains multitudes. So we do have all of the departments that provide core services to the municipality, the things that you think of when you think about what a city government would do, Police, Fire, Roads, Parks and Rec, our Health Department, all of the services that, that happen at the Permit Center, all of this is a departmental service. Then we have publicly owned assets and facilities. I actually just learned this year that the Anchorage Golf Course is a municipally owned facility.

Did not know that, but it is, and it is managed by a contractor, as are other municipal municipally owned assets. And then the municipality also includes utilities and other enterprise entities which are standalone but very much connected to the, the budget of the municipality and are under the purview of the Anchorage Assembly. So all of this means our budget is extremely complicated, and it takes some time to sort of parse through how all of these different entities relate to each other. We're going to do our best to, to sort through some of that tonight. But the, the real high-level version, what it boils down to, is that when we talk about our budget, we're talking about 3 big categories.

What we spend money on are staffing, services, and stuff. Like, those are the big buckets. And what's important to remember when we think about these broad categories is that not all of these, these parts of the municipal budget can be paid for out of the same sources of revenue. We're going to talk about that a little bit tonight, but this is how we'd like for you to think about what it is that we pay for as a municipality.

So what's in the municipal budget? Well, the municipal budget is actually divided into a couple of different smaller buckets. So our operations budget is what funds generally funds our staffing and the things that the municipality does, the services that we provide. That's what's in the operating budget. Our stuff is what's managed by the capital budget.

So this is anything that the municipality owns or any, anything that's on the ground or under the ground. That's our capital budget. And then part of our budget is to oversee what's going on at Anchorage Water and Wastewater, at the Community Development Authority, at the Port of Alaska, which is a municipal asset, um, Solid Waste Services, and Merrill Field. So each of those entities has their own piece of the municipal budget. And then when it comes to revenue, we have money that comes into the municipality for some dedicated purposes, and all of those are itemized as well inside of the municipal budget.

That's a very broad picture of what's in those 3 binders that we get every single year when we talk about the fiscal year's budget for the following year. Funded, meaning where does the money come from? So let's talk about our revenue and our things like taxes, other forms of our revenue. So on the screen, you'll see here a graphic that we've been circulating, the color of money. So the idea is that not all money is the same, and that's true for a government, for a company, all kinds of things.

So some things can be used for anything, some things could be used only for some purposes, and it's, it When you start getting into it, it gets complicated, as we said. So, um, what you're looking at here though is you're looking at basically not just the types of taxes and other revenue that we get, but how big they are. We have to think about scale as well as, um, kind of where this money's coming from. So the biggest one of these rectangles, um, and if you can see my cursor, I'll try to draw around it, is our property taxes. Um, so we get about $569 million, and I should say too, we're using numbers from our current budgets.

But, but really this year's budget for 2026 looks pretty much the same as 2025. So, so think of this as kind of the big picture stable version. So our property taxes are by far our largest, but as you'll notice, just under half of them actually pay for our school district. And so when you're paying your property tax bill, what we are really going to be talking about is general government so that the municipality, the city itself, but we should keep in mind that almost half of your property taxes go to the school district. So then let's move to the other side of this dashed line.

As I said, property taxes pay for the largest part of our general government, but we also have other income. We have the business personal property tax, or what people call the inventory tax, so some businesses pay that. We have our gas tax, or motor fuel tax, tobacco taxes, car registration, some other voluntary payments that we get from the feds and the state, and vehicle rental taxes. So those are kind of our general local money that we get. We've also got things like ambulance service fees, our police counter fees, our MOA trust fund.

We have a savings account essentially, or, or an endowment that we have for certain things, building safety fund, right? So there's a number of other ones, and then you'll see way on the bottom right there, we've got alcohol, marijuana tax, and then local assistance. We'll, we'll dive into local assistance. That is state funding that we get every year or have gotten historically. But alcohol marijuana tax, I'll just note, those are dedicated taxes.

And if you could look at them, they are much smaller than property tax, right? So again, we have to think about not just where the money is coming from, but really what can pay for which things, depending on what you're taxing. So it's arguably, we're never going to pay for as much as we can with property tax with our alcohol tax. Just as an example, we don't have to drink a whole lot more and have a whole lot more people. So anyway, this is something to think about, not just kind of where the money is coming from, but how much we get from which source and what is the base?

What is the tax base that we, um, get from that. So let's move on to the next one. So our property tax cap, that's something that many people know we have. A lot of people don't know we have this in our budget, but this is something that we've had in our code and in our charter for about 40 years now. So not when the municipality was created, but it was something put in place many years ago.

So this was approved by voters in 1983. It's in our, in our charter, and it is really a formula. So what it does, and the intention of what it does, is it constrains property tax growth. So it says that we can't just like suddenly tax twice as much as we did last year. It makes our budget predictable.

So it's a way to really ensure that our budget is growing slowly as our city grows. And so really the effect of that has been it's kept property taxes steady over time, and we'll talk about kind of how that's changed, how inflation factors in. But really, when you adjust for inflation, our property taxes are pretty stable over time, and our budget itself has stayed pretty flat. The other important thing to know about the tax cap is that it's not a policy choice. So the policy choice was made when it was put in the charter.

This is a formula. And so it's based on inflation. It's based on how much more we build, how many new buildings we have, new construction, and whether we have our, our population going up or down. So when our population goes down, we have to cut the budget. That's not a choice.

That is something that's in that formula that happens. And so that's another thing to understand what we can do now with our current conditions and what would really be things that we can't change without voters approving it? Those— that's another kind of thing to think about. So let's also talk about diving in a little bit further on kind of what all those different funding sources are. So for 2025, and this is pretty much true, again, adjusting for inflation for '26, we have about a $650 million operating budget, plus or minus a little bit on either end.

But essentially, that's, that's what we are using to pay for our city. Of that, our revenue is about 58% property taxes, so over half, almost 3 out of 5 dollars that pay for the city are property taxes. 21% Is coming from other taxes, so things like room rental, vehicle rental, alcohol, and marijuana. Again, some of those are dedicated, so they're going to very specific purposes, but they're part of the overall budget. Um, 3% of that money comes from the state and federal government.

We'll dive into kind of how that's changed over time. Federal government is mostly transportation funding, and there's some grants in there too. Folks on the hillside will know there's some wildfire grants that we are really making good use of, for example. And then the rest of our income, rest of our revenue is really permits, licenses, fines. You know, if you, if you pay your ticket to the city, things like that.

And those are really small. They're a small overall portion, but they're important to remember. So the pie chart on the right here is actually from our 2025 budget, and it really gives you a detailed breakdown. And these slides will be available online as well. So that's kind of a high-level overview of how the city's funded.

So then I'm going to turn it back to Erin to talk about kind of, okay, how do we pay for that? Thanks, Anna. So this is a really fascinating map to me anyway, that talks about the taxable value per acre in Anchorage. And the reason that this is important for us to look at is It reflects that not everyone in Anchorage pays the same amount of tax, and this is a relic. This is a holdover from when the City of Anchorage and the Borough of Anchorage unified 50 years ago.

So service areas are something that were created as a concession to folks who at that time were living way outside of the city, and they didn't use a lot of the city services. They didn't drive on the City of Anchorage roads, and they didn't feel like they ought to be taxed for services that they really weren't using. And so we have these things called Limited Road Service Areas, and they're predominantly up on the hillside. And what that means is that not everybody in Anchorage pays for our services at the same rate, or maybe even at all. So everybody pays for Anchorage School District and area-wide services.

So that includes the library and things like that. Most people, but not everybody, pay into police, fire, and parks. And then road service areas are places where people pay really only for the road maintenance in their area, and— but they don't pay into the road service and the ARDSA, which is the Anchorage Road Drainage and Service Area, which pays for all of the roads in the bowl, essentially. So why is this important? Well, when you look at this map, it illustrates for us what the, what the relative taxation looks like, and you'll notice that there's some big chunks of our city where, like for example, Jay Bear does not contribute to the tax base of Anchorage.

Neither does Ted Stevens International Airport, and obviously nobody's taxed in Chugach State Park. But these are all parts of our city that we still need to like support with roads, drainage, infrastructure, etc. So that's, that's a kind of a broad brushstroke of the way that taxation really doesn't affect everyone in the same way in the Municipality of Anchorage. Another way that we pay for, for stuff predominantly is through bonds. And a bond is essentially a loan that we all as a city agree to use to pay for larger projects.

And this is generally how we have paid for roads and drainage, how we pay for some of our parks. School bonds you will see very frequently on, on the ballot, and then capital purchases for police and fire. There's a heavy equipment levy that is a part of the way that we get funding for things like new snowplows. There was a levy for police cars that was proposed, and so these are things that the voters decide on an ad hoc basis whether or not they are going to fund, or we are going to fund. So I am also a voter.

Now the, the service, or the funds that we pay to repay these bonds, is calculated back into the municipal budget. And Ali dropped a link into the chat for a handout for this meeting this evening, and at the bottom there's a bar chart that shows where, or what the, the proportion of expenditure is for some of our different departments. And you'll see debt service as a standalone line item on that bar chart, bar chart. And that does include our bond repayment, but it also includes debt on buildings that we own, things of that nature. But it gives you a sense of the scale of what our debt costs us as a municipality, because that is something that we have to factor in every year.

Just like a family who owns a home has to factor in the cost of their paying back their mortgage, so we have to do the same thing as a municipality.

See, so some of the, the way that we organize funding for capital projects in Anchorage, so larger projects, drainage, road, road maintenance and rehabilitation, some of those things, parks, things like that. All come through the capital improvement budget, and that is, that is a piece of our budget that we look at every year, and that's accompanied with a capital improvement plan, which is a little bit of a longer range view of what are the things we would like to do, what are the, what are the investments we would like to make in our city over the next 6 years. And a lot of our local projects now are paid for through voter-approved bonds. But it hasn't always been that way. We have had other revenue sources, which we'll talk about in a little bit, that have paid for more of our capital needs in Anchorage.

State and federal funding has shifted significantly over the last decade, and as a result of that, we are shouldering more of the burden for our capital needs, the stuff that it takes to run a city or to to move freely through the city on our roads and our sidewalks.

So we talked really about kind of where the money comes from, the different sources, the things that it pays for, but let's dive a little bit more into what are we paying for, where does that tax money go.

So first, let's back up a little bit and compare ourselves to other communities around the state, so, or around the country, really. So you've probably been to other cities, and you might not have thought about the fact that when you're in that city, you're actually standing not in just in that city, you're standing in a county, you might be standing in a school district, a township, right? There's a whole bunch of different layers of government that many places have. And many of those in most other places have— they each have their own taxation. And so, and they have their own set of services.

As an example, if I'm in a county, then I might be the one running the county hospitals, I might be running county roads, there might be sheriffs, right? There's a lot of different services that counties do. That we actually also do, even though people don't think about the fact that it's a county service. And same with cities. Often cities are the ones doing police, you know, there's plating, there's all these different services.

And so in other places, it might be two different governments you're dealing with, but here you've got one. And so essentially what we've got is one municipality trying to do two sets of services. And so when you compare us, you really need to think about both the city and the county. And so when we do that, we can see that there's about just under 350 cities with 100,000 population or more. So we're We're not huge.

We're not New York City. We're not Chicago. But we are much bigger than most other, you know, kind of small cities. Those small suburbs, like the one I grew up in, was about 35,000. So when you compare to those, you see that we're 75th in population.

So we're not, you know, top or bottom. We are first in geographic area because we are a very large place. Even if you subtract out the mountains and you subtract out the coast, we're still very large. And then we are therefore last in population per square mile. And of course, that does include areas that aren't populated.

But even if you dig into, um, to other places and you really only look at the Anchorage bowl, we are very spread out. Um, and so the implication of that, that we'll get into later, is we have a lot of infrastructure that we pay for to cover and the small population relatively to pay for it. But it's really important just to emphasize that when we look at other cities, we really need to be talking about other cities and other counties or looking at places that do both, 'cause that's really what our budget reflects. So then let's dive into our actual budget. And again, this is a modified version of what's in our budget documents.

This shows our departments. And so you'll see a pie chart and it goes, the largest of our departments is police. And then if you follow it around clockwise, you'll see it's cascading down into those little tiny departments that do a lot of good work, but are not a big part of our budget. So when you look at our top 5 departments, We've got police, fire, maintenance, which is operations and maintenance, things like roads, facilities, all of those kind of functions. Snow plowing is within there.

We've got our transit department or public transit, which is partly funded by federal dollars, but it's showing up here as a relatively big department. And then parks and rec, the folks who manage all of our public lands, all of our trails, all of those kind of services and a bunch of facilities. And we also have debt service in there. Erin mentioned earlier, if we counted debt service, it's actually a pretty big department. It's a big amount of money, but it's not a service in the sense that these other ones are.

So when you look at it though, if you notice, police, fire, and maintenance are just over half of this graph. So that also means that basically most of our property taxes that go to the muni to pay for those services are really paying for those 3 departments. So it's not that you're only paying for those departments with your property taxes, but just for scale again, that really Hits home kind of how big those departments are relative to everything else. And so it means that your tax bill really ultimately just goes to police, fire, and roads. I mean, that's, that's the bottom line with those other funding.

And you'll see that there's a number of other departments, they're too small to show up as labels even, but those are also important services. We have our HR department, you know, any organization that has a bunch of employees needs an HR department, our IT department, Assembly is in there, it's a little tiny sliver, the mayor's office is a tiny sliver, right? There's a bunch of other ones in there that have a function, and are important, but are not the big drivers of our budget. And then conversely, we know we probably need more police, right? We need, we have a large area, we need more police service.

That's a huge priority. And also it's already our largest department. So, so these are just things to kind of keep in mind as we talk about these and really kind of think about the implications of when we talk about when we need more police, you know, that's, that's a pricey proposition, but very important. So let's talk about a couple other things. And these are common questions we get.

Why did my property taxes go up? Earlier I said that our budget is pretty much flat adjusted for inflation for the last 40 years or so, but there's multiple reasons why we've also seen your actual property tax bill going up. So we're going to unpack those, but, but just real briefly, one of them is that our home values have increased. And so the assessed value of your home, if you're paying the same mill rate, the same rate that you're paying that you were 10 years ago, but your home value is doubled, your tax bill is also going to double. So that is a big factor, especially for residential properties, why we have seen tax bills go up, even though it feels like you're paying more for less, essentially.

That's one factor. Another one is that the state and federal money in our budget has decreased, and we'll come back to that point multiple times over. The last one is our cost for services have increased, right? Inflation has hit all of us. It's hit every one of our budgets, and it's hit our city budget.

Things, everything from gas to plywood to nails to markers, all of those things have gone up in cost. And so So those things are also drivers of our budget and kind of things that we have to be budgeting for. So next, people have asked, well, what, what are all the taxes we have? How have those changed over time? And so we did a little catalog.

These are just kind of recent changes because there has been some, and a number of them, all of the ones that are in yellow are actually ones that the voters approved. And so they were put on the ballot typically by Assembly members. But ultimately, the decision was a yes or no from the community at large, those who vote. And so we've had our bed tax. Last time that was increased was about 20 years ago, but we have seen a lot of discussion about that.

That's kind of our most recent major tax that has changed. We also have an alcohol tax and a marijuana tax. Both of those are dedicated. Again, it's a relatively small amount of money, but those are going towards specific things that voters approved. We have increased our residential property tax exemption as a result of a state law change as well.

So that went up recently. So that hopefully gave most people in our city a little bit of a tax break. And then recently last year, the Assembly voted. So this was not a voter-approved thing, but the Assembly voted to increase the exemption for inventory tax. I mentioned for small businesses that have a physical footprint or have inventory, whether it's, you know, vehicles or whatever it is, we increase the exemption so that more of those small businesses are not paying that.

So that helps small business, and it also means the tax bill still has to be paid by everybody, right? And so every time we make one of those exemptions, it does shift a little bit. But what we shifted was relatively small to the, the whole size of the budget. So this is just kind of an overview of kind of how some of those changes have been made. And again, emphasizing that really ultimately voters decide on most tax policy in our city, not all of it, but most of it.

Another question we get often is how, how much have we spent on homelessness? So you'll see there's a QR code there because if you want the super detailed answer, there's a lot more information. But I think this is really the high level and, and kind of people are asking not just how much have we spent, but it's important to say whose money are we spending. And so if we look back the last few years, we know that we had a lot of federal money coming in because if we all remember, we had a pandemic, we had a lot of disruption to the economy, to our health system, to all of it, and it impacted homelessness as well. And so, so you'll see most of those things say HUD or say COVID because a lot of that was federal money that we used to pay for sheltering, to pay for a number of different things, prevention services, right?

Not just in homelessness, but I think it's important to remember that most of that was federal money. So it's one time. Luckily, we have gotten most of our money back that we had spent and were reimbursed by FEMA. So really there's a lot of ways that we have able been able to minimize our local investment or cost, but most of it is federal. And then you will see on the local side, we do have some property tax money going into that.

Our general government is now paying for shelter, year-round shelter for, I think, really the first time in our city at this scale. But we're also paying through alcohol tax. We know that's paid for shelter and a number of other services, including prevention. And then lastly, you know, we know there is a cost to homelessness. Around our police response, our fire and our emergency response, our camp cleanup, right?

There's a number of other costs that aren't, they're harder to really isolate and say it's all homelessness, but it's still an important impact to our budget. And you'll see also we have had some state funding. So a couple years ago we got a grant to operate our shelter in Midtown from the legislature. And I see a couple legislators on, so thank you again for supporting that. We get money or individuals get money through the Housing Finance Corporation, housing vouchers that help pay people's rent, Medicaid and behavioral health.

Those are huge state expenses that we don't see at the city directly, but impact our city. And other things I mentioned, OCS, courts and prisons, those are all places where folks show up that are in the homelessness system as well. And so those are all costs to our system. So that's really the short version. And then if you want a lot more detail, you can use the QR code or go to the Assembly website with our focus on homelessness.

So with that, I'm gonna turn it back to Aaron 'cause we're gonna dive not just in how things are today, but how we got to where we are now. Yeah. So, so I hear this quite a bit from folks who are longtime Alaskans who talk about how things were in the '80s and in the early '90s and how it really seems like, you know, Anchorage has gone downhill, services have declined, that things aren't as good as they used to be. And there is really good reason for that decline. So we, what we need to do, and when we think about the '80s versus now, is, is compare conditions.

And the conditions in the '80s were a lot different than the conditions in the 2020s. So we had growing population, we were in the middle of a boom time, there were lots of new homes, which also means new taxpayers and a more broadly based tax. We had, we were building outward from the core of Anchorage. Lots of construction was happening on the fringes, and we were building a lot of new new stuff, both in the public and the private sector. A lot of new things were being built.

Anchorage in the 2020s is a different picture. We all know that Alaska is a boom and bust state, and changing conditions in oil markets have definitely shifted the needle. We now have a stagnant population. We've been in a period of decline, and it's just been in the last 12 to 18 months that our outmigration has started to stabilize. We have fewer new homes and a lot of the homes that are being built right now are being built in limited road service areas.

So they are not necessarily paying for roads and drainage and maintenance in Anchorage proper. They're only responsible for paying for the maintenance on their little strip of road. We have a lot of legacy infrastructure that we have built roads and pipes, um, things that are not indefinite resources, not— they don't have an indefinite lifespan. And so there's a lot of repair and maintenance that is now required because the new stuff is now old stuff. And unfortunately, that puts us on the hook for maintenance that we didn't necessarily plan well for back when times were really good and the cash was flowing.

The muni is doing a lot more with less dollars at this point. So Anchorage in the 1980s, our budget adjusted to 2025 dollars in the 1980s was $625 million. We had about 60,000 less residents and we, we were spending more per person in Anchorage than we are right now. Or excuse me, we had more income or more revenue per person than we have right now. So we are, we are paying more real dollars to maintain a larger footprint than we did back in the 1980s, and we're doing it with significantly less investment from the state and the federal government.

Just in terms of like the pipes that we have to maintain now, there's a really, there's this I think it's an interesting graphic, um, we have, uh, with, with respect to the road miles and the pipe miles that we have, uh, so back in '83 we had half of the road miles to maintain, um, we have twice as many road miles now to plow, to fix potholes, to repave, to, um, to fix sidewalks. Like, we have a lot more structure that we need to maintain. And the cost as population grows is not linear. So when you think about infrastructure investments for a growing city, you're not just talking about a straight line in terms of the cost to maintain. It's actually exponential when you think about the, the way that the number of feet of pipe per person influences the the total cost to maintain that pipe.

If you're building fire hydrants, for example, the, the cost to maintain those is an exponential curve as opposed to the growth of population being a straight line. And we experienced population growth. We did not think about how are we going to pay to maintain exponentially more infrastructure as a result of being a bigger city. This is a case study from Lafayette, Louisiana, where it compares their population from the almost the '50s to 2015, the population growth versus the growth in infrastructure. We have a very similar story here in Anchorage.

So one of the other factors that we need to take into account is again with the boom and bust of Alaska. Back in the '80s, we were receiving some significant investment from the from the state that helped to fund not just capital projects but also our operating budget. And that meant that our property taxes were offset by state investment. The proverbial tap turned off in the mid-20-teens, and now we have a very tiny percentage of our city budget being funded with state dollars. We did receive a bump in 2024 because the state legislature made a really excellent decision to help fund the Port of Alaska modernization project.

So we got $200 million in capital funding for the port, but in terms of dollars to operate the city of Anchorage, that money is very, very much in the rearview mirror. So we are, we are looking at a difference. If you look at the decade from 2005 to 2015 and 2015 to the present, we got $1 billion more from the state of Alaska in the previous decade than we did in the last decade. And incidentally, we're looking at about $1 billion of deferred maintenance on Anchorage infrastructure over that same period of time. And to me, those numbers are not coincidental.

So again, just to recap, why are we in a different place now? Why are we relying more heavily on property taxes to fund city services? It is a remarkable change in state funding. So in the '80s, about 42% of our budget was funded by state dollars, 36% by property tax, and the balance was made up from some of those other funds and fees and things that are just part of the functioning of a city. And in 2020s, we have less than 1% of our city operations and capital needs being funded by the state.

And about two-thirds of our needs are being funded by property tax, and we have double the infrastructure at this point to be able to maintain. So it's a very different picture, and that means that the burden of operating our city has fallen more squarely on the shoulders of folks who actually live in Anchorage. That is our fiscal present, and that, that change in state and federal investment We don't anticipate that that's going to look much different in the decade to come. That means we're going to need to make some decisions about how we manage our money going forward, and those are conversations again that Member Brawley and I want to have very much out in the public square because it— those are— these are decisions that affect everyone. This is our municipality, and as the, the title of our presentation suggests, this is our municipality, it's our budget, We all need to be aware how it functions and how we can make adjustments as we move forward together as a municipality.

So at this point, we want to encourage you to, to make the budget a topic of conversation. I— we, we can't really move forward well as a community if we're not actively talking about our financial priorities and sharing those in, in public spaces. And I I know we're, we're definitely operating in a time where talking about political things can feel a little bit fraught, but, but something like the municipal budget is, is it's a place where we've got to have these conversations. We've got to have dialogues and, and ask some of the questions about, you know, where, where is money going? How could money be spent differently?

How could revenue be shifted? What other choices haven't we thought through yet so that we can think about and hopefully invest in a better future for all of us? For all of us and for our friends, our neighbors, our kids, our grandkids. And that's really the goal, is to create a thriving community together. So thank you so much for showing up, for giving us your time, and for offering your feedback.

And for those of you that ask questions in the chat, we will get those questions answered and get them out to you. We have all of your email addresses, luckily, so we can send you a follow-up email. If you would like to email us, please feel free to do that. You can send your email to the entire Assembly. And of course, you're welcome to email Anna or I individually if you've got other thoughts to share.

But again, really, really thank you for coming and spending your evening with, with us and for engaging with good faith and participating in civic dialogue. This is what we need to be doing together. So thanks so much. Anna, any parting words? Yeah, I'll throw in 2 things because I know a school budget came up.

So the assembly does not set the school budget. We set the main number. But the school board is going through that process right now, so we encourage you to participate in that process if you're interested in school funding. And similarly, if you're interested— I know Brandy and others have brought up state funding. I think our legislators have signed off now, but they are about to go to Juneau for session, and so definitely reach out to your state legislators, um, not just about what's affecting Anchorage, but whatever's on your mind that you care about in this state.

So really encourage participation there too, but please also come back and work with us on, on the budget. Awesome. All right, y'all, thank you again so much. Have a great evening. We'll leave this slide up in case you want to take down some websites or notes, and we will be in touch with a follow-up email.

Thanks again. Yeah, and stay safe out there.