Community and Economic Development Committee - May 1, 2025

I'm not sure if the recording has begun for the OWL, but I know that the manual reporting has begun. So I just want to put on the record, I apologize for the delayed start of this meeting.

No one, we're recording. Yes, because it'll take a minute for the ship.

Good morning, everyone. I'm going to call this meeting of the Community and Economic Development Committee of the Anchorage Assembly to order. Thursday, May 1st. It is 9:12 AM. I apologize for the late start.

We'll begin with member introductions. Uh, Anne Brawley. Zach Johnson.

I don't believe there are any members online, but if there are, please announce yourself and also feel free to text me to make sure that I know you're here and to get you into the queue.

We have a relatively full agenda. I do want to make a note at the start for the record of anyone listening.

I believe this was the latest meeting start time for this committee since I've been at the helm. It is a technical deficiency today that is giving us some pause and the grace to make sure we have connectivity. Otherwise, I'm much more low-tech and need less high-tech stuff in the first place. So, um, I do not want to waste time on technical— they're not working— rather just make sure we have a conversation. But what was important is that we have access to the public having this information.

So now that that is resolved, at least for the online folks, we'll be able to proceed. But my intention is to keep this meeting on time, starting and ending as best as we can. Also, another note for the record, I do not see new members here, but leadership of every committee is not a certainty. It's not a guarantee. And so while I have the opportunity to be the chair of the committee, I appreciate the support of colleagues.

And I have used the best as I can this committee to both serve its purpose in code, but also in name. And so that we've moved a little bit beyond just the traditional Title 21 conversations, although we have those. We've moved a little bit past the marijuana regulatory conversations, although we have those as well, into a little bit more of the community development conversations. Two items of which represent today around food security, for example. So I just wanted to put that note there for any members, new members that do choose to listen to this recording after the fact, and for the members of the public to get a sense of what this committee is all about.

On that note, we'll move forward with regular reports, and we'll begin with— I saw Lance. Lance, just give us some direction on taking us through the various elements of planning, development, and public works. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And yes, in the meantime, I'll ask the departments to be brief on this update. Um, because we have some presentations at the end.

But thank you. Uh, for the Planning Development Public Works Department, basically the building as a whole, there's a couple things I just want to make members aware of. The first is regarding the technology in this room. I've been meeting with IT and folks that hold AMAS meetings, and I've asked them to sit down with the clerk's office, Mandy, and others to find out what your needs are for recording. So I anticipate some significant upgrades in the future, so the delay will not be the purpose here.

So thank you. The other thing is, um, we and Miss P, the departments in this building participated in a transportation fair with the DOT. One of the products of that was basically a construction map that included transportation projects and other projects. There's sets of the maps over there. We'll get those posted online.

It's all of the construction activity as of basically the beginning of April, and we'll get this— we'll get this map posted. There's names of projects and contact individuals, so use that as you will. Um, for Mr. Johnson and Mr. McCormick, one of the things in the limited road service areas as a result of the election There was some changes in Mursa boundaries. We're getting those maps updated, so we'll make those available to you. The folks in Geographic Information System help us provide those.

They're doing a lot of other work. They're working with the folks in the wildfire, and then they're also working with Heritage Land Bank. For those of you who may remember, we did an analysis of developable property in Girdwood pretty at a high level. We're working to get that through, through some of those HLB properties inside the Anchorage area. That's a work in progress, so more to come.

So just make aware of those. I think for the, uh, for the building, I'll stop there and then turn it over to Greg at Development Services. Great. Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Morning, Mr. Chair. Um, top of mind for Development Services right now is staffing. Uh, yesterday we saw the retirement of our— one of our on-site plan reviewers, one and only mechanical plan reviewer, stormwater plan reviewer, and we did also receive the resignation for our architectural plan reviewer. So we're, um, we've got all those positions are listed.

We're looking at things to do to backfill for plan review in the interim with contract hires. Um, let's see, we're also still down 2 structural plan reviewers, and we—. Oh, yesterday we also lost our mechanical lead inspector. So lots of spaces to fill.

Um, construction valuation. We—. Remember, John, you have a question on that point? Well, yeah, on that, how many people in total? I know you ran through a list of recipients, but I think we are now 7.

Once our architectural—. 7 In just the last couple weeks, uh, yesterday. Essentially, well, two of us— two have been vacant for most, most of these positions, uh, are retiring. So they've been in the positions for a while. Onsite was planning on retiring in December, but she decided to stay to play a role so we could try and backfill her position before.

But obviously not successful mandate. We do have two candidates right now for the onsite planner position and one for the mechanic. So that's— well, seems like a pretty remarkable exodus. Yes, it wasn't just development services.

Um, evaluation-wise, we did hit $189 million construction valuation this week— or sorry, last week. So that does put us at about 25% of where we were this time in 2024. So over 25%.

And then the last thing I'll mention is the right-of-way. Um, the load limits come off on the 5th, May 5th, at least they were for the hillside, and we are anticipating a full right-of-way opening for the 12th. So everything on that map that you see there will be picked off. Um, from development services standpoint, we have, uh, 5 new subdivisions that are either at or near plan approval, preconstruction meeting. So a lot of new, uh, new roads getting built this year.

Is that for development services? All right, great. Uh, I have one question. I feel like someone would ask it if there were more members here, so I'll do it essentially. What is the actual impact to the workflow and the output of the retirees, of the retirements on the April 30th patching date?

Um, well, it's less than ideal. Like I said, we're—. We have a, uh, RFQ going through purchasing right now to bring a former building official to backfill with mechanical plan review. He can also do structural and architectural if needed, so we're really hoping that that'll help out. Um, That was our only mechanical planner, and so right now we have no, no mechanical planner.

We do have a 10-day turnaround on those, so we're hoping, you know, we won't be doing any today, obviously, but get that contract hire in place within the next week or so, then we should be able to get caught up. And before he left, our mechanic did catch up, catch us all up. Structural has been doing a great job keeping up for the last year now as a short staff. Unit. So don't need to state too much going on there.

I just wanted to make sure that we're hearing that there's an increase in interest in doing stuff, and at the same time, we have to make sure that we keep our retention numbers and our staffing numbers. We've had 2 positions open for approximately a year, uh, and we've struggled to find people to apply.

So we're hoping people will apply as much as we can. We do have one remaining on-site plan reviewer who's very busy. Just getting—. In the on-site section right now.

And before I hand off, I should also mention, uh, of the 10 codes we're working on adopting, the 9 committees that we've set up, we have, uh, 2 that are done and, uh, are ready to go to the building board. We have 2 nearly done that will just need to be processed, uh, 3 that are in progress still currently, and 1 is paused. That's the energy code. We're waiting to have meetings with Alaska Housing Finance Corporation since they're working on updating their— theirs to type the 2024. We want to be able to match theirs so that stuff that we approve can meet their requirements as well.

Um, yeah, two questions. Uh, one we can come back to probably another meeting, but just curious about an update on the third-party plan review. But specifically, I'm wondering You know that I know that only covers certain functions, so can you remind what, what function the third-party option covers? Um, that's my first question, and I have a separate question. So for structural, for residential permits, structural, structural, for commercial, they have the option to do structural, mechanical, plumbing, lead.

So that'll meet some of the need but not residential need per se, like with mechanical. There's the potential for that. Not many folks in pigments here are probably And I just want to bring that up because I know we enacted that for both and then we put a sunset on all of it. And so that's not for several months, but I know there's a timeline for that. So I just wanted to—.

I had a note to bring it back on paper. So maybe a future meeting we can get a briefing on kind of how that's gone. And with the staffing shortages, we haven't been able to keep up with the audits, the 10% audit that we were hoping to be able to do for a short 2 structural position that would be doing those audits. Okay. Um, yeah, so, so that's just suggested.

Yeah. Um, and then separate question, just you mentioned different codes. I know it's all part of building code, correct? So are, are we expecting kind of one giant ordinance with all of those pieces, or would it be those pieces one at a time? The intent would be all of them together, depending on when the energy code is completed.

Since that one's been paused, uh, we may submit that later, uh, and then the rest Okay, okay, thank you. Do you want to explain? Thank you. Um, for the record, the job planning department, um, I'll try to keep this very quick. Um, like other departments in the building, we do have some, uh, short staff situations in a couple of our divisions.

Long-range planning is a little short. Um, and so in that review, in short, we are interviewing and hiring.

So, um, and related to that, we have several staff announcements. I'll save most of them for next meeting. Main announcement is that we have a new long-range planning manager. Daniel Foster has agreed to accept that position. Um, for Planning projects, we have the 10-year targeted update of the comprehensive plan underway.

We went to the PCC with an introduction to them of the project and an explanation of what we will be asking them to do as our working group for that project over the next 6 months. Um, there will be a reporting of that session posted on the project website soon.

And all of the project materials listed on that website as well, on that web page as well. Um, we are taking our work plan for the department to KVC at the next meeting on Monday, and we are also working on some data mining for Design Standards Laboratory. Um, Uh, one piece of good news related to that is while we were looking at the data, uh, we noticed that, uh, in 2024 we permitted more legal ADUs in Anchorage and Anchorage Bowl than we had in 20— sorry, 2005. Some good news. And that is Thank you.

I thought I heard there's some good news. Can you repeat that good news, please?

Uh, good news, uh, we have submitted more legal ADUs in Anchorage Bowl, um, as of last year, 2024, prior to 2011. So many questions, but that's good news. The question is, how do we continue, right? What are we doing that is enticing folks? What are they seeing?

I'd love to learn more about it. Mr. Johnson. And what is that number, the bigger number we got last year? The bigger number, I believe, was 25. From not having a lot of starts, 25 is probably an immense amount of starts.

And so that's tremendous to hear the difference across years. Thank you for that work and that update. Public Works, I know I heard that Mr. Col is not with us today, and so Mr. Wilbur will take the lead. Thank you. Um, for Maintenance and Operations Department, they've been obviously doing a lot of street sweeping.

As you see, the DM Department of Transportation is out there doing their roads as well. Um, also they're working on— street maintenance folks are working on pothole work, but a lot of other work on facilities going on in maintenance. They're gearing up for taking over the facilities at the Mountain View Center starting after the first of the year. And thanks to your support, resources to do that. By the way, thanks for your support as all.

So that's a lot of other things going on, but I'll stop right there. Um, project management, engineering, just a couple things I want to mention. Um, Coming your way on the— you're going to see an addendum item. There's a lot of projects going through purchasing, going out to bid right now. One of the documents that you're going to see on the addendum is the construction award for Spark Drive.

It's going to be on the 20th meeting, and you'll probably see some other ones. In general, as the bids are coming in, they're coming in sort of out of time for our on-base process. We're going to be asking administration for some leniency on the addendum item, so we appreciate your support. If you have questions, let us know. Um, and let's see, I think I'll, I'll ask, um, Brandon Toper just to give you guys a short update on what's going on with the ordinance that was introduced, that with the changes we want to make to the process for the design criteria manual.

Um, Assemblymember Zalatel has been working with us and we appreciate her support. So we got some changes in the process we'd like to make. Just give you guys a quick update. Yeah, Brandon Toper, I'm the engineering manager for Project Management Engineering, and, uh, AR— proposed AR 12-133 is, um, specifically intended to, uh, revise how the DCM is approved when it's updated in the future. Um, I just want to real quick touch on some background on the DCM.

Um, we start— uh, the first version was published by the Greater Erie Area Bureau in 1974, um, so it goes back ways. Um, it was updated in 1988, then by the NIST Valley Bank Group and the most recent version was updated in 2007. Again, this value of acreage, PM&E. Um, there was a kind of a turning point in the DCM where in 2014 the Assembly adopted it as regulations. So prior to 2014, from 1974 to 2014, it was a document that was managed and updated strictly by the Department of Public Works and PM&E.

Um, and then in 2014 it became regulation. And so, as part of the adoption as regulation, the assembly outlined a process for any updates that you see in the future. And that process includes going for a public hearing with the Planning and Zoning Commission and then going following on with a meeting at the assembly for approval. And so, at the time, there were some efforts underway to update the DCM from the 2007 version to something more current. And, um, those kind of— due to staffing and other issues, and then, and then the, the, the process that's involved in, you know, taking the DCM to Public Hearing, letting the zoning commission reassemble— those processes, processes have fizzled out at the time, and now we're trying to kind of restart them, get them going.

We're looking at the process and asking the question, you know, does, does it completely make sense that every single change that happens to the document goes through the Planning and Zoning Commission for public hearing and then goes into approval. So, um, we worked with Member Zelitel to kind of come up with a different process whereby we would have 3 different versions of revising or updating the DCM, the lowest level being administrative, and that's for doing things like making corrections if there's a mistake or spelling error, or if, uh, if a reference changes its name or if a website changes location. We currently have in the DCM, we have some dead, um, website links that, that won't take you anywhere anymore, um, and we'd like to get those updated. So that would be an administrative update, which we would do as staff, then we put out public comment, um, with a public notice, and, and then enact them without any additional steps. The next step would be a substantive update, um, or substantive revision.

Which would be a new regulation or a new version of a manual or a guide, an industry standard guide, makes a change to something that we've kind of referenced in the DCM. And so we need to update some numbers within the DCM or some of the content to reflect the changes we've made. So a good example of this is the recent adoption of PROAG, the Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guideline. Um, that's been adopted as regulation. Um, it was drafted for a very long time, um, but our 2007 version of DCM is not approved with, uh, PROAD, um, and it doesn't even reference it because it didn't exist at the time.

And so being able to kind of make an update to say, here's the, here's the current ADA guidelines and here's some changes to the DCM to kind of conform to those things, again, uh, instead of state Instead of staff being directly responsible for that, you would, uh, this type of update, we would have a project management team that would include, uh, members of other departments, um, as needed to kind of bring in the expertise to do the update. But again, it would be the project management team that would do the update. It'd be put out for public hearing— or excuse me, public comment with a public notice, um, proposing that may happen twice. So an initial public comment period with some revisions and responses, and then follow-on public comment period, and then we get implemented without any additional steps. And then the third, uh, third option would be the full update, where maybe there's some totally new guidance that never existed before, never referenced, or some other change that we feel we need to make, being responsive to maybe the needs of the development community or our own needs or maintenance operation needs and so forth.

So under that category, we would again have a project management team draw expertise from other departments to help with the updates. We would also have either a technical advisory committee or an industry stakeholder group, or possibly both, involved in the update so that we can get the industries and other consultants to help with the update. And then we would have a robust public process that would include public meetings and presentations to assembly committees and the Federation community council. Industry professional groups, and then we would follow on with a 45-day public comment period on any drafts. And then once we feel the draft is at a state where it's ready for approval, that, that third option, right?

I'm drawing—. Just one quick question. So what you're describing sounds— well, I guess so the question is, this isn't Code, right? This is a technical manual. Okay.

And then, um, because I know we don't really have regulations at the city level, or I guess that they exist, but they're not really used. But it sounds like more like this is like a— at the state level, you'd have a department that does regulations and they adopt it. It sounds like that's kind of what you're describing. Yeah, more so than a code update, which is more like statute, right? So there are sections of code that explicitly reference the PCM for certain criteria.

It is referenced, but yes, it's not going to cut up to itself. Right. Just to follow up along with that, make sure I understand that. You described that a previous assembly in 2014, I believe you said, adopted— took action to adopt the DCM from 2007, essentially. And in that adoption created a series of process that you just described that was quite long to me, um, and dependent on all things working.

So a little Pollyanna, if you will. And what I mean by that is because essentially then the criteria hasn't been updated. So we locked— this body was locked, locked itself into a process that depended on updates regularly happening that haven't happened in almost 20 years.

So just to flag for Assembly members and future new Assembly members and the administration, that ain't it. That's not a good process at all. We should have a little more force— forward thinking, to make sure that we can, like, with all the different types of reviews that were just described in the process, I would imagine that those reviews can't happen because of the levels of staff. And so at a certain point, we can't set up processes that we can't live up to. And, and then at the same time, be champions of growth and development.

Because then people come happy, come into our process, and it's broken. And it's broken at the start because it was never designed to work past the decision makers of the moment. That's weak. And I'm not calling attention to any individuals, but as process, that just doesn't land in a space where we're going to get out of, uh, cyclical nature of being broken and not being able to fix it. So thank you for flagging that for me.

And it's not a critique on past members. I think people use what they have, but if I can— if we can ask better questions, help us have better questions so we can be a little more forward-looking down the line. And we don't want— we can, we can, we can be predictive of some obvious challenges, or at the very least make sure the resources are there to do the things we say we want to do. Thank you, sir. Continue.

I think that's it for project management. For traffic, just a couple things. Greg mentioned the weight limits coming off, and for those of you who live near End Street, 16th, Patterson, or Barbara, the traffic department's been out putting the sheros in. They're starting their efforts to update the paint on the ground. And to that point, the Paint and sign shop, they have gone on— they, you know, in the summertime they work from basically 10:30 at night until 6 o'clock in the morning, and they're out.

So as the streets are getting swept, those folks are right behind them doing some painting and a lot of other things going on in traffic. But yes, turn it over to Ms. Briggs in real estate. Thank you. Good morning, Tiffany Briggs, real estate department.

A couple quick updates at our last HLPAC last meeting, we had a really good work session with ACDA to talk about their Third Ingra RV Resort project. Our commissioners had great questions, and our next step would be at our meeting this month to do a resolution of support. Assuming that the commission signs off on that, then it will be coming to the assembly for a lease. To the ACDA for that project. Um, at the last committee meeting, um, I was asked for an update on the Totem parcel.

I did reach out to Mr. Anderson with the school district. He said he talked with the, uh, school board vice president who has been in contact with some members of the assembly. He didn't say who, and they were talking about Um, the totem parcel and also maybe this bus barn parcel they were thinking of. He didn't give me a lot of details. He said give me another couple weeks, he would have a bigger update for me.

So to be continued.

Right on. A word of caution, um, to colleagues up here and the colleagues who are not here who may be joining us. Um, as best as folks can, like, that seemed half to me. It's a report. And when this body moved to make sure that that totem property was out of the ASD portfolio, it was to be transferred to the municipality, and then we determined what we're going to do.

And at a certain point, my savage sovereigns— and I described that about my colleagues because we all can do what we want You know, getting— get interested and start trying to cut other conversations. And, and that's great. People have that right, the capacity. The problem for me though is we still haven't transferred the property. So I would like transactions happening that we say we want to do, get them done, and then start layering on all the other stuff that my colleagues are good at adding on to.

And so that's just a word of caution to all of us, because we've been sitting on this, can it get transferred? And that was a hot item. We still need to do it. I know that there are some other people trying to connect some dots. That's cool.

Um, but it still lingers, and we need to get it over the hurdle, because if a phone call comes in today for a better use We cannot take advantage of it today because we're meandering. And so I want to call the school district because when they received the word from Ms. Buck, when they voted on that at the school board, it wasn't to then put it into this other process. It was to get it done. Let it come into our portfolio out of their portfolio. This needs to happen ASAP.

Thank you for the update.

Cool. Are we done with all that? I hear ACDA is here and they have some good news on some updates. So Mr. Robbins, thank you, sir. So through the chair, thanks.

But come a little closer though so we can have you on the out. Just make it make sense. Good work. Well, I have your note. Uh, just a couple things.

I don't know if we've announced to this body that, that our development director Jim Weingarten retired, and we hired a new development director, Chad Stovall, who was the state director for HUD for the last 4 years. Uh, and so I'm pretty excited about that. It's putting together some new, uh, focus on helping the mayor this body reached the goals for housing, and we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks. There's been some questions about the Transit Center and what's going on at the— shouldn't say the Transit Center, we call it 6th Avenue Mall, where the Downtown Transit Hub is located, and what's happening there. With, back in November, we started a process working with Transit to, to move them back into that facility because they had been sort of parceled and pieced out around downtown.

We've been working really closely with them to improve the rider experience at that space. We've increased security there. We've done a lot of remodeling, and I think that, that we've accomplished our goal, which is to make a safer, uh, rider experience for the transit folks who catch the bus there, both the downtown workforce and those who move out of the downtown hub. In fact, I can tell you that year over year, we track the number of removals we have, the number of times that our security touches people at those spaces. And the, of course, removals are up inside because we didn't have a lobby last year.

So there was no inside removals, but the curbside removals and the removals from the garage in that area are down by 12%. So the way that, ACD is managing that facility now, I think has made a big difference in the way that that facility is being used by the public and by those, uh, folks who are moving around downtown. Um, we are currently, uh, working with two different ideas or concepts for the redevelopment of that mall. Um, I can't disclose all of the details yet because I don't have signed deals, or we don't have any contracts, but one of them you'll become very aware of very shortly. One of the ideas, because it's— it'll become public here, I think, in the next week or 10 days based on the process that they're involved in.

And we're excited about either one. Our goal is to redevelop the— we have 18,000 empty square feet of mall space there that's not being utilized right now. It includes office and retail and potential restaurant, uh, to create some sort of a hub. We haven't given up for thrown out the idea of housing or, uh, some other hotel or some other process, but we have been in contact with two different groups who reached out to us and asked about redeveloping that space. So that's the update on the Transit Center.

Glad to answer any questions if anybody has them.

More—. Well, you— I wish I could talk about it now because I'm real excited about a couple of these ideas, but Again, one of the processes you'll know about probably before I get a chance to tell you. The other thing is that I thank you to HLBAC. We had a great work session with them to talk about the third, uh, Nigra RV Resort. They had some really great questions.

You know, uh, there's a couple of folks on the AC committee that have a lot of knowledge that we don't have necessarily at ACDA, and so it's great to get some of those questions and work through those answers with them. So that process is taking place, and I think the meeting is set for May 22nd. We look forward to coming to you. We of course anticipate a positive outcome there. Um, we hope that that will happen and the commissioners will vote.

And our goal is to get that out to RFP for a developer and an operator this summer. So we're, we're really hoping to get that done as soon as possible. Uh, and then we have started our, our on work on our Priority Housing Project, which are the lots that we acquired from you guys based on— they're from the city. Uh, we've hired, uh, Lang and Associates, and they've now started the planning process or the replanning process, thanks to Lance and his department for helping. Because again, these guys are experts at what they're doing, and, and they're helping us to smooth that process out and make it flow.

Uh, we're combining the two lots there. We have two small lots, but by combining them, we can— instead of trying to build two more-unit buildings, we'll be able to build much much more efficient use of that space. We have, uh, you'll notice if you drive by that spot, one of the things we promised to the assembly is that as soon as we took control of that, that we would sort of make that look like something was happening there. And so we have moved cement planters over there, we have hired Green Connection, and they'll be planting flowers and plants. So when you drive by that space, it won't look like a big empty burned-out spot anymore.

It looked like the city is doing something with it, and I think that's important for the neighborhood. We put up a sign there, and I think we've got a dozen calls from people just driving by and seeing the sign going, what are you doing? You gonna put a homeless shelter there? So, always a big first question. Uh, again, we tell them we're not necessarily doing that.

So, uh, there's a lot of other projects, but those are the big developments. I certainly can answer any questions for anybody if you have them, but we're excited. We're looking forward to helping the mayor and this body reach the housing goals. That's great. Thank you, Mr. Robbins.

I don't see any questions. Thank you for the update, being with us. We don't have any items for unfinished business, and, uh, we have a few presentations. And I'm appreciative that Visit Anchorage is with us today, uh, to do a presentation on the annual report. And I saw Jeff, so I'll— you come forward, introduce yourself, and actually the floor Thank you.

Um, it looks like we have a screen that will work. You know, it's, it's funny to go from wishing that everybody takes as much time as possible to wishing everybody can hurry up so that I don't feel like I'm holding up everybody when we get close to our stop time. So, uh, for the record, I'm Jack Bonney. I'm the Vice President of Communications at Visit Anchorage. I know there are a lot of familiar faces in this room, but for anybody who's not familiar with Visit Anchorage, we're a 501(c)(6) nonprofit company.

We're tasked by the Municipality of Anchorage to represent all of the municipality as a place for leisure time, for travel, for meetings and conventions business. So that's our bread and butter. I wish Julie could be here today, but she just couldn't make it due to scheduling. Uh, I want to say really quickly that Mr. Martinez talked about going beyond Title 21 and talking about community development. Part of the reason that I'm here today is because of a conversation we had maybe even 2 months ago now.

It feels like it was yesterday, but it's been a bit.

He suggested that we start coming to these, so we're going to start by sharing kind of a miniaturized version of our annual report to the community. Typically, we present this in front of the public and our industry in late January or early February. What I'm going to do today is shrink down that presentation, talk a little bit about 2024. Talk a little bit about what we see coming in 2025, and then I've mixed in some early-on Q1 results and just some cool stuff that's happening right now. Feel free to stop me as we go.

I'm not too keen on doing this on the rails, but here we go. I'll help you with time management. Yeah, tell you what, give me a, give me a hard— I used to work in television, dude, so if you want this to be 10 minutes, I can do that. If you want me to do 5 minutes, I can do So this is my TL;DR slide. This is what you get from me if you were sitting next to me at soccer practice with the kids.

How's tourism doing? So 2024 was really, really good in a lot of ways. We had increases in travel spending, increases in the number of jobs in leisure and hospitality and wages that those jobs were getting. We had an increase in tax collections. If you look at 2024 compared to 2023, there are some metrics where we're down slightly.

We believe that some of that is 2023 was an exceptional year here in the best possible way. You had a whole bunch of people hanging on to money that they hadn't been able to spend, got a whole bunch of people who were eager to get out traveling again, and they went big. So to say that 2024 was off slightly compared to 2023, I think what you're really seeing is the, the resumption of a trend line that you could have had in '18-'19, with 2023 being significantly up and 2024 still being one of the best years we've ever had in travel and tourism, but perhaps a little bit less of that snapback. Um, what's 2025 look like? If you'd asked me that question in December, I would have said we're on track for a really good year, one of our best, um, top 5.

I think as the months have gone on, the last 3 to 4 months, we've seen some wobble. Um, we have some solid advanced bookings, but we're hearing anecdotally that, uh, the phones maybe slowed down for people as they were taking bookings in the private sector. Uh, we're seeing on a national level some increasing concern or skepticism about the economic outlook. Um, as recently as the last couple of months, we've seen some domestic air carriers scale back their predictions for domestic air travel. Which is concerning, to say nothing of all the international stuff around tariffs and trade— visas, you name it.

So there's an increasing amount of instability and some stuff that could drag down our results here in Alaska. Even some Alaska-grown developments that could drag down that aren't specific to our community but do have ripple effects. I'll get into those a bit. So all that to say, I think it's more important than ever that we invest in tourism marketing. We're really trying to invest in getting in front of the travelers this year to make sure that those results are as strong as they can be.

Go ahead and slide it up the next one. I'm not going to spend too much time on this. If you read the— if you look through the slide, this is just where we are. We had air travel up about 4% compared to last year. Uh, really interesting little stat here: the volume for the non-summer months at the airport actually grew faster.

They were up 5%. And I should point out really quickly that this is a TSA count, so this is everybody going through the Anchorage Airport, including residents. We're all in the mix. We know we like to travel too, but, uh, sign of an overall health trend. Cruise stable from the year before.

We're seeing some tremendous growth worldwide in cruising. We're working on the assumption that every berth that comes into Alaska is full. That's, that's kind of been the standard for most of the time that I've been in travel and tourism. That was definitely— there was an exception to that in 2020 and 2021 when people were hesitant to be on a cruise ship. We anticipate that those berths will be full again this year.

I think the really big X factor for 2025 is whether the type of traveler who books a cruise decides to spend as much as they were planning to, given all that economic uncertainty. And so the overall visitation could stay stable, but the spending habits could change significantly. Um, I'll just go through these really, really quickly. Almost $1 billion in traveler spending. This is a really low side estimate that's based on some credit card reporting data.

This is only Visa cards and only spending that happens across the table in Anchorage. So we're not talking about advanced bookings. If I'm in my— if I'm in my house in Ohio and I book a Hilton meeting room here in Anchorage, that spending number doesn't show up in that billion dollars. Leisure and hospitality jobs— I already talked a little bit about this. We are back above our leisure and hospitality hires globally.

We're also seeing, based on some Bureau of Labor Statistics findings, that the wages in that sector could be up as much as 30% compared to 2019. This is exceptionally good for people who have careers in tourism and possibly concerning if you're trying to run a business. So everything is— the costs for everything are increasing. Wages go up is a good thing. However, it does mean that there is a more expensive cost to do a business.

And then the last two I think are probably closest to home for most of the municipality here in the room. Last year we anticipate about $45 million in total hotel bed tax collections, and that includes short-term rentals that remit hotel bed tax as well. And then about $9 million in car rental taxes. Car rental tax is surprisingly actually down a little bit from 2003— or 2023, I should say. I think again, that's definitely due to Snapback.

There was a limited amount of other transportation options in 2023 as stuff still came back online, and so we saw more car rentals in the year prior, in 2023, than we did in 2024. Move on from there. I just want to give you this one because it is such a cool thing. I wish that the, the ad would play because it's so rare that we as Alaskans get to see the creative stuff that is out in the marketplace from travelers domestically and internationally. If you jump into the version of this that's in PowerPoint, I encourage you to go look at it because it is targeted at lower 48 folks.

It's one example of a really large campaign that we ran with a company called Epsilon. And I just want to drive this home because it has some really interesting spending data. So with this ad, it's a digital ad that plays on websites and based on people's exposure to that ad, we're actually able to track not only their web browsing habits. I know that's creepy, but also their spending habits when they're in town. And we find that for the investment that we made with this, of about $175,000, there's $4.6 million in spending in the destination by visitors who saw those ads.

Now I'm not gonna say that everybody who saw that ad, that was the reason that they booked their trip. Obviously this was probably exposed to some people who already had travel plans and just showed up with a habit that they were interested in. But it does mean that there's about a 26 to 1 return on ad spend for this campaign. We don't get that kind of detail with everything that we do as far as advertising goes, But I think it's really heartening and encouraging to see the power of an ad like this in the market itself. Um, um, no, no, no, it's not, it's just not my expertise.

But it works. I really appreciate it. I will say one more thing about that. The spending, we're able to break it up by zip code. And we see that spending not only downtown, but in area codes like 99515 and 99515.

We know that that spending isn't located only in one place in town. And that's good because our mission is to spend— to spread the benefits of travel and tourism across the community.

I could hit you over the head with some numbers, and I will, but this is kind of the human element. This is more of the unseen stuff. This is us at trade shows, trying to work through PowerPoint technical difficulties in rooms all over the place to train travel agents, introduce Alaska and Anchorage to tour operators. The lower left there is a very large trade show, IPW, that we go to every year that generates tons of new business investment in travel tours and businesses. Those folks in the center, most of those folks are volunteers that work at the visitor information centers.

They donate tens of thousands of hours making sure that people understand what there is to see and do and getting them all over the place while they're here. Um, I'll spare you the numbers, but there's, there's an absolute metric ton of work that goes into this.

Two of my favorite stats before we get too far: 3.4 million sessions on Anchorage.net, had 153,000 people get their eyes on the official guide to Anchorage, either something that we mailed to them in advance or as a digital copy. Um, we hosted more than 30 events for businesses, and there were 30 more that were hosted by the community, either because there was an opportunity to meet visitors, there was an opportunity to support a community group that is doing the work, or just because of where people were when they were having fun. Okay, so that's all of the, the reports of the community, how 2024 is, how 2025 might be. Um, I just wanted to pause and talk about some of the interesting things that are going on right now. So the first 3 months of the year, we've seen pretty stable hotel performance.

Again, I have a high degree of concern that rate could drop as those economic concerns come to light, as people hesitate. That's when you'll start to see things come down. That's good if you're concerned that hotel prices are too high. It's bad if you're concerned that hotel bed tax collections might fall. We published a new Fisher Guide to Anchorage.

It's out now. I've got a spare copy with me if anybody wants to take a peek here in the room, but it's online as well. As well. We've gotten some really excellent media coverage in the first few months of the year. Condé Nast Traveler came up and covered the Iditarod, and you would never ever know from the coverage that it was a very sketchy year as far as snow.

They had an excellent time. We're also one of the top 50 places and top 25 places to visit in both Travel Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler. That's Anchorage specifically, not Alaska. How's the summer looking? I have a couple of folks in the private sector who have already soared from their own luggage on April 28th.

The first cruise ship came into Whittier, so it's already started. Cruising is about 40% of our summer visitation most years, so just to give you kind of a context. If you didn't see it day before yesterday, there's a new show on PBS by the chef Patty Jimenez, who is Mexican and a U.S. citizen, and she's traveling the Pan-American Highway route. She started in Ukiabek, she came through Anchorage, and she's on her way all the way to the tip of South America. Her first, her premiere episode is actually in Kiyavik, but also Anchorage, and then some Prince William Sound and Homer stuff.

It's really worth taking a look at if you want to see. She did an excellent job of finding many different facets, many different voices here in Anchorage, and we were proud to be able to sponsor that show in a way that got them here and got them deeper in the community than they were planning to. All credit to Patti and her team. They did an excellent job finding places. Coming up next week, uh, it's already May, we're hosting an event called the Anchorage Travel Expo at the Denina Center.

In the olden days, we called this the Frontline Training Trade Show. It was an opportunity for us to train all of the motorcoach drivers, Bell staff, uh, really the frontline of travel tourism to understand the product that's available to their clients so they're able to better help their own guests in the summertime. This year we've decided to expand it and make it open to the public, so, and the hours will actually include 5 to 7, so an after-hours thing, with the intent that we should be able to teach our own residents what's new and what's different and what's going on out there. So I hope you have some time on May 7th. We also partnered with a company based out of the UK called Great Big Story.

You may be familiar with them in your YouTube feed. They do just really cool stories about world travel, interesting people in communities. They came up and covered the Native— the NYO Games in late April. We expect that to premiere in mid-May. That was another one that we were able to underwrite so that they spent the time here and really understood what Anchorage was about and the context around the games here.

And then our new restaurant guide will be available probably by the middle of May at the latest. This is one that Every time somebody says that print is dead and we should stop doing printed things, I just tell them the story of the time that I tried to kill the restaurant guide. Between the restaurants themselves and motorcoach drivers, they said, please don't ever take this away. It is literally the thing that goes into everybody's hands when they stop in Anchorage for lunch. So we're really proud of that as well.

Wheelbarrow worries with opportunities. So Good news, bad news. Uh, good news: there's still a really high intent to travel among high earners. High earners tend to be the people who visit Alaska and visit Anchorage because it is a resource-intensive proposition. This isn't driving next door, this isn't going to your nearby urban center, this isn't visiting Grandma.

This is, this is where a lot of people, uh, a very expensive and very time-consuming trip. This is rare. We see increased cruise capacity and increased airlift. Like I said, we've seen some at least national concern about whether TULIP is going to hold up. 2025 Looks pretty good for meetings here in Anchorage.

Bookings are really good. There's about $118 million of economic impact from meetings sold just last year. I've already talked a little bit about the kind of coverage that Anchorage has seen recently. And really heartening for a place that is obsessed with summer, because we live in Alaska and summer is awesome, we see an increasing appetite for travel in all seasons. Even if you ask people this summer why are they here, what are they most excited about, I bet you one of them is going to say the Northern Lights.

And as we all know, that only happens from September to April. So there's a really strong encouraging shift to offer a year-round product or double down on something that's really specific to the non-summer months, like Nordic Ewing or fat tire biking or cross-country skiing. Challenges, um, lagging consumer and business confidence. I don't think I need to tell anybody in this room that people feel weird about where the economy generally is headed. We don't know what that means for people spending.

We just know that when people are concerned about their savings accounts or their retirement accounts, that they tend to scale back on travel in general. That's been less true. We have some studies from MMGY, a nationwide— nationwide firm that suggests that there's kind of a gap, there's a split where lower income is deprioritizing travel quicker, where people making, say, more than $100,000 or $200,000 are continuing to prioritize travel. I don't like that gap. I think travel should be something that everybody can enjoy.

But for the time being, the most likely Alaska travelers don't seem to have that same hesitation to book. Um, take that for what it is.

Uh, look, yeah, looking forward, uh, 2026 and beyond for meetings in Anchorage look softer, and I think some of that is a hesitation based on grant funding. We've already heard from some meeting planners that they have to scale back either because their event is supported by grant funding or because the people that are in the room or their meeting are furloughed or taking early retirement, or you name it. So that's a really concerning thing to see, not just in Anchorage, in general. There is an ever-increasing amount of domestic and international competition for this. I think as the tariff stuff starts to go back and forth, I wonder if we don't get a little bit more people staying closer to home and booking US trips.

I genuinely don't know how that plays out this summer.

Yeah, let's, let's move along. Okay, so I'll bring it all home this way.

I guess I do want to add one more thing on that last one. Especially based on the excellent map of some of the public sector investments. I think there's a parallel response or parallel activity in the private sector to invest in property. So if you look at the Hotel Captain Cook redoing Tower 2, the Hilton fully redoing their hotel, the Aviator, the Wild— becoming a Wild Birch, converting to a 252-room hotel with a new restaurant, Nadena buying the Portage Glacier Cruise and Ali investing in Wild Birch Hotel. There's a ton of private sector investment that is very, very encouraging here locally, and I hope that some of these challenges don't sour people on the opportunities that are here.

I should say that all of that private sector investment is parallel to stuff like the Town Square Park project and wave binding and the RV Resort. So I don't want to be overly rose-colored glasses here, but I do want to pause and say there's some really cool stuff happening. You should celebrate that.

And then the last slide is just the stuff that I wish I had time enough to talk about, but just wanted to send you a couple of links. So if you can't find Patty Inige's, uh, Americana, or the Anchorage Is video series, which features among other people Eric Leggett of Tl'ut'na and Drew from the artist who's got the mural inside the co-op. It's really worth a look. Local Conversations all just teases the other thing that's very much in our house this, this summer. We invite members of the community to come and present a topic of their choice to visitors.

There's no set schedule. I'm the only guy with a PowerPoint. They don't get PowerPoints.

And just to encourage people to have conversations with residents while you're visiting. That starts on May 7th. I think Castle's Creation, Pink Hat Man, is going to be the first one to do that, but we'll have dog mushing, botanists, Alaskan Native culture bearers throughout every week starting on May 7th.

I appreciate the patience of nobody derailing me, but I'm happy to take questions if anybody's got questions. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Yeah, I guess to the point about challenges, yeah, I don't want to do the opposite and be too gloom and doom, but I mean, this state runs on federal money and it's being cut. So I guess the question is, I don't know how much Visit Anchorage does advocacy. Have you been speaking to our congressional delegation about this concern because I think— and also when people lose their jobs, they don't have money. When people, uh, when all of our prices go up, they don't have money to travel.

So I guess what I'm hearing is what you're saying is people with a bunch of money will be fine, and that runs our economy to some extent in the travel or that sector. But, um, what are we doing to, to really say like, this, this is going to harm all of us? Yeah, I think particularly through our involvement with the Alaska Travel Industry Association and individual conversations both with state lawmakers. We didn't talk about this at all, but the state has similarly decided to fund the statewide marketing and promotions effort at a lower level than historically. All this is up until they pass budget.

Right now, I think it stands at $2.5 million for the whole state of Alaska to promote itself as a visitor destination. So good news, bad news for Anchorage, we have a larger share of that voice and an opportunity to feature ourselves more prominently. On the other hand, we have to shoulder a bigger burden because we're unable to leverage those old state campaigns that used to be us standing on the shoulders of the giant statewide campaign. That doesn't exist anymore, and it's very uncertain what level it's going to be funded at. I think aside from that, back to your original question, even the perceptions are— we've certainly had individual travelers I'm not gonna say it's a ton, but say half a dozen, reach out to us either by phone or by email and say, hey, I'm hearing something, something about federal hiring.

What does this mean if I want to go to Denali National Park? What does this mean if I want to take even just a trip that uses air traffic control services to fly to Anchorage? All of those perception things are really huge challenge and Our task right now is making sure that people understand that so far as we know, everything's going to be open. That from what we have heard, those places like national parks have front-loaded so that their visitor-facing staff is going to be priority. I'll put aside for a minute what that means to long-term things like maintenance or trails or building or infrastructure, any of that stuff, but also that they understand National parks are national parks for a reason, and if you want to see the Denali, you absolutely should.

If you're going to Denali because you want to see a moose, I got a deal for you— there's a ton of those right here. So that's not to, that's not to try and draw people away from national resources, just to remind them of opportunities that are right here without large travel, without any serious travel. Yes, all things advocacy, but also public education.

Right on. Obviously, we can talk. I appreciate you taking the, uh, taking my invitation to come in. Let me pass that regard on to Julie as well. And I hope that members of the committee and also our staff that has the opportunity to be a part of this committee regularly report and see the value in the information you provide.

I think it provides us some really good insights. It's about the positive aspect as well. And I think we should have that more often happening and celebrating stuff. I will leave just two questions. You can follow up with more information.

I would be interested in when you look at the spending habits and the spending data, getting a sense of the number of transactions that that represents and the average value of the transaction. You know, get a sense of like what—. Where the cash is going. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

Appreciate it. Thank you for that, and we'll move right along on our time for our presentations. I'll just give a heads up that the good news about the final two items for new business is that they're my presentations and I don't have to talk a lot. There's some quick things that folks could look at, and it's really more for introduction today to the concepts. And so we have some— I think we'll be on time today despite starting a little bit late.

So, uh, if folks are here for the site access, then let's go. I didn't see if there was a team site access conversation. Hi everybody, uh, thanks for having us. Daniel McFoster, Long Range Planning. I think also online we have Holly Torres, who ran the public engagement side of this.

So any questions can go to her. I'll go through the slides really quickly unless Holly, you wanted to start first and talk a little bit about the process. No, with the time constraints, why don't you just go for it?

So, site access is a project that's been a couple of years in the making, and this is hopefully including that project.

Okay, so site access, um, let's just jump into it.

What is site access? Very basically, it's how does somebody get from the public street onto private property? That's the site. How does somebody access the site? As it got constituted, it became a whole set of rules related to the way a building looks, the way a driveway should look, how much space you can park in front of a house, where the doors should be.

That the whole set of activities and behaviors, how people go from the public road to the private street. It's— it became a lot of stuff. So here's the timeline. In January to October of 2021, there was a site access parking project in the Planning Department. The site access parking AO was introduced in September 2022.

In November 2022, Assembly adopted AO 2280S, which governs the parking mandates and also sort of changed the direction of that project. So, Site Access then became its own AO. It was 2023-50. That was adopted in July 2023 to go into effect in January 2024. As soon as it went into effect, there were immediately some issues that got identified by the development community.

You know, a lot of feedback from Cook Inlet, some other local builders. And so, in 2024, 2024-AA passed, was a moratorium on the Site Access standards. Until November 2025. Then we were— the planning department was directed by the assembly to put a working group together to figure this out, and we were working on it until then. And then we went to the Planning and Zoning Commission on March 3rd.

So if you want more detail about any of this stuff, look for the plan at the March 3rd, 2025 Planning and Zoning Commission meeting. And then currently we're planning to go to the assembly in May, so May 20th, I think. So, uh, just what it was— the initial version of site access had a different set of standards that applied treat all these places on the map differently from places outside of the map. So, here's what it looked like. On the left was all the rules that applied on the inside, and the right was all the rules that applied on the outside.

So, where— how many windows you can have, what the front of the building could look like, how much foot driveway you could have, where you can park vehicles. So, there was a lot of content here. Fundamentally, it really comes down to there are many places in Anchorage where it's hard to tell where the street ends and the sort of private property begins, because we have so many garages, or so many driveways. And that creates a really tough public realm, right? If you're using the street, it's no longer clear where the street ends and private property begins.

And this ends up creating a lot of potential conflict. So if you're walking down the street or driving down the street, it feels like the whole thing is a street. So there could be potential threats all over the place. So a lot of this project was sort of redefining that and really looking at the street and reducing the risks of the street, or maybe increasing the certainty of users of the street. So this is one of the more A more sort of, you might say, traditional neighborhood.

And you can see here, there's a lot less access, fewer access points to the street. I'll go back one. Here, tons of access into the street. Here, less access to the street. So, site access is sort of managing all those pieces and thinking about how do people move from public to private.

Let's see, here's another one. So, this is a sort of in-between neighborhood. Again, you don't have too many driveways. You have some spaces that aren't interfacing to public and private, but there's still a lot of street space. And then here is sort of what I think a lot of people think about.

For many people, this is a really nice ideal and attractive thing. And here there's actually no access, vehicular access on the street, because these houses take access off an alley. And so you have a hard curb, you have separation between the curb and the sidewalk, and that's really nice. This is really expensive though, and actually Anchorage doesn't really build like this anymore because this requires an alley. For people to get into their garages.

And the subdivision code doesn't require alleys anymore. We do have alleys. Alleys are great infrastructure, but the reality is most of Anchorage does not have alleys. Um, here's another example that— this is, I think, what site access sort of— why we did this project in the first place. A property like this, it's just, it's hard to tell where the property ends, the street begins.

And for a user of the street, you could potentially have people driving out from any point. So what this project tried to do is establish new standards that would set a sort of some boundaries on that and better define where the property ends, the street begins. And that also gives the street a little bit more structure, a little more safety. Moving forward. So here's an example.

This is really basically what we came up with is that trying to get away from really wide driveways. So this is a 40-foot driveway in an older neighborhood and getting to a point where now you get a 28-foot driveway and anything beyond that, you have to have a physical separation so people can't just be crossing the property line at any spot. And a lot of that is about protecting right-of-way, because when you have a driveway that takes the whole frontage, that's that much right-of-way that cannot be used for anything else. It can only be used for accessing that. You can't park there, you can't store snow there.

And public right-of-way is public, so we have to sort of defend our curb space and manage our curb space. And this is helping to do that because it's requiring that physical separation. Everybody still gets the 20-foot driveway. That's a pretty Why drive it? I mean, that's 2-way traffic, almost commercial standard.

So, but it allows you to sort of break it up. So you get 20 feet, you got 12 feet and 12 feet, or you get 120 foot. It does not— also, we looked at public streets and private streets, and we sort of figured that private streets are a different issue. They deal with snow management and parking differently. So site access doesn't apply the same standards there.

It's just an example. And of course, alleys. I mentioned alleys. Alleys are also public right-of-way. They're really a fantastic sort of valuable asset.

They're worth their weight in gold. We just don't have that many of them. If you look at how many alleys are there in Anchorage, this is all the alleys that we have, and not all of them are in great condition either. So a lot of our discussion focused around it, even though most of Anchorage doesn't have alleys. It'd be great if it did, but when you're building— to build an alley is sort of— you're essentially building, you know, 80% of the second street.

That gets really expensive. Some of the older parts of Anchorage were designed and platted and built with alleys, but many new parts weren't. So, it's hard to retrofit Anchorage into that ideal when most of Anchorage has a new build map. Some things we did sort of really make sure we focused on was, and changed slightly, is how people get from the street again, walking. So, we looked at where the door is located, whether it's visible or not.

And a big thing that came out of this is looking at If some of these are streets problems, maybe we should address them in the street. So we're doing design criteria manual updates, Brandon earlier, Complete Streets through AMAS, the municipality of Anchorage Long Range Transportation Strategy got adopted last month, and the official streets and highways plan update. And all those are looking at, looking at our rights of way and managing those towards public priorities a little bit better rather than having private property address that through zoning. We're going to— we want to address that through roads, specific right of way regulations. Other things the code does is it ensures that, you know, an entrance is always covered.

It ensures you have a certain number of windows and transparency on the front and the side of buildings. And, um, yes, so any questions, bit of a lightning round, be glad to talk about it. And Holly's also here to talk about any process questions as well. Uh, yeah, and I'll just add, um, myself and Mr. Boland were involved in this, but thank you to the planning department because really you took— you guys took the lead. Um, my question is, um, Just to bring it back.

So, November 2025, we have a set of code that's paused right now. This is intended to replace that. If this doesn't pass for any reason, or we don't take action by November 2025, what happens? And what is the implication of it? That's a good question.

I think because also there's the design standards moratorium. And so I think we've discussed it's going to probably be an assembly decision whether you want to adopt this into the moratorium. You want to adopt it with maybe an effective clause for a later date. But that would be a big policy issue because some of the things in here are not in the more— and a lot of our partners in traffic and PM&E, they've said these would be really helpful to get those changes in, and they'd like to see that. But I think that's a really big question.

I don't know what—. If I can clarify, maybe the question is about kind of the code that is paused right now, so not the design standard, but that is a thing to work out. But for this one, if we put the code that was not working back into place, what happens?

We got a lot of feedback that said it was, it was all extremely difficult to use. So a lot of people, they were not able to build what they were trying to build. And, you know, in many of these projects, you need to be planning 1 or 2 years out. And so it effectively halted a lot of projects. Like Cook Inlet housing was a big a big participant in our work within some of our processes.

So, I assume— I don't know for certain, but I assume that we would return to that sort of a situation of uncertainty and a little bit more difficulty. Thanks. Mr. Johnson? Yeah, I think two questions. So, since we have this moratorium on setbacks standards right now, I appreciate the illustration how we want to go from, say, 40-foot driving space down to 28, but today, if somebody was doing a project this year during the moratorium, they'd be permitted to use up more space if they wanted to?

It's tricky because there's the zoning standards that— that site access change driveway widths in zoning standards, but PM&E also has their own. They're the ones who approve the driveways, so they can still— I think they always have a 28-foot requirement, but they can still say we're not going to grant because PM&E and traffic, they really decide who does connect to the street, so they can make that final decision. So Perhaps zoning. I don't know exactly, but fundamentally it would go down to what traffic decided, but I don't think they would in most cases allow, but that would be their decision. It's not the Wild West out there.

It's not. I mean, a lot of this, it was already being regulated through traffic and PM&E, and it was sort of aligning that with zoning, but they can still regulate and they regulate.

Yeah, no, there's still the 2 bits rule that basically says that the primary can't see 2 bits of multiple operators, and then the max for residential is still 12. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I don't see any other questions at this time. Oh, sorry, I can just interject for a second.

I wanted to speak to the working group that we had involved in this process and, uh, send out huge thanks to all of those community members, um, assembly members, and development committee members involved in church. They met several times, uh, put in a lot of work on this project.

An exceptional— thank you to the working group.

Thank you. I don't see any additional questions at this time. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you. Great.

Uh, we're at 10:24. We're close to time. Uh, are there any members of the public here who want to be heard at the end?

I don't see any at this time. As well. If there are any online, please flag yourself for the clerk and we'll make sure we catch you.

Um, moving right along with our final few minutes, I'll do as best as I can to wrap it around, and we'll start with the presentation on Anchorage Economic Development Framework. Pull up the PowerPoint. Right on, pull. And I'll walk through these 10 slides quickly for introduction to the members. There is a resolution in your packet that I intend to— that will be introduced on the addendum for the May 6 meeting.

A strategic foundation for a stronger, more resilient, and opportunity-rich city. Move to the next slide, please. What does this represent? Why do we need a framework? Economic uncertainty.

What I describe as a spaghetti— pattern of spaghetti toss development schemes. In other words, let's throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Um, not an effective way to develop an economic framework. Our infrastructure is under pressure. Declining population and workforce challenges.

Growing need for local resilience and efficiency. And we need a rubric of focus. Anchorage is— needs a unified approach to investing and planning. I flagged this as a post-Project Anchorage discussion as well because I thought it was really important that we have a stronger framework to how we can have a unified approach to our investments and our strategic economic development strategies. Moving on along, please.

What is this framework? Uh, simple force— force principle guides that will help us spend smarter, plan a little better, build stronger systems, and create opportunities for all. Hopefully it'll be adopted. It's a resolution, and I did it in resolution form so that we are encouraging the administration and the municipality and the various units rather than shaling them. Shall meaning compelling.

We want to encourage the elements. Let's walk through the pillars of what the framework are, the four guiding principles. Next slide, please. The first pillar is economic truth, acknowledging that Alaska's economy has relied on subsidies and outside capital, calls for building local economic strength and self-reliance. Promotes transparency, accountability in our fiscal planning.

The next pillar of this strategy, stackable ROI.

ROI, for those who don't know, means return on investment. Stackable, building blocks, one and the other. Every investment should generate multiple benefits, jobs, infrastructure, housing, and cost savings.

Public dollars should work harder and go further.

We should be encouraging cross-departmental and community-wide impact.

I hope that some of these things are self-evident as we mentioned the high level of them. They're easily dig into— we can easily dig into any of these categories. To the affirmative of like, this is what we would like to, but it's really coming from the, we're doing bad things already. We're making decisions that don't make sense often. And so I'd rather not lean into the negative and just keep us here, but I hope it's transparent for folks.

And if it's not, feel free to ask a question. I'll make it clear if I can. Pillar 3, please. Preemptive resiliency. Resilience is not, is not just a response.

It's a mindset. Prepare Anchorage to withstand future disruptions. Build redundancy into systems now, not later.

Next slide. The 4th pillar framework would be equity and opportunity. All residents deserve access to economic mobility. Fairness in housing, education, jobs, and services, and strong communities are inclusive communities.

What would this mean in practice? My hope is that departments and agencies are encouraged to apply these principles in budgeting and planning, that we will apply these principles to evaluating programs based on the long-term value, that we will apply these principles to ensure that outcomes reach across neighborhoods and populations. That we would apply these principles to, to make sure that we are aligning our comprehensive plans and our C— our capital improvement updates.

Next slide, please. Community benefits. If we have an economic framework that helps us make better decisions, it helps us have better transparency to the public about what choices we're making, how we're picking winners and losers, as the public often likes to determine our actions. More efficient tax— use of our tax dollars, better coordination across city functions, safer, more self-sufficient infrastructure, and expanded opportunities for working families, veterans, and future generations. This is what I hope that we would have as a result of utilizing the Four Pillar Framework.

Final slide. In conclusion, this is about responsible stewardship a shared and shared success. Building smarter, stronger, and together, because fundamentally we keep saying it, no one else will do it for us. Leading with purpose, with a plan, discipline to help us build a city that works for everyone. I will throw one element of a conversation under the bus, uh, just for the sake of flagging it for folks in the post-project, in the Project Anchorage discussion.

There were lots of projects that were tossed around. There were work sessions, a website brought in projects from the public.

My hope is that while that project was a fine project, and I appreciate members from the development corporation being with us today, essentially my pushback to that was, how does it stack up in the work we're doing to help change the economic trajectory of the future. Example, there was a Kincaid project. How would any amount of investments in a Kincaid project to make it year-round change— to make it a year-round wonderful asset— change the economic trajectory of a city? But if we are, for example, investing in like Transit supportive development corridors, because we just created tax incentive strategies. If we are building the infrastructure, pedestrian infrastructure and connectivity in those corridors where we want the housing to be built.

Well, that seems like a better choice to change the economic development framework. Well, if I were to choose Kincaid versus the sidewalks and transit supportive corridors, well, today political willpower may be the determining factor. I hope that a guide, a framework of how we determine from the assembly would make us ask them fundamental 4-prong questions. And then we would get to the stackable ROI and we would probably determine that the greatest bang for the buck is going to be investing in those corridors where we want the housing to be happening, where we are making all of the staff time, the changing codes happening. Where also we want people to invest in our community, right?

And so it begins to give us a sense of hopefully a better way to make decisions across all sorts of categories. That's my hope. I introduce it, welcome feedback. The idea is it's a resolution so that it is more of a guiding framework and not a codified rule, although I'm open to all of the discussions.

Cool. And I welcome feedback from members. We are past time. I asked for— I'll ask for 5 more minutes from my colleagues. I don't see any objections to that.

Again, feel free, anyone who's in the room, anybody who's online, if you have any feedback on the framework, feel free to send it forward. I will flag that I shared this with the administration. And they, from at least Director, Policy Director Nolan Clowder, they are supportive of this. It speaks complementary to where we're headed and the values that we'd like to aspire to. So I open it up for feedback and we'll move on to the next item.

Next quick slide. Food security. I'm not going to walk through this one. This is a heavy piece of legislation. This is a radical shot across the bow to how we look at land use and how we effectively have the conversation around food security.

The timing for this is not connected to the closing of a supermarket in Fairview, although it makes sense. This has been a project that has been worked on for several months, and I thank our legal attorney, Mr. Hurt, for his strong work on this. I'll walk through the slides high level and give you what my timeline is. Uh, first, roll up. Yeah, why this matters.

Anchorage imports the vast majority of our food. Many neighborhoods, especially food deserts, lack access to affordable fresh produce. Excessive lawn coverage and underutilized land increase stormwater runoff, strain infrastructure, and offer little public value. This ordinance helps us repurpose land for community good, growing food, improving public health, and supporting climate resilience. This is a big one.

Next slide, please. What is the vision of this ordinance? Expand local food production in both residential and commercial settings. Incentivize sustainable land use with stormwater and environmental benefits. Activate state-supported tax exemptions for farms, recently passed, SB 161, Create Equitable Access to Tools and Land for Urban Agriculture.

Next slide, please. What is included in the, the big old package? We have sections for urban agriculture incentives, market gardens, food forests, and compost hubs. So if you are a food producer and are actually selling products in the commercial space, We have incentives for you. We have incentives in this package looking at the lawn to garden movement, the permaculture.

If you're into that space, equitable, edible, equitable, I like edible landscapes, rain gardens, and permaculture, vacant and abandoned property type use, temporary use for growing food and composting. We also have in this item priority zones, the idea of adding extra benefits for food deserts, distressed areas, and opportunity zones. Next slide, please. Community goals that we hope to impact: more healthy food grown close to home, more land can be activated for public benefit, there's more of a potential for reduction in stormwater runoff and pollution. I just flagged that we have a stormwater utility brewing in the back.

This is a complementary item. Revitalization of blighted and underused areas and empowerment of new growers, families, and community groups. This is a DIY hello Anchorage shot across the come to us and put your hands in our dirt and grow with us opportunity. Next slide, please. What's not finalized?

When I mentioned this, In passing to Mayor LaFrance, Mayor LaFrance mentioned that they had in the past had wanted to do some work on greenhouses. So I think greenhouses may be covered under the definition of how we use land, but maybe we want to get clearer and refine it. And so it's open. Greenhouses and high tunnels incentivized the way we want it. It's open.

Beekeeping, urban poultry, hydroponics, should these be included now and future phases. Community-based administration, what partnerships would help scale the impact? Thinking of the Anchor Gardens movement, those folks out in our community who are doing this work and who can help potentially provide backbone support. And then also priority mapping areas, what neighborhoods and areas we should prioritize. Go back to the way we described the framework and the rubric.

Uh, we know where the food distressed areas are. And, um, and where there are land opportunities potentially. Next slide, please. Next step, we'll be introducing this big old package on May 6th, and I will move to set the public hearing to June 24th. My hope is that it will give us enough opportunity to start just looking at this at departmental level, potentially bring back a conversation to this committee for the June CEDC with feedback from members.

And take that opportunity to have this go through a little longer. I don't think this is something that is the immediate fire. So my idea is also potentially launching this for implementation in January so that we work through this process now, think about the ways for implementation needs, and give us some, some running room to get there. Fundamentally, This is a late item. Late in that Anchorage has always been a food insecure community.

Late in that now we have more concerns coming to us about potential food disruptions in our stores, our shelves, and more importantly, into the framework of preemptive The economic framework that I just described, like this preemptive action, this helps us think about how we can utilize our land a little better for our present preemptive needs, needs some economic opportunity in our land. So I invite folks to take a look at the big old package, and again, I gave a timeline, and I would welcome much feedback for this. I hope that this gets us moving a little further away from the traditional framework of lawns and land that we have and get us into a little bit more of the, uh, holistic approach to our land and community development. Thank you. There are no high-level questions.

It's just to introduce the idea. I welcome feedback from members. And on that note, We are adjourned. 10:39. Thank you, everyone.