Muniversity Lunch & Learn with Heather Flynn and Eleanor Andrews

I literally went into— It's kind of loosey-goosey. It was a new government and not a lot of tradition, but people were just kind of making it up as we went along and making things work. And I had been working with Lainie Fleischer for a little bit and forming the Federation of Community Councils, which I hold dear to my heart, and I slave and still serve in my community council in South Edition. So unification happened, and I realized that I was going to be fighting for, trying to represent people in this new government, which to me made so much sense. Why did we have a city and a borough and services that ended on one street and maybe there was a gap in between and you didn't have services?

So I was really, really hopeful, uh, as soon as the election happened, Mayor Sullivan appointed me and 4 other people to write the labor ordinance for the community. And AS2340 had already been passed for the state of Alaska and basically said you can have another labor ordinance that rules your jurisdiction, they cannot veer too much from the state ordinance. You can't go over the top. And so we pretty much patterned after that because I was the only one that knew about the state ordinance and I've been working under it for state employees and school district non-certified people for about a year. So this committee was me, Tom Fink, Mark Solenberger, who was the city employee head of the City Union Alaska, you know, Anchorage Municipal Employees Association, Doug Stark, and municipal attorney Rich Huston.

Who's a pretty straight-laced type person, you know, he wasn't like some municipal attorneys who were more flexible and listened a lot. So like Mr. Fawcett. Yes, he's on the get things done side. And so it took us about a year, but we got this ordinance written. And so we started figuring out how are we going to form this new government emerging place.

Well, on my side there was me, and on the city's there was everybody that George Sullivan could put in place to make things happen for the city's benefit. And I remember my two nemesis, uh, Stan Stone King and Lynn Doherty, who had absolutely no involvement previously with labor relations, but they wanted the city to win on every point that they were assigned to. So we battled for years. We had unfair labor practices. We had 3 elections because they kept messing things up.

And I can't remember the specific case, but John Headland was representing APEA and me at that time. He's recently passed. And we had a case go to the state Supreme Court that supported our position. So finally, during the last 2 years of this struggle, AMEA decided they needed more help, so they went to the Teamsters. So they had Jesse Carr in AMA against me.

So Ike Waldrip called me up. Ike was the head of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and my former husband had been an electrician, so I kind of knew him. He said, girl, you need some help down there. I can't have Carr taking over the city. So I went and met with Ike, and he said, whatever you need for resources, I'm there.

Just back up. And it was really great to know that. But he said, if you ever have to negotiate with Jesse, I'll tell you what he told me the first time I sat down. He showed me— he had this really long conference table in the Teamsters Hall with a giant picture of Jesse Carvey in the room. Wherever you sat, you had to look at his beady eyes and that look.

And he said, take this jar of Vaseline, you might need it before this meeting's over. Whoa! Do remind them, for these youngsters in here, Jesse Carr was Alaska's version of Hoffa. He was a mafia guy. He just, he just was.

That's how he ruled. And, you know, during the pipeline days in Fairbanks, people were disappearing, and a lot of stuff happened at the warehouses. I had a lot of respect in fear for Mr. Carr. Not so much for the people I was negotiating against because they knew nothing about government, but the IBEW, the IBEW and Teamsters had fought jurisdiction over communication workers. The IBEW had traditionally represented people on the Dew Line and the Outer Banks or whatever, and the Teamsters won an election and I thought, well, I can't have them coming into government because they don't do it the way we do it.

And so that's what I decided to assist Ami, the APDA. Anyway, we won some battles, but we lost the war. But during that 7-year period, it was just hopeful on one hand and crazy on the other. Things would happen like I'd be negotiating with George Sully he actually sat down with me, and we're sitting in this meeting. He used to smoke with a cigarette holder, you know, with a cigarette going all the time.

He's looking at me down the table, he said, you look like somebody I know, have I met you before? And the guys on his side said, oh, you never say that to a woman. And there was this guy named Bill Coleman from New York who was assisting the city And he looked like a mafioso. He talked out the side of his mouth. He had this big scar on his cheek.

And I didn't know whose side he was on. He said, "George, you never say that to a woman unless you really know." Oh, they all tittered, tittered. And then I said, "Well, Mayor, as a matter of fact, when I first came to Anchorage in '68, I was your secretary." I've never seen a grown man blush like that.

And I'm sure he didn't remember a lot of details of my life. I wondered what happened that summer. Nothing much. His secretary, who'd been there for a long time, took a sabbatical, and I got a job there as a temporary secretary, which I failed at in the secretarial duties, but I was good with the PR. So anyway, negotiations were on, and at that time.

IBW, of course, represented ATU, the telephone utility, and Municipal Light and Power. And the hands got kind of tired of not getting their contract renegotiated. It's like, we've always been here, nobody can do what we do. And I remember one day I got a call from the mayor. He said, what did you have them do?

I said, do what? He says, my whole downtown is surrounded by heavy equipment. And there are no drivers there, no keys left in. I said, I have no idea. And what union people do generally when they're going to break a rule, they never tell the agent.

And I could swear innocence, I had no idea. And it took me all day to find people, get them to go back to their heavy equipment and unsurround City Hall. And at that time, my office was in the building at 9th and Inglewood. Used to be the Texaco building. Anyway, no, it was Union Oil building.

Anyway, so just crazy stuff happened all the time. And for those 7 years, I felt like my part-time job was sitting out here in these trailer rooms, these ATCO trailers that used to be public works out here, the city, the borough, in smoke-filled rooms till 1 and 2 o'clock in the morning. You'd sit out here and everybody was smoking, including the whole assembly, and about 9 o'clock with this blue haze across the room, they would say, "Let's go to dinner," and they'd go across the street to the Blue Fox. Is it still there? It still is.

Yep. And they'd come back pretty mellow, hard to stay on task. But I had to go to all those meetings because every meeting whatever you had gained the week before might be undone if you were not there. So every Tuesday from 5 o'clock to 1 or 2 in the morning, and if they didn't finish their business, you came back on Thursday. So, you know, my job was to go to these meetings and make sure that we weren't undone.

And I think for the most part what I'd hoped for worked, that we had a unified government, and after the labor wars were over with, we got people that wanted to move forward and make things work. You know, not just on the labor side, but I remember when George Sullivan got the $81 million for Project Hades, and when he left office, are we going to be able to do this? Tony Knowles appointed me as as his first appointee when he became mayor. So his term started January 1st, 1982, and the reason I was first, it wasn't that I was that good, but George Sullivan did what other people have done before. He made sure all the labor agreements expired the first day of Tony's term, and since I had a relationship and came from organized labor, he felt like I was a person that could build a relationship and trust from all these divergent bargaining units and people from the city and the borough, and let's just get stuff done.

And we did it within months. I wasn't personally at the table. There was a guy named Steve who was the labor relations director left over from Sullivan, who greatly resented me, like, who in the hell are you and how can you come from labor and try to represent management? And my feeling is that we're all employees of the municipality. There weren't those sides.

We didn't have the across the aisles that we put ourselves into now. I mean, it was new enough where I think everybody was going the same direction. And except for Jesse Carr and maybe Ike Waldron, they were not looking for jurisdiction. They were just trying to make it work. There was a lot of camaraderie.

One thing I remember especially is our forming labor-management committees. You know, the whole Japanese thing, quality circles. We had a summit. We had National Bank of Alaska, First National Bank, University of Alaska, and the Municipality of Alaska coming up with these models. We actually put some of them into practice at the municipality.

I don't think they lasted long after I left. I found a couple colleagues, former colleagues, in the last couple of days. Susan Lindemuth, who was in Personnel, and Carol Smith, who was over at EEO. They're the only ones I remember from those days that are still around or still alive. And one of the initiatives that we started was a classification and pay study because we had jobs that had been traditionally male, some female, and we needed to have standards about what they call the SKAs, the skills, knowledge, and abilities, and you made the pay based on that regardless gender was filling those jobs.

We went a long way, but it never got funded because always when you do those studies, there's a great difference between female-paid jobs and male, and when they see the dollar sign, somehow they don't think it's so important. And I know this for a fact because when I was Deputy Commissioner and Commissioner of Administration, I did the same thing in the Sheffield administration because it started out with medics, paramedics that came from the military, and and public health nurses, which were mostly women with master's degrees, which were paid about 40% less than the guys. And so we started that study to try to rectify that and got it all done. And then guess what happened in 1986? The price of oil went from $30 to $8 a barrel.

So Governor Sheffield and I and Kim Bischoff who was the state's finance director and commissioner of administration and department, had to sit down every day and decide who got paid. We had just started leases at the building, the Frontier Building at C and 36th, and they were getting $3.87 a foot. I said, I can afford $2.50, and some refused. I says, well, okay, It'll take 30 days for us to get out of there. We have to disentangle all of our IT stuff and whatever.

And almost everybody agreed. And then some leases we just had to end because we had to lay off some people. So in addition to that, not only did we lose a bunch of money, we couldn't guarantee that when the legislature came back in January that they would do their job and fund going forward. So we had to reduce the budget by $500 million and then scale it back to what it could be for the following year. That was a budget that was presented to the legislature, so they already knew the numbers.

They couldn't play the games. And so it may not seem so related to labor relations in the city, but on July 1st, 1986, when the budget was set on the price of oil. Okay, when the legislature adjourned in May, the price of oil was $30. On July 1st, it was $8. Every mayor in Alaska, including my old friend and former boss Tony Knowles, came down and said, "Can I have our money based off last year's?" I said, "No way, Tony.

You can't do that." So every city and municipality and school district in the state was in crisis. Because so much of the money that they relied on came to them through municipal grants, and the money just wasn't there. So there really wasn't a whole lot of difference between what happened at the municipality as that was ending and when I went to Juneau. It was just a continuum of— what's the word I would use— chaos, rather than a 4-letter word that ends with "show." How do we know what you're talking about? I don't know, we're all kind of the same generation.

But things got better, things got better, things got done. And, but you know, there are just a couple things I'm really proud of, and that was as employee relations director, I think I helped people believe that we're all working for the same things. It wasn't the unions against the administration. Striving for this new entity making it work.

Little things. I had been a consultant to Chancey Croft when his whole practice was workers' comp, and another friend of mine, Fred Rose, and I were hanging around one summer before I went to MUNI, and Chancey was trying to get people back to work who had been injured on the job. They were his clients. They were MUNI's workboys. And so we went around and talked to employers and department heads, public and private, about taking people back.

So when I went to the municipality as employee relations director, I got together with our risk manager, municipal attorney, woods power, and a couple of other people. We worked out a deal that anybody was injured on the job to the point where they could not come back in that capacity, but we knew that for psychological reasons, reasons they needed to work, we got all the bargaining units to agree that they would find a job for them until they either became whole or they got retrained to keep on working, because a lot of the craft guys, you know, somebody who'd been an electrician lost, lost an arm, he was a lineman, MLE. When they can't do that kind of work, their whole personality is built on being strong, macho, this is what I do, and we found some that were suicidal, depressed. They could not get back to their regular work. It may seem like a little thing, but as far as employee relations and taking care of people that work for your government, it's.

Was a model, and I was trying to do the same thing for the state of Alaska, but it was a little bit tougher, broader jurisdiction. So that's generally my story. Employer relations was the job, but people relations from '76 to when I left in January of '83 was mostly my story. Thank you. Thank you.

Us government employees, thank you for all you did back then to set us on a better path as we started here. So yeah, um, some good things happen. Good things happen. And you know, in both my school board and assembly situation, I was on the management side, and I always loved Gary Brooks, who was head of the IBEW. He's pretty cute too.

Yeah, last time I saw him was in my doctor's office, and we're both old. But I said, Gary was talking about what they wanted. I said, I know what your job description is. Keep everything you got, get more. But they were better to deal with after Jane took care of them.

We were with a very conservative mayor that came in after, after Tony. I'm being polite, very conservative. He had a better word for it. Okay, we won't do that. And, you know, Tom Fink, recently deceased, so, and he had a lot of kids, and I think I had 3 of them as students.

Um, but we had to make a lot of cuts, but we had a pretty good assembly also, and we were trying to be as creative as possible in finding pockets of money here. Sometimes you had to rob Peter to pay Paul. And we did that.

And Tom Fink was basically against everything, so it didn't make any difference what the assembly did. He vetoed it, and it took 8 votes to pass anything, and we did. We would pass it on Tuesday night, he would veto it on Wednesday morning. And we'd come back the next week and we would override his veto. And it was just a common thing.

It was frustrating, and he did have some people working for him that were pretty smart but pretty evil too.

No names mentioned. Oh, why not? Actually, they're dead.

But they have children around, so I am sort of careful. Um, Susanna asked me to talk about a couple of the programs and plans that worked out and worked well. I'll go back to the League of Women Voters again, who were very much in favor of parks and trails and the development of them. We— I remember riding my bicycle down what could be called a cow path on the north side of Chester Creek. We did not have any trails along there then, with a kid on the back of my bicycle.

No tunnels. Leash up the dog and run across 8 lanes of traffic at Ingra—. Iger Ingra. Gamble and get out to Goose Lake. I did that.

I can tell you exactly when, October 7th. Um, and we didn't have any bridges. We did finally get some trails. We got some paving, but we didn't have any bridges to get across anything. So we got out there and wanted to get across, and I crossed the creek on a downed birch tree and a 2x4.

Did fine, got over there. On the way back, fell in. And my son Patrick was behind me and got home. Poor kid was nearly frozen to death. I had to put him in a hot bathtub just to thaw him out.

And my daughter was born that night. Oh, gosh. A couple hours later. For those of you who are into riding that trail, that last bridge that's there, That's Lucy's Bridge. The more exciting one was the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, and we had people who really thought that was a bad idea.

Particularly, there was a guy by the name of Jack Spake. He's dead too, but I can say about him. And he believed that what we needed was a highway that went port to port, from the port to the airport. And so what we were going to do is pave everything along the waterway. Basically would turn my house into a Texaco station.

So naturally I was opposed to it, but so was the league, and so were almost anybody who had good sense about land use planning. And God bless Mrs. Silk Craig, geologist that she was, Italian crazy lady, we loved her. And because Jack said, well, it'll stabilize it in case we have earthquakes again. And she said, well, we could just pile up some rocks and pave it and make a bike trail out of it, and it would work just as well.

That's how we got the coastal trail. We had some people, some property owners that were really difficult to deal with, but we worked through it issue by issue by issue. And further out the trail, beyond what is today Lunary Park, or actually on either side of Lunary Park, There were people who said, "Oh, I don't want all those people in my backyard. I mean, that's awful." Well, today, the most prized property in Anchorage is right along that trail. So, it has been marvelous.

And it managed to keep going all the way out to— and this is one of the things that people a whole lot smarter than me could figure out— Kincade Park. You know, an old bunker full of bombs. And look what it has become. And it was truly just the perseverance of saying, come on, we can try this. We think we're going to make it work.

We're going to stumble along the way, and there'll be a few hiccups. But God bless Eleanor. She serves on the park foundation now, and I can go around and show you where the trails need repair. And any of you here who ride a bike or walk on the trail, I bet you know where the pink stripes are that say, you know, this is going to rattle your teeth out when you go over this bump. And that's the responsibility that we all have as a community.

One, to know how it got built, to use it and enjoy it, to share it with our friends and our neighbors, even our visitors. Be proud of the fact that you were all part of— if you weren't part of building it, you are part of keeping it and maintaining it. So I love all of the work that people do. Yes, I'd like to talk about that a little bit because, you know, it's another example of collaboration between citizens, the community councils, the nonprofits, and government. The Park Foundation was started under Mark Beckett, and Beth has been—.

When he was the mayor. Yes, when he was mayor. And you know, when you know people their whole lives, it's kind of familiar, but—. When he was in junior high. Yeah, when he was after high school.

Anyway.

And Beth was working there, Beth Nordlund, and when she left, we started the formal Park Foundation. And the beauty of it is, is that everybody loves parks. Back when the state of Alaska would have capital budgets, each representative got so much money. It used to be $25-something million. Million, yeah.

And every year, if they could do nothing else, they would allocate their money towards parks and trails. And then we got even smarter. I mean, it was kind of like you could say, hey, I support parks and here's my capital. You couldn't do anything else with that amount of money. And then we formed this partnership with Park Foundation whereby we have a contract with the municipality where we do projects that are under a certain amount, and rather than let them be done by public works internally, where unfortunately the chargeback system, you know, the internal I'll scratch your back, you scratch my back.

I used to call the attorney, municipal attorney, and say, don't call me and ask me any questions, I'm not going to fill your budget. I don't want to talk to you, because if they called you, they'd say, well, that's so much of my budget. I didn't ask you anything. So anyway, they contract these projects out to the Park Foundation. Our load is like 9%, and most of the enhancements that you see on the trails and making parks accessible, almost every single one of them now is barrier-free, is due to that relationship, the planning, the community out, you know, just talking to people from Parks and Rec.

And then we do the small projects, and then we build up to the big things they do. And so, and now we're working on the Long Trail, and it's just so much partnership. It's always supported by government, which is kind of in jeopardy now. We have to remind ourselves that even though a lot of money and support's been taken back, there's still a lot of opportunity for people who know how things work to cause those linkages to stay in place so we don't go backwards.

Because we are a national model on our parks and trails, and I hope we don't lose that standing. I want to give 3 examples, 2 old and 1 slightly newer, and take personal responsibility for a couple of things in the charter. It was the League of Women Voters that pulled forward the whole idea of community councils. It was me personally who wanted no business between midnight and 7 AM. I saw people doing really stupid things at 10 o'clock in the evening.

Can you imagine what we did at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning? So that was a rule, and that one was really important. Another one, and this one is really personal with me, and I went back and I just read, God knows, a box of news clips and stuff forever for the last couple of weeks. I introduced and fought very hard for no smoking in public buildings, and I give credit to Rod Wilson, who was the Health Department director and actually was my personal physician before that, and he got people to walk up and down the stairs in the Health health department. He said, you know, take care of your body, walk.

And so we did that, and I can remember having the teachers come and say, oh, you mean in schools too? I said, you bet, in schools. I can remember being pregnant and trying to go in the teacher's room and not being able to breathe. That was another thing I did, was I sued the Anchorage School District over its maternity policy and won. That was earlier.

Even went so far as to one time I had to call Public Works and I said, you know, when the guy driving Public Works truck that says Municipality of Anchorage on the side of it and not only is smoking but tosses the cigarette out the window. And they never had a problem with that after that.

So, you know, I really— I think all of us who have been in public life, we all will admit we made some mistakes along the line, but for the most part, we pulled together to try to make our city a better place to live, to work, to play. And I mean, I look around this room, and while I don't know most of you because you're all too young, I know some of you have been around a long time, and I thank you for staying here and doing a really good job of making this place a great place to live. So thanks. Yes, thank you. Okay, on that note, why don't we have some of these fine public employees ask questions.

Who from our audience might have a question today? Well, I have a question. Are you all public employees? No, no, there's a couple. Okay, well, I love that you are.

They're all public servants. Okay, all public servants. Questions from anyone in the audience? Yes, I mean, there's somebody right back there. Amanda, um, I'm really interested in hearing a little bit more, Heather, about your 5 years as the only woman on the Anchorage Assembly and maybe some of the challenges and opportunities that you had during that time.

For a brief period of time, I got a pat on the head that said, "There, there, dear." That did not last long. This is very arrogant of me of saying it, but it's true. I worked harder and knew more than all the other 10. I knew the budget inside out. I had come from the school board where Tom Freeman once said, when his numbers— he was the COO of the school district— when his numbers agreed with my numbers, we knew the budget balanced.

And I took that experience with me to the assembly, and I went over every dime, and I read every document. I very quickly learned how to you know, read quickly. But also, you knew when it came before you, whether it was an AM or an AR, whatever it was, which was just, you know, crack, go by it quick, and which you really needed to pay attention to and write down questions. I mean, I kept notes beside everything. Every Sunday, it was like a religious exercise.

Every Sunday, I was going through that packet. Line by line by line. And yeah, that's how I survived. And I didn't just survive, I thrived. Um, I told you I ran nonprofits.

I'm not a psychologist or a social worker or counselor, but boy, I'm here to tell you, when you run a nonprofit, if you don't run it like a business and bring the money in the door, the people who are the service providers, the psychologists, the counselors, they won't have a job. So, you know, I was the business person even though, believe me, I didn't have an MBA. It's just you learn, you learn it on the job, and you work hard at it. Thanks, Amanda. Making comparison, how much did you get paid as an assembly person?

Well, I'll go back to when I was on the school board. I got paid $300 a month and I went in the hole about $600 a month for babysitting. Patrick was 3 and Lucy wasn't yet 2 when I went on the school board, so it was a challenge. Um, my kids' kindergarten teacher— oh, and by the way, when I was on the school board, I kind of acted as the school district's lobbyist. I went to Juneau, and, you know, there was a lot of money coming in, and hustled a lot of bucks, not just for Anchorage, but also statewide.

That's when the REAAs were coming in. Now, for those of you who don't know what that is, Rural Education Attendance Areas. We had either BIA schools or state-operated schools, but we didn't have local schools and local school boards, and we developed that. 21 School districts, one more than we should have had, and that's how we got local school boards. Actually, give credit to John Rader, Mandatory Borough Act, and a couple of other people who really did a brilliant job.

What the REAAs were supposed to be, they were the seed corn for developing local government and local control throughout the state. What went wrong was we got too rich. All the money came flowing over, so it was easier to belly up to the bar in Juneau and grab money than to do the hard work locally of building support and having a tax structure and all that. Building government. Building government.

That's really what it was, was building government. And it's an experiment still in progress. For example, Department of Administration was the administrative agency for municipal grants, and the way the statute was written was that we would take the request and fund, and then the legislator for that area would come over and twist your arm and threaten you, literally, about what they wanted that money to go to. And the only oversight I had in my budget for the time the crash came in '86, was $10,000 for a hearing officer. You could do maybe one or two of something up north, but they basically wanted no oversight.

So I remember when Kotzebue had a $7 million appropriation for a school, but I wasn't getting any reports, and I couldn't afford to send anybody up there. But I used to also be the union rep for the state troopers. So I said, can you call the battalion up there and tell them to go to this coordinate to see if there's a school? The guy said, I don't even see a piece of dirt turned over. So I called John Schaefer, the mayor, and I said, where's the school?

He said, oh, I joke, we decided we want to do something else with the money. I said, well, you've got it sitting there. He said, yeah, we're earning interest on it too, and then we're using that and when I get around, Adams will get it reappropriated. I mean, that's how you administered municipal grants. You basically didn't, you know, somebody would get a grant to build a runway in a village and he'd meet some lobbyist at the airport and said, what you really need is a plane.

They would take the money and buy the plane, but then when they did, there was no way to land it. Isn't that crazy? We had a vote issue that way too. North Slope Borough wanted to teach kids how to fish, so they had this 55-foot great big boat, very, very large boat. And then suddenly said, oh, wait a minute, the kids aren't in school, and during the summer, which is the only time there's even ice-free there, oh, all right, I guess we don't need this.

Well, we'll take it and we'll sell it down to the— we'll sell it down in Seattle. Well, they couldn't quite get it there fast enough, so Bob Green, who was the superintendent in Kodiak, said, "Okay, I'll keep it and bring it down here and then take it down next year," whatever. Then he became the head of the.

School Boards Association, and so he and his son ferried that boat. It was a really hairy trip to Juneau, and we had it docked in Juneau, and we had a great— this is when we had a lot of money, so we'd go down there and we would take one legislator a night. Once in a while we'd take two, but usually one, and we'd go down the channel and down the Lynn Canal and get over there somehow because we build a fire on the beach and roast some hot dogs, have a little wine, and then we put back. And we had a mantra: a full glass of wine never tips in the wind. And we—.

Every school district had a ton of money then because they got to take their legislators on a boat trip. Oh yeah. Who's they? Was Bob and me and his wife? No, I mean, when the money flowed, that was easy.

Where we are now, the money is not flowing and it's not coming back. So we have to look to ourselves to rebuild our community. I'll tell you right now, we need an income tax in this state. We should never have gotten rid of it. But locally, responsibly, I'll use the PAC because you all know what that is.

It really needs work, $30, $40 million worth of work. We have to go back to doing things the traditional way. You go out for a bond. Fire Department's sitting here. When you need something really big that's going to last not next year and the year after, but for 30 or 40 years, you bond for it.

If you want an art savant, everybody writes, everybody likes roads. So arts bonds. Trails, thank heavens for the guy, what was it, 3 years ago, who ran the truck out off the trail and the bridge fell in. Yeah, right up there, Westchester. Yeah, by Westchester, there's a great big sign up there that said, vote for park bonds, repair this bridge, and it worked.

But that's where we have to go back to as a community, being personally responsible being willing to pay our fair share as citizens. Oh, by the way, I sat on the Board of Equalization for quite a while. I'm not doing it this year. Where people would come in and complain about their taxes, and sometimes you have to explain to people that if the value of your house went from $400,000 to $500,000, yeah, the tax bill has the potential of being much bigger. Because the value of your house is much greater.

And I always would ask people, well, what would you sell it for?

Or they had submitted somewhere along the line what they borrowed from the bank, so I knew what they thought it was worth. And most of the people, you know, politely you can say, suck it up, pay your taxes. And the people, by the way, who work on the third floor, who have to be there to collect taxes, say thank you to them, because they're the people who have to listen to those who are unhappy. The other thing is we're an aging community. Anybody in the room over 65?

Wait a minute, I know I can see one, two, okay, I think three or four of you. And both of us are. Voluntary disclosure. Both of us are. Um, unfunded mandate, $150,000 with evaluation.

Legislature passed this, and you get that as a senior citizen or disabled person, a relief from the value of your property. And then the city added another $50,000, and then they expanded it, so it's now $7— so $225,000 of value of your house is not taxed. Now, if you live in a half a million dollar house, You are going to pay taxes on the rest of it, and you're living in a half-million-dollar house. Yeah, you can afford it. You can afford it.

I'll take a step back. Let's, um, can I— sorry, at the end of the time here, I do want to see if we have more audience questions or if there's any questions online. Okay.

So, Darryl and Bill, but you both talked about our friend Mayor Pink. A lot of younger people may not realize he issued 160 vetoes in 6 years, and the assembly overrode him 85 times. I didn't realize it was that many. Yeah. Wow, he was like Mr.

Negative. Busy Wednesday mornings. Bill, you have a question? I have a Project 80s question. I'm curious how he decided what to build, and I know there were also rants like a marina or a South Anchorage Trail or indoor horse rink kind of thing.

How did we decide what to build, and were there any near misses that you wish we had? Community councils, legislators, school district, a lot of public hearings, and internal people who work for the city or the borough and had their own desires, and they all went on the table and public Public participation. A lot of it, yeah. In the first year, we would look at the map, and if it was blue, it meant that the municipality owned the land. So there was no acquisition of land cost associated with it.

So we needed a convention center, we needed a sports arena, and we needed 10 schools. We paid cash for schools. I mean, it's— I never say that very loud, unbelievable, but at that particular time we did. And the school sites had been identified previously, so they were there, there, there, there, there, and we acquired the land. So in the first year, there was great pressure because the legislature was going to find out in 5 days that they had a bajillion dollars to spend, and we needed to be ready, uh, in day 15 to tell them what our priorities were because they were going to do it fast.

And so I—. And it was—. And I— the decision-making structure on the first year was, uh, too fast, but, but Some things like city-owned property and things we needed like a library, and that made sense. Something probably didn't make as much sense as others, but I remember being in Mayor Starke's room looking at the map going, okay, we got these 8 pieces of land, what do we need there? But I would wonder why some of that also ran because George Sullivan had gotten the money, said this is how we're going to spend it.

Toluse Knowles said, wait a minute, you haven't put any money in for upkeep, you know. And so he put into the budget, and I believe into the whole acquisition, was that the Performing Arts Center would be supported by municipal appropriation of $750,000 a year, right? I don't know how long that lasted because I left, but he knew that you cannot build a house and not keep it up. And it was such a new concept, and, you know, that we could have 3 meetings about how it got built in the committees and the ziggurat motif that I called around it and the circus lights, because it was so much community process— excuse me, participation. Everybody got something that they wanted, but there was this concept.

And then when I go to Juneau, I've got Pioneer Homes and all these state things but we got to put deferred maintenance into our budget as a line item. It carried over. How sensible is that? Well, but we got so drunk with having cash to pay for everything, and so when the cash ended, people didn't know how to think. Like, how do we pay for something?

One of the also-rans also, you know, was the Port-to-Port, you know, building the freeway along there, and part of that, frankly, was simply opposition by people who— it wasn't so much that there were people— I remember that night in the old Sidney Lawrence Auditorium with 700 people there, and I don't know, 40, 50 people spoke in opposition to it, and 3 people voted for it. They were all road builders. And Jack Spade came out and said there were 700 people there, and therefore 697 of them were in favor of building it and only a few were against it. I thought, this guy needs a math lesson. But it was that kind of thing, and there were some kind of crazy stuff.

I mean, the Sullivan Arena was largely supported by most people, but some people didn't want it in that location. Some people wanted it further south, and even recently when What were they trying to think of? A sales tax and trying to come up with this, this, and this. There was a lot of neighborhood issues of, "I want this because I live here," or, "I don't want this because I live here." And fortunately, and frankly, I don't think that process was nearly as public as the one that we had when we were doing Project '80s. It was really wide open.

Good question. Okay. One more question and then we're gonna close it out. Marie, can I get—. I mentioned on the invitation about the stories you both told about John Asplund and Stephen Spruce.

Marston, can you? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. I've got a— going back to the old borough days, there was a guy by— well, first of all, John Aspinwall was the mayor of the borough, and a guy by the name of Bob Morse was, I don't know, chief engineer, whatever the heck he was. We did not have primary sewage treatment in this town. When I first came here, I could go out and walk across the railroad tracks, and I could tell you at low tide what the most favorite color of toilet paper was at that time.

John Asplin and his sidekick, Mr. Morris, decided the most important thing we could have here is we've got to have sewers. We didn't have sewers. And to this day, when I'm coming in on the airplane from having been somewhere, I look down and I say, as soon as I go over the John Asplin Memorial Sewage Treatment Plant, I know I'm home. And Fair warning, we still only have primary sewage treatment. You know, if the EPA— probably won't happen with the current administration— but if the EPA came in and said, hey, a city this size needs secondary sewage treatment, oh, the cost of that would be almost beyond belief.

That was also some of the wars we had who had to have sewers up the hill or down the hill, and you know, we all know what flows down the hill. And frankly, there's going to be some places, if you live on the hillside right now, you may have problems with your septic tanks and your water. I mean, that's, that's an issue that's out there. Okay, but what was the other one you were saying? Uh, library hero, Will Morrison.

Oh, Will Morrison. Dear, dear, dear friend of mine, deceased a couple of years ago. She and I used to argue over everything. Her husband loved it when I'd come over because it gave him a break. He would have— but she was committed to libraries.

That was her thing. In fact, you couldn't hire a librarian in this town without her approval, and that was true of the university as well. But she was committed, and when we ran out of money building a library Kind of two things emerged. Put the assembly chambers there, because, you know, we were still out in the ATCO trailers. Put the assembly chambers there and the library there.

People who go to the library might be interested in seeing what's going on with the municipal assembly, and people who go to the municipal assembly might just spend some time in the library. It became really good too if you had kids, you know, they couldn't be toddlers, But if you had kids, you could send your kids to the library, and then you could be in front of the assembly, um, making your pitch over what was done. Wilda— anybody here gone to the Anne Stevens Reading Room? Good, a whole bunch of people. There isn't a single stick of furniture, a carpet on the floor, a light bulb, a book, or a teacup that was not donated.

Wilda and Gloria McCutcheon and a couple of other people got together and said, we are going to make this library work, and they did. Then there's a plaque on the wall, you had to buy seats for the Wilda Marston Theater. She went out and mailed every one of those for $400 or whatever it was. You had a kid or you had somebody you cared about, you bought a seat in that theater, and frankly, it was so cheap. But here was the joke, you built the library but there was no money for books.

So there was these bumper stickers, you know, "Habla Spaghetti Feed, Buy a Book." They even had shelves but no books because the money ran out.

All right, well, I want to thank our lovely guests, um, and thank you Thank you everyone for coming. It's great to see so many people interested in the history of our community and our municipality, which as we've heard today really touches lives in so many different ways. And like our speakers said, not every resident really understands how all of you are touching their lives, but inside this room we know. And so we appreciate you coming out today. This is one of a series of these lecture series.

Next week we have Becky— no, next week we have Deputy Chief of Staff Barbara Jones talking with former Mayor Rick Meistrum. And then on September 3rd, we have Municipal Manager Becky Wynn Pearson talking with former Mayor Mark Begich. And then on Friday, September 5th, there is the evening event at Town Square Park from 5 to 8 PM. You might get more of those super cute cookies. Thank you, Daryl, for providing those cookies.

Thank you. But there will be live music, there will be a night marker, local vendors, an art tour. So please come help us kick off the fall portion of MOA 50 at Town Square Park on September 5th. That sounds like fun. So next week, same time, same place with Mayor Rick Maestrom.

And thank you everyone online. Oh, and here's me a flower.