Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz told state lawmakers Monday he expected to use some of last year's local surplus to help plug a multimillion-dollar budget hole that he blamed on state cutbacks.
Berkowitz said in a presentation to Anchorage Assembly members last week that his administration had calculated that about $24 million in costs had been "shifted" from the state to the city due to cuts to services like snowplowing and housing prison inmates. On Monday, he gave the same presentation to Anchorage lawmakers at City Hall.
Two Anchorage-area Republicans, Sen. Kevin Meyer and Rep. Dan Saddler, attended the briefing, as did two Anchorage Democrats, Reps. Andy Josephson and Harriet Drummond. Staffers for Sen. Anna MacKinnon, R-Anchorage, Sen. Mia Costello, R-Anchorage, and Rep. Matt Claman, D-Anchorage, were also present.
Meyer and Saddler said they weren't happy that the mayor appeared to be pointing blame at the Legislature. Meyer noted that regulatory issues relating to Municipal Light and Power, and not Legislature decisions, accounted for more than half of the city's projected budget gap.
He told Berkowitz he wanted to know what had happened to the city's surplus of about $14 million from 2015, which the mayor announced earlier this year. He said that would be enough to cover the gap not connected to the electric utility.
"Part of the problem, Mayor — we talked about this down in Juneau — some of the legislators outside Anchorage wanted to push more onto Anchorage," Meyer said. "You had a surplus."
Berkowitz has criticized sharp cuts to the program that shares oil wealth with local governments. With the state facing a $4 billion deficit, Meyer questioned whether Anchorage should in fact be sharing some of its surplus with the state.
"Maybe you can help me as to what happened to that surplus," Meyer said.
City manager Mike Abbott said the city's surplus represented about 3 percent of a nearly $500 million budget. He said it's normal for local governments in Alaska to end each year a few percentage points "in the black." Relative to the rest of the budget, it wasn't that big, Abbott said.
Meyer asked again what had happened to Anchorage's surplus.
"Some of it is going to be used to solve this problem," Berkowitz said, referring to the costs that he said the state had shifted.
Berkowitz is expected to unveil his 2016 budget proposal to the Anchorage Assembly on Friday.