A court-ordered search of city records turned up nothing to indicate that Anchorage mayoral candidate and former Assembly member Dan Coffey was involved in drafting the city's contentious 2013 labor ordinance, according to court documents filed Wednesday by city attorneys.
The documents come in response to an Anchorage judge's order last week to give a union coalition any emails, letters or documents to and from Coffey concerning the labor ordinance, AO-37. The Coalition of Municipal Unions had filed a lawsuit to force the city to turn over all documents related to AO-37 before the April 7 election but Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi narrowed the scope of the order to cover just Coffey.
In complying with the order, the city found just two emails, neither of them correspondence from Coffey prior to the labor law's introduction in February 2013.
"There's really nothing there," said municipal attorney Dennis Wheeler.
The documents include a March 11 email to Coffey from the American Civil Liberties Union about the closure of testimony on AO-37, sent at the request of then-chair Ernie Hall. The other document is an email from Coffey to Assembly member Patrick Flynn on March 27, 2013.
Coffey wrote to Flynn he was listening to "the debate about the labor ordinance" at home and said he objected to a remark from Flynn characterizing Coffey as "skulking around." He also wrote in the email that he was "at the Assembly on a matter unrelated to the labor ordinance and left prior to the debate."
Coffey said Wednesday the city's response to the court "vindicated" him on the topic.
"I had nothing to do with AO-37," Coffey said.
Mike Stumbaugh, president of the firefighters union and a plaintiff in the court case, commented in an email that the unions' request was "never about Coffey."
"As these papers show, he didn't have any official dealings with AO-37. He has always said that to us," Stumbaugh wrote. "Just more junk but the city is following the court order at least."
The union coalition is hoping to unravel how AO-37 came to be written and passed. Since an initial records request was filed last September, the city has released more than 7,500 documents. But city attorneys say another huge trove of documents, measuring 4 gigabytes on a hard drive, has not yet been sifted through.
The city has until June 15 to turn over the records. Wheeler said the city may hire a paralegal to meet the deadline.