Mayor Bronson’s budget director asks to resign or switch roles in letter criticizing Anchorage Assembly

Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Sharon Lechner, said last week that she will resign from the municipality unless she is reassigned to a new position, according to the mayor’s office.

Lechner gave Bronson her resignation letter April 30 — last Tuesday — just after the Assembly unanimously approved revisions to the city budget that evening.

In the letter, she criticized the Assembly over its changes to Bronson’s proposed budget revisions. The annual revision process occurs each spring when the Assembly sets the tax levy.

“The Assembly passed a budget that unwound months of progress for our city,” Lechner said. “Worse, every amendment proposed by the Assembly that reversed important items (such) as additional staff for the Controller Division or parking parity for the employees in City Hall, was passed with unanimous approval.”

On Thursday, the mayor’s office said in a written statement that the Assembly had surpassed the taxing capacity of the municipality by about $605,000 when it made changes. The Assembly then held a special meeting Friday and unanimously approved changes that fixed the problem.

Bronson on Friday also issued several vetoes of the Assembly’s budget revisions. Assembly Chair Christopher Constant said the Assembly will likely vote on whether to overturn Bronson’s vetoes during its Tuesday meeting.

In its Thursday statement, the mayor’s office attributed the budget problem to a calculation error when multiple Assembly amendments were assessed incorrectly and said Bronson’s proposed budget was beneath the tax cap.

“While it’s unfortunate the Assembly made this error, we will work with them to fix it,” Bronson said in the statement. “Anchorage residents expect us to work together to solve problems, and we will do that. Budgets must be legal, adhere to fiscal policies, and protect taxpayers.”

Assembly member Anna Brawley, co-chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, expressed frustration over the statement and asserted that the mayor turned a small issue into a political one.

“It’s routine for those things to need to be recalculated. It is a complex budget. There are fixes that need to be made. Mistakes can be made. We made a mistake based on the limited information we had, and the implications of what we did. So then to turn around and make it into a political fight when we were working collaboratively to fix a small technical problem is infuriating,” Brawley said.

Brawley said the administration contacted Assembly members Wednesday after budget staff found the problem, and that they met with Lechner and other Bronson staff the next day to figure out how to fix it. The error represented about fraction of 1 percentage point of the city’s total budget, which is about $610 million.

“There’s a disconnect, and there’s a complete, I guess, separation, between the political apparatus of the mayor’s office and using things like this for political gain, versus the reality of how a budgeting process works,” Brawley said.

Bronson is currently running for reelection, and in recent weeks, he has ramped up criticisms of the Assembly.

Lechner is the fifth person to work in the budget director position since Bronson took office in 2021. She took the position last fall, when the Assembly approved the 2024 budget.

Lechner previously worked for the city as its chief fiscal officer and in other positions prior to 2010, according to her resume. She also has experience working in banking and for Native corporations.

Assembly Vice Chair Meg Zaletel, who also co-chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, said that she believes part of the problem came about because Lechner wasn’t involved in setting the original budget.

“I think this issue even arose because of the lack of experience in the executive team, particularly within Management and Budget,” Zaletel said, adding that the staff do have budget and finance experience elsewhere, but that the municipality’s budget is a different and more complex process.

The other issue is that the changes the mayor’s office had proposed were ”not the typical tweaks we make,” she said. “They were actually drastic policy decisions.”

And the city has not closed the books on its 2022 financials — the audit is about a year overdue — “so we’re still making some guesses,” Zaletel said.

That’s why the Assembly changed several of Bronson’s proposed revisions, she said. His revisions would have implemented specific policy decisions, like a $1,000 bonus for non-union-represented employees. Instead, the Assembly “basically created large buckets of funding” for its priorities in order to preserve some flexibility, according to Zaletel.

“If we need to make shifts based on some problem from 2022, or later some problems from 2023, I don’t necessarily want to be hemmed into giving up a particular policy promise,” Zaletel said.

Additionally, several of Bronson’s proposed changes were “one-time accounting true-ups that we can do at any time,” Brawley said.

For those, all 12 members of the Assembly needed more information before voting, “because otherwise, you’re asking people to vote on a whole bunch of complicated financial stuff that they don’t understand, with no public discussion of it,” she said.

Because the Assembly approved the budget revisions unanimously, it’s likely the Assembly will have the supermajority of votes required to override Bronson’s vetoes.

Lechner said that if she isn’t moved to a new position, her last day will be June 28, according to the letter, which was provided to the Daily News by the mayor’s office.

In a social media post Friday, Bronson said, “Sharon is the most experienced and professional individual to have in this position. The effects of losing her will be felt throughout the entire municipality. Without her expertise, we would have never caught the Anchorage Assembly’s very serious budget error: passing a budget last Tuesday that was over $600,000 above the tax cap.”

During the city budgeting process, staff often shore up small problems without an Assembly vote, Brawley and Zaletel said.

This problem had to do with “intergovernmental charges” — when one city department charges another department for its services, and when the Assembly reversed a proposed cut from Bronson, they didn’t have the complete information from the administration, Zaletel said.

In this case, it made sense to hold a vote, “given the uncertainty around the finances in the municipality, without the audits and incomplete information and so many new players, it made good sense to kind of hit this pause button, take a closer look and just be more specific,” Zaletel said.

Lechner, in her letter, said that in the weeks leading up to the budget revisions, no Assembly members reached out with questions, even though the Assembly has a new budget and finance analyst.

Assembly Chair Constant said Lechner was invited to the Assembly’s meeting last month where the members discussed their amendments, and that she had the information.

“Normally when we have a budget analyst who’s not brand-new and an OMB director who’s not brand-new, and we have a better working relationship where you can talk through these things before they get to the meeting — you can work all that stuff out,” Brawley said.