City’s first chief equity officer will tackle solutions for building a more equitable Anchorage

Anchorage’s first chief equity officer, who stepped into the role this week, will focus on finding solutions for a complicated issue: How can the city build a more equitable Anchorage?

Clifford Armstrong III of Tacoma, Washington, was appointed by Acting Anchorage Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson. He started in the position Monday, and the Assembly confirmed his appointment Tuesday evening.

In Tacoma, Armstrong served as the city’s equity in contracting and workforce development manager. That program focused on gender and race equity requirement in contracting, he told the Assembly during a work session last week.

The many functions of the chief equity officer “have one underpinning, which is pointing the direction and being a ship captain, so to speak, to developing a more equitable Anchorage, in whatever way, shape or form that comes to pass,” he said.

The Assembly approved a proposal from former Mayor Ethan Berkowitz to create the city’s new Office of Equity and Justice — and the chief equity officer position — last summer, during nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism.

Armstrong will be responsible for “developing, supporting, and implementing the municipality’s equity agenda,” according to the ordinance. That means working to build practices in Anchorage’s government that build diversity, equity and inclusion, according to the extensive job description on the city’s website.

He will be paid an annual salary of about $115,000, according to his offer letter from the acting mayor.

How exactly Anchorage will move forward will depend on input from the community, its leaders and what the data shows that the city needs, Armstrong said told Assembly members.

Data collection, and then quantifying and understanding its meaning in context, will be key to that mission, he said.

That can help the city understand whether or how its different groups of diverse residents are being impacted in disparate ways or are experiencing disparities in their outcomes, he said.

“One of the things that I would propose probably doing within the first year and a half, two years, is really being able to develop something like an equity index, which is what we built in in Tacoma as well,” he said.

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An equity index would help the city take a closer look at different subpopulations, he said, and if there is “some negative distribution of outcomes, then that lets you know that probably should be something that is prioritized,” he said.

“I think the place to start is with a common definition of exactly what equity is and exactly what inclusion is and exactly what diversity is, and working from that common definition,” Armstrong said. “I think everybody would agree that they want people to be free from discrimination or be free from the any sort of negative outcomes that might be predetermined because of some factor that they were born into and couldn’t control, or some other sort of societal ill.”

Before the Assembly confirmed Armstrong as chief equity officer earlier this week, some Assembly members asked why someone local was not hired.

Member Meg Zaletel said she’s concerned about the process that was used to hire for the position.

“I think that we need to take a look — and maybe this will be one of the roles for the Office of Equity and Justice — but how we recruit and how we reach out for these positions,” Zaletel said. “I think we have lots of great, locally qualified candidates who could do this work.”

Still, she said her concerns have nothing to do with Armstrong.

At the Assembly work session last week, Quinn-Davidson said that community representatives from First Alaskans Institute and the Alaska Black Chamber of Commerce participated in the entire selection process.

Assembly member Christopher Constant said on Tuesday that he is “looking forward to a fresh perspective not bound by the politics of the past.”

“The reality is, you are stepping into a community new and fresh, which brings a clean slate and an opportunity to see many things that we as a community may not be able to see collectively because we’ve been in it for so long,” he said.