Rosemary Shinohara

The state and city are gearing up to choose a final route for a new road into the university and medical district from Northern Lights Boulevard.

Pay and benefits for city employees are at the center of an ongoing debate in Anchorage as administrators and unions begin a new round of contract negotiations that will be governed by the controversial labor law rewrite.

The city has rejected for a second time a proposed referendum petition to repeal the labor law rewrite passed by the Anchorage Assembly in March.

Assembly member Adam Trombley is casting a critical eye on the city planning department.

Soldiers on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson will be setting off explosives Tuesday as they train how to remove obstacles such as impediments in a road.

Neighbors of a VFW club in a strip mall on the Old Seward Highway want to close it down, and they're hoping to enlist the support of the Anchorage Assembly Tuesday.

Backers of a proposed referendum to repeal a recently-adopted rewrite of Anchorage's city labor law are trying again after city officials turned down their first attempt.

Nick Moe, the write-in candidate for Assembly in West Anchorage, conceded Tuesday that a weekend hand-count of votes in his race showed Ernie Hall, the incumbent, is the winner.

The city has rejected a proposed referendum petition to repeal AO 37, the ordinance passed in March that rewrites city labor law.

West Anchorage Assemblyman Ernie Hall's lead over write-ins in the April 2 city election widened from 93 votes to 318 Saturday when the city completed a computer count of about 1,100 absentee and questioned ballots in the district.

A new software system meant to automate many functions of Anchorage's city government is more than a year behind the original start date and has risen in price by about $4.5 million since the initial 2011 budget for it, the city's chief financial officer, Lucinda Mahoney, said Friday.

The city clerk's office says it will hand-count ballots in a West Anchorage Assembly race in which incumbent Assemblyman Ernie Hall was just 93 votes ahead of write-in votes on election night.

Anchorage union leaders are launching a referendum drive to try to kill the city's just-passed rewrite of the city labor law, a spokesman for a coalition of city unions said Wednesday. Just filing the roughly 7,200 required signatures for the referendum with the city clerk's office in a timely way would require the city to suspend the ordinance.

Voters on Tuesday delivered mixed results to candidates backed by conservative Mayor Dan Sullivan. In West Anchorage, Assembly chairman Ernie Hall, who co-sponsored the labor law rewrite, faced a strong write-in vote for Nick Moe.