OPINION: Taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for politicians’ misdeeds

Many years ago, just before dirt was invented, I sat in a packed county commission meeting in Florida and looked at the vacant chair of a commissioner who regularly took a powder when the panel was preparing to vote on zoning for certain property.

He always claimed a family emergency required his attention as he hustled out the door. He would return about an hour later. I wondered, “How many emergencies can this guy have?” His ever-helpful buddies on the commission ensured the zoning changes, designed to increase the tracts’ value, passed without his being present. Turns out he or his partners owned that land.

There was no record of his voting for the changes, of course, none of his fingerprints despite his dodging clear disclosure rules requiring transparency — and, he later admitted, no real emergencies, at home or anyplace else. “I just didn’t want people to know,” he told me, smiling, apparently forgetting who he was talking to. When the story splashed across the front page of the newspaper, I figured this guy’s career was toast. Silly me. He later was re-elected.

A reader later sent me a nice note with quotes attributed to French lawyer, diplomat and writer Joseph de Maistre: “In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve,” and, “Every country has the government it deserves.” It should be noted that Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin and Alexis de Tocqueville, among a gaggle of others well acquainted with lousy government, have been quoted as making similar observations.

Fast forward: Mayor Dave Bronson asked the Assembly to reappropriate $827,500 of the city’s $587 million budget for 2023 to settle a trio of legal claims against his administration — beefs lodged by Heather MacAlpine, who was the former director of the city’s Office of Equal Opportunity, as well as by former Municipal Manager Amy Demboski. Both claim they were illegally fired. The Assembly on May 5 met for about two hours in executive session — that is, out of view of the public — to weigh Bronson’s request.

So far, you will notice, the pesky public has not been included, invited or involved by our betters in any of this. It likely will stay that way for a while. Assembly Chairman Chris Constant reportedly said details will not be revealed until they are final. Who will get what chunk of the $827,500 will remain unknown to us mere hoi polloi? We have no idea of who said or did what during the executive session, or why we should smile and hand over our money.

The Assembly did schedule a public hearing May 23 on the settlement — but, almost unbelievably, KTUU reports, “Constant says details of the settlement will not be revealed then and the hearing is designed to let the public speak about the broader issues involved.”He’s gotta be kiddin’. The hearing is designed not to tell taxpayers anything. Zip. Nada. People are supposed to go to the meeting and talk about ... what? The broader issues? What the heck are the broader issues? It would have been more honest if Constant simply had resorted to the “I just didn’t want people to know” last ditch defense against an inquisitive public.

Let’s face it, $827,500 is chicken feed in Bronson’s nearly $600 million operating budget to run a turnstile administration that spends most of its time shooting itself in the foot. It is pocket change for our leftist Assembly that spends too much of its time and our money in an endless, quixotic quest to undo the last mayoral election. Unfortunately, to some folks plagued by this city government, that money is a ton of dough.

People in this city get up every day and go to work so they can pay their bills, including thousands of hard-earned dollars in property taxes. That $827,500 is real money to them. It is bad enough they are victims of what passes for city government in Anchorage, but it is immeasurably worse that their money — even if it is “only” $827,500 — is being divvied up away from public view before they are invited to a “public hearing” and being told to pound sand.

If we were serious in this community about finally getting government that works, we would ensure that those who screw up pay the bills rather than passing them on to working men and women and giving them no say in the hosing. As taxpayers and citizens, we need to pay more attention, demand transparency and remember these people who love to work in secret with so little respect for voters who put them in office or the taxpayers who pay their way are supposed to work for us, not the other way around.

De Maistre may have had it right, up to a point, but nobody deserves the government we have.

Paul Jenkins is a former Associated Press reporter, managing editor of the Anchorage Times, an editor of the Voice of the Times and former editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.

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