Memories from the First Assembly Chair

On September 9, 1975, the char​​ter was approved, George Sullivan became the unified government’s first mayor, and I was elected to the Anchorage Municipal Assembly—my third election in a year. The City of Anchorage and the Greater Anchorage Area Borough ceased to exist six days later. Voters had not approved a name for the new government, but had turned down calling it a “city,” surely due to the bitter aftertaste of years of conflict. Staffers didn’t know how to answer the phone—they couldn’t just say “Anchorage.” Over drinks one evening, we settled on calling it the Municipality of Anchorage, which is the name that sticks to this day, or “Muni” for short.

Unification immediately changed assembly politics. Before, we had split on lines of city versus borough. Now we split as liberal versus conservative. Five members stood on either side of that divide, and I was the moderate in the middle. On one hand, my fiscal and managerial caution put me with the conservative camp; on the other hand, my support for parks and planning aligned me more with the liberals. I also supported freedom and civil rights, issues that straddled political boundaries.

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On the unified assembly, my independence put me in the driver’s seat. I could organize as chairman by joining either side. I had wanted to move into the assembly chairman’s position for some time, and this was the opportunity. I invited the entire assembly to dinner one night. Assembly member Lidia Selkregg invited me to her house to meet with the liberal wing. With a few agreements on priorities, I won majority support to be the chairman of the new assembly. Within the month, I also was elected president of the Alaska Municipal League, representing local governments before the legislature. The league had a critical mission that year. The coming of Big Oil meant the state government would be flush with money, but local governments were straining under the load of providing services during the oil boom and needed aid from the state.

My work chairing the assembly for the next year was extraordinarily challenging. Two governments had become one, but only in name. We still had two sets of laws, two organizations in two headquarters, and two sets of employees with two sets of job classifications, pay rates, labor agreements, and unions. At first, we had chaos. Municipal workers didn’t know who their bosses were, where their jurisdiction lay, or what ordinances and regulations they were supposed to apply. Employee morale crashed as the assembly and mayor churned through the work of establishing a functioning system. But while we worked, there was no rest from the external pressures and needs of citizens. Indeed, demands on the Municipality reached a feverish height as Anchorage lurched through an unprecedented growth shock brought on by construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline.

The pipeline project, said to be the largest private construction job in human history, paid astronomical wages to armies of outside workers. The local economy superheated in gold-rush fashion, with insane prices and wild behavior similar to that of the Klondike seventy-five years earlier. Prostitutes and construction workers cruised the streets with huge wads of money in their pockets. Crime rates soared. Organized crime moved in. We lacked housing, our roads were clogged and disintegrating, and over-extended utilities could not afford construction materials due to soaring rices. The very nature of the community changed with an influx of hardhats from the Bible Belt.

I was proud of how the assembly responded. In the first year of unification, we rewrote the dictionary-sized Anchorage Municipal Code, approving 2,640 separate legislative items. Assembly meetings occurred, on average, every two and a half days, and that doesn’t count informal work sessions. We saw each other more than we did our families. We took an active, independent approach. The assembly dug into issues and grappled with details to reach its own conclusions. Although evenly divided philosophically, we made a strong working group when faced with the daunting task facing us, and we performed well.

The assembly’s activism surprised and antagonized Mayor Sullivan. Our mutual congratulations after the election soon gave way to sharp-elbowed jockeying for position as we defined the balance of powers in the new governmental structure. Being on the opposite side of the table from Sullivan rather than working at his side made me realize how brutal a fight with him for power could be. After I helped him get elected, he seemed to expect me to support him unconditionally. As Suzan Nightingale put it in a column in the Anchorage Daily News a few years later, “Sullivan, who had expected Rose’s help, was learning that when basic philosophical differences arose, help was not the same thing as cooperation. When irreconcilable differences of opinion arose, Rose led the Assembly in publicly passing ordinances that Sullivan had already promised to veto.” The fatigue of endless eighteen-hour days for both of us probably fed the conflict, as well.

Sullivan seized control of the assembly agenda and set up the municipal attorney’s office under executive rules, meaning that its staff would serve at the mayor’s pleasure. Both moves stripped the assembly of the autonomy we needed to work independently, giving us neither the ability to manage our workload nor to obtain unbiased legal advice. I fought back. In a series of votes, I changed or reversed Sullivan’s agenda plans and finally won control of the agenda for the assembly chair. Nor would I back down from policy disagreements, going against Sullivan’s wishes on various ordinances—taxicab regulation, the airport budget, and powers of the ombudsman. Sullivan wanted a toothless ombudsman, a position reporting to the assembly with the power to investigate the administration. When we overrode his veto, Sullivan refused to recognize the override. He even vetoed our rules of procedure.

The breakdown in our relationship happened fast, like a lot of things in those frantic years. Unification occurred in September 1975. By February 1976, I publicly declared dissatisfaction with Sullivan’s performance and proposed amending our new charter to bring in a city manager who would assume many of the mayor’s executive duties. Although Sullivan had supported the manager form of government prior to unification, he shot back that my proposal amounted to sour grapes over policy differences. Yet even he was aware of the problems. The administration bogged down in litigation and other setbacks on labor relations, a utilities crisis, borough finances that wouldn’t balance, and public dissatisfaction with our inability to cope with sudden changes in the community. After barely nine months in office, rumors made the newspapers that Sullivan was so unhappy he would quit before his term was up. Instead, he announced that he definitely would not run for reelection, although that race was more than two years away. I suspected that he had a run for governor in mind. He charged that I was fighting him to set up my own run for mayor.

Thankfully, those conflicts have faded over the years. Indeed, most of these events slipped from my memory until, while writing this memoir, we reopened my old files. Recently, when the municipality celebrated its thirtieth year, George graciously recognized my contribution to Anchorage as it exists today. Our relationship is cordial. The organization we built together through the tension of divided government is a singular success with a proud history. The signs of our work are all over town.
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