Unification from the Shores of Ship Creek

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An excerpt from From the Shores of Ship Creek: Stories of Anchorage’s First 100 Years by Charles Wohlforth (Todd Communications, 2014). Text copyright 2014, Alaska Humanities Forum. Re-printed with permission. ​

Jane Angvik arrived in Anchorage in 1973, short of money but with skills as a community planner in a town that needed them badly. Construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline had begun and the city was spreading across the Anchorage bowl like a spilled cocktail. Young construction workers flowed through the bars with huge paychecks they wanted to blow quickly. It was bigger than the gold rush.

At the Greater Anchorage Area Borough offices on two-lane Tudor Road, Angvik asked the planning director for a job.

“I had worked at a city planning office, I was sitting in front of him, and I could breathe,” Angvik recalls. He offered her a salary she could hardly believe. “All I knew was I was going to be able to double my income and come live in a beautiful place that was full of mountains.”

Angvik got an apartment with a nurse and a medical records worker. Going out together, they never had to pay for a drink. “We were all 24 or 25, and we’d go to work, and then we’d party all night with all these people who were here to build the pipeline. It was amazing. …This town was wild. It was just bursting. It was really fun.”

The average age in Anchorage at the time was 23. Crime, traffic, prostitution and drug abuse spiked. The permissiveness of the disco era hit at the same time as the tsunami of young people with money. City police left for high-paying pipeline jobs. A severe shortage of officers and other workers could be met only with drastic increases in pay and benefits, which also brought double-digit price inflation.

In one year, 1974, the number of vehicles registered in Anchorage increased by 44 percent, hospital admissions rose 79 percent, building permits 35 percent. Robberies went up 65 percent, auto thefts 52 percent. A small one-bedroom apartment rented for over $500, the equivalent of $2,700 today. Adjusted for inflation, the 1974 cost of a one-bedroom apartment would be more than $3,200 in 2025. Local government couldn’t cope and the state and federal governments sent emergency financial aid to help.

Older residents bemoaned the loss of the city’s small-town feel and the need to lock their doors, just as a previous generation had bemoaned the changes that came with the World War II boom. As in that earlier population rush, newcomers brought new energy and new values and rapidly rose to positions of leadership. Once again, economic opportunities created greater equality. A survey by a Wellesley College sociologist at the time found that women believed they were free to accomplish more without encountering bias in Anchorage than they had been back home.

Angvik was reared in a political household in Minnesota and had worked as a community organizer in a War on Poverty program before coming to Anchorage. As a planner, she jumped into similar work here, taking the new borough mayor, Jack Roderick, to more than 50 community meetings to hear neighborhood concerns. Those meetings became the germ of the community council process that still provides a voice to neighborhoods. The ideas fed into the borough’s first comprehensive plan.

In the mid-1950s, the City of Anchorage had marked out greenbelts and a few other lines on the map of the Anchorage bowl beyond city limits. But local government had not existed to plan the majority of the area we now call Anchorage, generally south of Northern Lights Boulevard and east of Merrill Field. When Angvik arrived, all land south of Tudor Road remained unzoned. Without controls, roads blazed by homesteaders became corridors of businesses, strip development. Houses sprouted like mushrooms in the middle of swamps.

“People were coming into the community at the rate of a thousand people a month,” Angvik said. “They had no place to sleep, so the marketplace was moving as fast as it could to put up ticky-tacky little houses.  … And the challenge was that the planning activity was occurring simultaneously with the development, and the development was being driven much faster by investment than was the planning process.”

Conflict exploded weekly at Borough Assembly meetings. Angvik remembers them as screaming matches. They commonly lasted through the night and into the early morning.

The borough had existed for only eight years when Roderick became mayor in 1972. It had never been free of intense controversy. In fact, the people it served had never wanted it at all. With a dysfunctional assembly, a hostile city government, and a new organization, the explosion in growth could not be managed. The Anchorage we live in today reflects those days of chaotic sprawl.

Journalists arrived to see the rush happening in Anchorage, and the reports they sent back were not flattering. Most of Anchorage looked like a dirty highway frontage strip on the edge of any western town: dusty, haphazard and cheap.

“Anchorage is sometimes excused in the name of pioneering,” wrote John McPhee in Coming Into the Country. “But Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air.”

Like an awkward, acned thirteen-year-old, Anchorage knew it wasn’t beautiful, but wasn’t sure what to do about the problem. That would come later. That Wellesley professor, Lee Cuba, found that people in Anchorage during the pipeline decade, mostly newcomers, loved being here, felt like real Alaskans, and buzzed with energy and optimism. Many stayed, and as they aged and settled down, the job of making a better city slowly became a community goal. A difficult goal, because of the way it had all started.

​The roots of the city’s growth problems reached back to its beginnings. Congress prohibited the creation of counties in Alaska during territorial days, presumably to protect the influential fish and mining industries from local taxes. By the time the Alaska Constitutional Convention met in 1955, it didn’t want to replicate America’s typical local government set-up of cities, towns, and counties, because that produced too many small, overlapping government authorities. The convention’s local government committee decided to create a completely new system of local government for Alaska.

Convention delegate Vic Fischer, the Anchorage planner, said the committee sought to make local government as flexible and as powerful as possible, so Alaskans could control their own destiny. An area that wanted maximal local control could form a home rule municipality, which would unify all powers not held by the state government into a single entity. An area that wanted minimal government could choose a regional unit, similar to a county, with towns inside it, and a menu of powers. The committee wanted a new name for this new unit and went through many fanciful choices—tundraburg, poloria, munipuk, and couperie, among others—before settling on borough, which was at least a word in the dictionary.

In Anchorage, local government for the area beyond the city limits was already overdue when statehood arrived in 1959. A USGS report in that year noted that in Spenard, which lacked sewers, closely spaced wells commonly drew water from atop the Bootlegger Cove clay layer, the same aquifer that caught the waste draining down from septic systems. The Spenard Public Utility District, a ten-square-mile area, had its own library, road service, and volunteer fire department, and a private company built a water system there. But across most of the greater Anchorage area, roads were unmaintained, dogs roamed without anyone to catch them, and in case of a fire, it was uncertain if anyone would respond.

Residents outside city boundaries were used to all that. In the late 1950s they resisted being annexed into the city. They showed no interest in being in a borough, either. The constitution drafters had miscalculated when they expected communities to set up boroughs. Three years after statehood, only one small borough had formed, on Bristol Bay.

Without local government, everything became a state issue. Governor Bill Egan noted that he commonly received phone calls, letters and petitions asking him for decisions about filling in a ditch, transferring students to a different school, or prohibiting snake exhibits or junk yards on certain properties. In 1963, he and other state officials lost patience and decided to force Alaska’s populated areas to form boroughs.

But the Mandatory Borough Act that passed that year brought outrage, lawsuits and a repeal initiative, which a judge halted as unconstitutional. In Anchorage a group called the Committee for Common Sense Government bought newspaper ads decrying out-of-control big government, bureaucracy and taxation, which it claimed was already choking the area. Residents voted down a proposal to create the Captain Cook Borough for Anchorage by a three-to-one margin in September, 1963. The new state law then automatically created the Greater Anchorage Area Borough on January 1, 1964, with the boundaries of the then-existing election district for the area.

John Asplund became the first borough chairman (equivalent of a mayor), elected to the same position he had held at the Spenard Public Utility District, which the borough absorbed. Asplund focused on building sewers and a sewage treatment plant. Sewage was going underground and into creeks. Sewer systems in the city and on the military bases drained through more than a dozen pipes directly into Cook Inlet.

Debate over sewer construction and city and borough taxes created a level of conflict that is difficult to comprehend 50 years later. Asplund’s friends and colleagues remember a man of courage, gentleness and integrity who accomplished a historic step for Anchorage with the sewer system. They said his opponents were self-interested. His opponents, including city government leaders and the powerful Anchorage Times, charged that Asplund was a weak manager, too willing to spend on sewers, and ran a poorly functioning local government.

Borough voters supported the sewer project, but its centerpiece took six years of political struggle and 18 lawsuits before it was completed in 1972. The night before the treatment plant at Point Woronzof was dedicated, the Borough Assembly fulfilled Asplund’s hope to have it named after him. He was about to retire.

“There came a time when the citizens of our community decided that living with raw sewage in their neighborhood streams was not tolerable,” Asplund said at the ceremony. “We are truly one giant step closer to a clean community with clean air and clean water.”

The Times congratulated Asplund in an editorial, while again charging him with bungling, confusion and deception. It grudgingly admitted, “Maybe for today the new facility is too much. But few doubt its essential need in the years ahead.”

Asplund’s project still collects Anchorage’s wastewater and puts it through primary treatment, which removes about 75 percent of suspended solids before releasing 58 million gallons a day of liquid through a pipe 800 feet offshore. After 40 years, it is one of only 32 sewage plants nationally not required to treat sewage to a higher level of cleanliness. The Environmental Protection Agency has allowed that situation because Cook Inlet’s currents rapidly dilute the water.

The sewer system did more to establish the geography of Anchorage than any land use plan. Without sewers, modern health standards require homes to be built on large lots where waste can percolate into the ground. Hillside residents who wanted a rural lifestyle with widely spaced houses stopped sewer extension into their neighborhoods. Since large lots are expensive, that became the most affluent area of town. On the other hand, where sewers went first, housing and businesses were more densely spaced. Those areas ended up as urban neighborhoods.

Sewers also changed the landscape. Bootlegger Cove clay formed a barrier like a sheet of plastic under the ground. Water on top of it filled ponds and swamps all over Anchorage. When water and sewer lines punctured the clay layer, surface water drained away into the soil below, eliminating many wetlands.

The first borough offices stood on Northern Lights Boulevard near the site of today’s Barnes and Noble bookstore. Vic Carlson, borough attorney from 1966 to 1969, recalled that he couldn’t drive to work on C Street because Blueberry Lake was in the way, a pond used by float planes. C Street stopped at Fireweed Lane and traffic going south jogged over to Barrow Street and threaded through the Arrow Lumber yard (today a bingo hall). But sewer construction broke the clay layer under Blueberry Lake, it drained, and now businesses and offices occupy the space. The only evidence of the lake’s existence is the name of Blueberry Road, which connects Fireweed Lane and Northern Lights Blvd. next to Steller Secondary School.

The sewer fight divided the city and borough, but so did urban and rural Alaskan values. The straight, relatively orderly streets of the city, with the library and other public buildings and sewers already in place, came at the cost of higher taxes. Some city residents resented those from outside its boundary who used city facilities without paying city taxes. Those outside the city often saw themselves as rural residents, self-sufficient Alaskans who didn’t want government services. To them, the city threatened too much government and taxes. They wanted to live in Alaska, not Anchorage.

The state law that set up the borough made the conflict worse. The eleven-member Borough Assembly had six of its members elected from outside the city and five chosen from among the membership of the Anchorage City Council. On certain issues, however, each city councilman’s vote on the Borough Assembly would be weighted to reflect the population he or she represented. That meant the assembly had five members from the city, but each city member sometimes had 1.4 votes.

The Borough Assembly and City Council would meet weekly and pass resolutions criticizing or even suing each other, with five members attending both meetings and voting from both perspectives. The sides voted together, as a bloc, city versus borough. A one-vote switch on any issue made the difference, creating constant temptation for political deals.

Discussions to unify the city and borough began in 1966, and in 1969 a commission was elected to draft a charter for a unified government. It was holding hearings in 1970 when a terrible disaster struck.

The 99-room Gold Rush Motor Lodge caught fire at 2:30 a.m. on the extremely cold night of January 13. The motel stood on the south side of West Northern Lights Boulevard between Dawson and Cheechako streets (the abandoned Northern Lights Inn stands on the same site today). Northern Lights Boulevard formed the city limit. The motor lodge, on the south side, was outside the city, where it had been built in 1966 without any building code requirements or inspections. It was a fire trap: all wood, without fire walls, alarms or sprinklers. When the borough fire department arrived, within two minutes of the call, half the building was already engulfed in flames and guests trapped in their rooms were screaming from the windows for help.

The city fire department responded, too, but its trucks parked on the far side of the road. City firefighters rushed individually to help the trapped guests. Borough firefighters also requested help from the city’s truck to set up an aerial water spray. The city’s commander refused, and the truck stood idle across the road while the motel burned. Five people died in the fire.

All the next day on the radio, newsman Herb Shaindlin, a master of outrage and incitement, and a major local voice, built the narrative that the five who had died were victims of the city-borough conflict. A legislative investigation later concluded they would have died even if the city’s fire truck had been used. But Shaindlin’s version stuck, to be remembered decades later as a turning point in the cause of unification.

At least unification advocates remembered it that way. For years, they called upon the memory of the fire to make their case. But in fact, when the first unification commission’s charter came up for a vote the same year, residents outside the city turned it down, despite the fresh memory of the fire. After that defeat, the commission amended the proposal to make it more attractive outside the city, but it failed again in 1971. Asplund and city Mayor George Sullivan tried again with a more limited unification concept in 1972. The Assembly turned it down. Next, the city tried to quit the borough and form its own Cook Inlet Borough. The state turned that down in January 1973. Again that fall, the assembly turned down a new charter commission.

And then the pipeline boom hit. With crime soaring off the charts, the borough had no police department. Alaska State Troopers patrolled the area along with the rest of the state. In 1974, Roderick asked voters for permission to take over the city police department and spread it areawide. A bitter political campaign ensued. Ads paid for by the city government said of the borough, “If they administer the police like they administered the sewers, we’ll all go down the drain.” The borough government hit back with its own ads accusing the city of dirty campaigning. Taxpayers paid the campaign bills for both sides. The vote failed. Then the city sued the borough for misuse of pipeline impact aid, and taxpayers paid legal fees for both sides of that fight, too.

Jane Angvik had lived in Anchorage only a year when Vic Fischer convinced her to run for the second charter commission in 1974 (he later became her husband). He had been 31 when he attended the constitutional convention; Angvik was 26 when she was elected to the charter commission (Commissioner Lisa Parker, even younger, was still attending Anchorage Community College). The new population of Anchorage was receptive to putting newcomers in charge.

“There is no question that the only reason I was elected was because I was a young, pretty girl,” Angvik said. But she had already helped write the borough’s first comprehensive plan, working with people in every neighborhood. She saw unification as the only chance for the plan to be implemented. “I had a story about planning, and wanting the community to be better, and I could always talk, and was fearless about that. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I couldn’t do it.”

Frank Reed, who had lived in Anchorage from its first days, chaired the commission in his warm, courteous style, with a sense of the importance of writing a constitution for the city. Joe Josephson provided the broad view of government and drafted the Bill of Rights. Mary Frohne, a Hillside activist, kept the perspective of the tax-averse, large-lot rural part of Anchorage in view. Arliss Sturgulewski brought together the words.

“Arliss comes from the League of Women Voters,” Angvik said. “Arliss believes if you take the notes and write the first draft, you do all the work, you have a much higher probability of influencing the outcome. So Arliss, Shari Holmes, Lisa Parker and I, the women, did that.”

Besides creating the basis for a new local government, the commission made some smart decisions to get it approved by voters. One was the service-area concept. Although Anchorage would be one city, areas could opt for the level of service they wanted and were willing to pay for. Another good decision was recognition of the old city’s investment of 50 years. In-city residents got a temporary tax break to compensate for the infrastructure they contributed. A third bright idea was having elections for the new mayor and assembly at the same time as the vote on the charter. If the charter didn’t pass, those elections for offices would be for nothing, so the candidates campaigned for the charter as well as for themselves.

Before the charter commission was elected, Eagle River and Chugiak had seceded from the borough. But while charter deliberations were going on, a judge ordered the communities back in. That left the commission without any representation from Eagle River or Chugiak, even though those areas would vote on the final document. The commission went to Eagle River to hear the community’s concerns. Angvik remembers guns in the audience. As they sat down, each commission member was served with a lawsuit.

“We didn’t persuade anyone in Eagle River,” Angvik said. But the commission did set up the new Assembly with districts that would allow Eagle River and Chugiak to have its own member (later, the single-member district was moved to downtown and Eagle River and Chugiak got two).

Anchorage’s new government also pulled in the small town of Girdwood, on Turnagain Arm, without representation on the Charter Commission. Established by gold prospectors in the 1890s, two decades before the first dream of Anchorage’s existence, Girdwood had slowly developed with its own government. After gold mining petered out, skiing became Girdwood’s reason to exist, and it eventually developed the four-season Alyeska Resort. But when the charter was considered, Girdwood had just a few residents and the community’s interests were an afterthought.

On September 9, 1975, voters approved the charter and elected city mayor George Sullivan as mayor of the new unified government over borough mayor Jack Roderick. Six days later, the Greater Anchorage Area Borough ceased to exist and the home rule municipality came into existence, spreading from Eklutna to Portage and east across the Chugach Mountains nearly to Prince William Sound. It was called the Municipality of Anchorage.

The crisis of serving a community in the convulsions of the oil pipeline construction boom continued, and now city leaders also had the job of combining two governments, with two sets of laws, two people in each job, and two sets of labor agreements and financial books. It was an enormous, frustrating task. The Assembly met three times a week, often fighting with Mayor Sullivan. Less than a year after unification, the newspapers reported that the mayor would quit (he didn’t).

But the most difficult issue for the new government was completely unexpected: equal rights for gays and lesbians. It had been included by a citizen’s committee drafting a law to implement the new charter’s Bill of Rights. Mayor Sullivan deleted “sexual preference” from the draft, but the Assembly added it back on a unanimous vote. A gay man, Jim Parsons, had served on the Charter Commission. The next Sunday, an Anchorage Times article noted how uncontroversial the change had been.

That day, a brand new force erupted on the scene: Christian conservatives led by Dr. Jerry Prevo of the Anchorage Baptist Temple. They flooded Assembly members, the mayor and the newspapers with angry messages demanding the ordinance be vetoed or repealed.

The issue gripped the community for the first three months of 1976, with at least two Assembly meetings drawing unruly crowds of nearly 1,000 people, the largest ever seen. The gay rights proposal died under Mayor Sullivan’s veto, only to be proposed again, with similarly intense opposition, in 1993, 2009 and 2012. Today the vast majority of Americans live under equal rights laws for gays and lesbians, but not in Anchorage or Alaska as a whole. Sexual orientation and gender identity were added as protected classes under Anchorage Title 5 – Equal Rights, approved by the Anchorage Assembly on September 29, 2015.

In 1976, that opposition came as a surprise for local politicians. Before the pipeline years, no giant churches existed in Anchorage. Social issues didn’t produce much heat: Alaska abolished the death penalty in 1957, legalized abortion in 1970, added the right to privacy to the state constitution in 1972, and decriminalized small amounts of marijuana in 1975. Anchorage’s gay rights fight of 1976 was the first time church members had flexed political muscle. But in the decades after, Prevo and Christian conservatives shaped much of the political debate on social issues.

Pipeline construction ended in 1977. Growth slowed, but the city had gained a new size, a new identity, and enough new, young people to transform the population. Memories of the Greater Anchorage Area Borough rapidly faded away, although the service area system still allows neighborhoods to customize the level of government they want. For example, Eagle River and Chugiak still don’t have a building code.

But more boom-time development was on the horizon.​

Published by the Assembly Legislative Services Office

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