Mayor LaFrance releases 2025 Budget prioritizing good government, public safety, and reducing homelessness

Anchorage, Alaska - On October 2, 2024, Mayor Suzanne LaFrance and her team released the 2025 Municipality of Anchorage budget. The mayor's budget prioritizes public safety, tackling homelessness, restoring core services, and establishing a future-oriented foundation from which to build.

"A budget is not only a reflection of our values and priorities, but the vehicle through which they become results," Mayor LaFrance said. "Our team has focused on building a budget that funds strategies to address the community's biggest challenges while delivering quality public services each day."

The 2025 operating budget includes key investments to address homelessness, expand and improve crisis response services, strengthen road-plowing capacity, support child care and early education, and rebuild the Municipality's workforce to safeguard critical service delivery for the people of Anchorage.

Highlights from the Operating Budget:

• Addressing homelessness head-on through housing, shelter, and camp cleanup.
• Expanding the Mobile Crisis Team, which responds to residents in crisis, to 24-hour service;
• Continue fully funding the Anchorage Safety Patrol; shifting service from the Anchorage Health Department to the Anchorage Fire Department to improve crisis response capacity;
• Improving recruitment and retention in the Prosecutor's Office, a key public safety function;
• Raising snowplow operator pay to expand snow removal capacity, reliability, and expertise;
• Investing the Anchorage Child Care and Early Education Fund directly into the childcare sector to stabilize the sector and spur growth;
• Supporting innovative pilot projects to improve access to quality, affordable childcare and early education;
• Kickstarting a new Grants team focused on securing large federal and state investments, including infrastructure dollars;
• Making municipal jobs more competitive to improve consistency and functionality of critical services;

Highlights from the Capital Budget:

• Traffic calming and pedestrian safety
• Parks and trails projects, including funding to revitalize Town Square Park
• Improving Chugach State Park Access
• Critical road and drainage work
• Public safety investments, including emergency vehicles
• Upgrades to the Anchorage Senior Center

Proposed Levies for Consideration on April 2025 Ballot

Alongside the budget, the mayor has also put forward two special levies to address the Municipality's aging equipment:

• A special snow equipment levyto replace obsolete equipment to keep our roads safe and clear all winter;
• A special public safety levy for the Anchorage Police Department's deteriorating vehicle fleet to maintain crisis response capacity and keep the public safe;

The released budget includes the mayor's proposed operating budget, capital budget, and budgets for the municipality's utilities and enterprise departments.

"The 2025 proposed budget continues to prioritize core service delivery and aligns funding toward critical community needs, all while coming in almost $200,000 under the tax cap," said Ona Brause, director of the office of Management and Budget.

"I am proud to share a fiscally responsible budget that gets the basics right andfaces the big challenges head-on," Mayor LaFrance said. "It takes longer to fix things than it does to break them and Government is no different. This budget reflects our commitment to the hard work ahead. Our community deserves no less."

The mayor's proposed budget has been submitted to the Assembly and is available for community review. The Assembly will review, hold public hearings, amend, and approve.

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Media Contact: Amanda K. Moser
907-615-7852
​[email protected]

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