Alaska News

Our view: Two tracks

Mayor Dan Sullivan made a promising start Monday with his proposal to deal with chronic street drunks in Anchorage. State Sen. Johnny Ellis said the mayor was "on the right track." Actually, the mayor is on two tracks, both of them good.

He sees the chronic street inebriate problem as first and foremost one of public safety. He wants Anchorage residents to feel safe and comfortable in their parks and on their trails -- or, for that matter, in parking lots and around intersections.

Families shouldn't be afraid to use parks because street drunks have taken them over. Neighborhoods shouldn't have to put up with all the public nuisance behavior, or worse, that comes with drunks and other substance abusers.

So, for starters, the mayor wants to use a recently passed city ordinance to shut down a yet-to-be-chosen homeless camp -- and at the same arrive with whatever private or public help the occupants need to get off the street and into a better life, from long-term treatment to housing assistance.

He doesn't want to simply lock people up or move them out of sight -- an inhumane response to a real problem.

The mayor made clear the street drunks of Anchorage are more than a public nuisance. They're people.

"They need treatment," he said.

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He intends to work with Sen. Johnny Ellis and others who have led the way for more treatment beds and involuntary commitment of chronic street drunks incapable of getting help on their own. The mayor will also bring together two community task forces to tackle the problem in other ways.

And at the top, he wants one city executive to pull this cooperative effort together, and he aims to hire that person in the next few weeks.

Decades of street drunks as part of the cityscape in Anchorage -- and limited success in changing that scene -- have led to a strain of thinking that says, "Street drunks will always be with us." As the mayor pointed out, we've been reactive. The Community Service Patrol picks up the passed-out; we arrest a street drunk when he commits a crime -- or we arrest those who victimize the inebriated, when we catch them.

What the mayor wants to do is make the streets safer and street drunks fewer -- through law enforcement and treatment, not attrition. We don't want to count more dead. We want to count fewer drunk and more sober.

Real progress will cost real money because treatment is expensive. Given the city's finances, that will be a challenge -- and the mayor expects most of any new funding to come from state and federal sources.

But first things first. The initiatives the mayor has in mind are not original, but putting one person in charge should help. Once that person is named, then the city will begin to put the mayor's ideas to the test.

Mayor Sullivan said that "we're not naive enough" to think we can completely solve the problem. But he has set out ambitious, worthy goals. Bless whoever takes the job of helping the city reach them.

BOTTOM LINE: Here's hoping Mayor Sullivan's initiatives will work as planned and help reduce homelessness.

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