The nickels, dimes and quarters from Anchorage's parking meters may soon help pay for a steel-framed fabric roof cover over the tennis courts at East Anchorage High School to make them available well past the warm-weather season.
The nine-member board of the Anchorage Community Development Authority, a quasi-city agency that maintains parking garages and seeks to invest in redevelopment projects, recently voted to approve an $800,000 grant for a proposed all-weather "multi-use pavilion" at East High that boosters said would accommodate sports like tennis, soccer, football and the Special Olympics. The majority of the authority's revenue comes from parking meters and garages, though about 30 percent comes from real estate.
The Alliance for the Support of American Legion Baseball sought the grant for the multisport pavilion, and supporters include Mayor Dan Sullivan, a tennis player and former head tennis coach at West Anchorage High School. The Alliance's president, Steve Nerland, a former high school baseball coach, said the steel-framed and semi-enclosed pavilion could be a model for covered indoor facilities in Anchorage. The $1.7 million proposal, a version of which came to the Anchorage Assembly late last year as a state legislative request, marks the latest step in an ongoing effort to expand recreational space and make up for all-weather courts lost when the private Alaska Club sold its facility on Bragaw Road.
But Thursday's vote sparked a contentious debate among board members about the finances, mission and what chairman Mike Mills called the "political character" of the Anchorage Community Development Authority. Longtime executive director Ron Pollock said the organization has not given out grants in its 10-year history and is not equipped to do so.
Assembly member Ernie Hall, a nonvoting member of the board, on Thursday lauded the East High proposal as an "incredible project." But he said $800,000 is a "huge grant" for any agency, particularly one with about a $9 million budget. He noted that significantly larger city enterprises, like Municipal Light and Power, are not in the business of making grants.
"I don't know if the municipality's ever done a $800,000 grant," Hall told board members. "Not while I've been here."
In 2004, the Anchorage Community Development Authority was created from what was previously the Anchorage Parking Authority. At the time, the municipality was "considering creation of a community development authority that could aid in developing public lands identified for their development potential and redevelopment of deteriorated or demised areas or properties, as well as affording housing projects," according to a 2013 organizational overview of the development authority.
The organization generates between $7 million and $10 million annually, the majority of which comes from parking meters and garages. Its balance sheets show savings of about $7.3 million, about $6 million of which is slated to be spent on capital projects in the next two years, according to Pollock, who recently resigned and whose last day as executive director was Friday.
Those planned expenditures do not include what is expected to be a "significant" maintenance cost associated with a parking garage on Seventh Avenue, Pollock said. He said that cost won't be known until this fall. Mike Mills, the board's president, and Pollock cited that financial uncertainty in opposing the sports grant.
Mills and Pollock both also said the development authority should be focusing on generating new tax revenues and paving the way for private development, including playing a role in projects such as the proposed redevelopment of the 4th Avenue Theatre.
In an interview Friday, Mayor-elect Ethan Berkowitz referred questions about the grant to Sullivan, but said the community development authority has "tremendous capacity."
"I'd be very concerned about draining its capital resources as a time when we need to leverage them as much as we possibly can," Berkowitz said.
Difference of opinion
Lucinda Mahoney, former chief fiscal officer for Sullivan who has been a member of the organization's board since 2009, said the grant fits into the organization's overall mission.
"The board's decision to (invest) in this public/private partnership is within the framework of the ACDA mission, which is to seek opportunities on public or private development projects that insure a public benefit," Mahoney wrote in an email.
Newer members of the board also said the project seems to fall squarely within the "development" mission and has a clear benefit.
"I can't think of a greater public benefit than public health and fitness," said Patrick Rumley, a financial planner and a recent appointee to the board.
Rumley also noted that the four Assembly members representing Midtown and East Anchorage -- Elvi Gray-Jackson, Dick Traini, Pete Petersen and Paul Honeman -- had signed a letter of support. The president of Special Olympics Alaska, Jim Balamaci, also sent the board a letter in support.
Earlier this year, the Assembly added a $600,000 request for a weather cover over the East High tennis courts in the city's list of requests to the state Legislature.
In his presentation to the board last week, Nerland, the American Legion baseball alliance president, said the project would consist of erecting an all-weather fabric cover over the existing tennis courts at East High School to create a multiuse facility. He said it could eventually include heat and lighting.
The facility would be jointly operated by the Anchorage School District and the city's Parks and Recreation Department, and Nerland said the grant from the development authority would allow the Alliance to pursue a $500,000 matching grant from the Rasmuson Foundation.
At the end of his presentation, Nerland pointed out that he never once mentioned the word "tennis" -- a word that now evokes the months-long controversy in Anchorage over whether to use state funds to build a public indoor tennis facility in the Turnagain neighborhood.
Nerland said his omission wasn't on purpose. While tennis would be a "beneficiary," he said, so would students at East High as well as football, flag football and soccer players, and Special Olympics participants.
Political tensions
Mills, the chair of the development authority board, said he had nothing but praise for the East High project.
But he said Thursday the $800,000 grant seemed out of line with the board's mission of overseeing parking structures and seeking out development projects associated with housing and commercial development.
"It's been unfortunate, I think, the way this body has become maneuvered in my mind by the mayor ... for one item," Mills told the board at Thursday's meeting.
Sullivan responded in an email that Mills' characterization of the board being aligned for one issue was not correct.
"The most recent two appointments fill required professional slots on the board, including a professional engineer and an experienced project manager and business leader," Sullivan wrote.
After years of little change, the board has seen turnover since last fall. Sullivan said one board member was terminated for attendance reasons; one asked not to be reappointed; one resigned, and two were not reappointed at the end of their term in October.
Thursday's vote coincided with the first-ever meeting for Rada Khadjinova and Matt Hemry, two of the most recent appointees. It was Rumley's second board meeting.
The board also includes three current or former members of the Sullivan administration: chief of staff Larry Baker, Parks and Recreation director John Rodda and Mahoney, who now represents the private sector on the board. Two of the longer-serving members, Terry Parks and Dick Stallone, joined Mills in voting against the grant request.
Hemry, a civil and environmental engineer for the Seattle-based firm Shannon and Wilson, is also vice president of the Alaska Tennis Association. Rumley, a financial planner, is a member of the tennis association. Khadjinova, division manager for Fugro Corp., a geophysical data acquisition firm, is a former Olympic skier for the former USSR.
Rumley said in an interview Friday that his connection to tennis "doesn't color my judgment here, honestly."
"I think the misnomer here ... is that this is a tennis thing," Rumley said. "It's not a tennis thing. It's a multisport facility."
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that a request for a weather cover at the East High tennis courts was not included in the city's list of requests to the state Legislature.