North Anchorage Assembly candidates lay out positions on addressing homelessness

Five candidates running for the new North Anchorage Assembly seat discussed their differing — and sometimes similar — ideas for addressing homelessness and other key issues during a candidate forum ahead of the approaching June 21 special municipal election.

The five candidates who attended the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce’s Assembly District 1 candidate forum on Monday — Robyn Forbes, Tasha Hotch, Robin Phillips, Stephanie Taylor and Daniel Volland — come from a wide range of political viewpoints and experiences. (Candidate Cliff Baker was not present.) They are vying for the recently opened 12th Assembly seat, which voters approved adding in 2020 and will be filled during the special election later this month.

While each candidate agreed the city should prioritize addressing homelessness, several criticized elements of its current approach.

Volland, an optometrist, small-business owner and South Addition Community Council vice president, said the Assembly and Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration made some progress during a nearly yearlong negotiation of a plan to address homelessness. Still, it feels like the city has been taking “two steps forward and one step back,” he said.

The city is fast-tracking a plan to build a 150-bed shelter and navigation center in East Anchorage, among several other projects as it stands down COVID-19-era emergency mass care operations.

Volland said that while he is glad the East Anchorage shelter’s size had been scaled back from a much larger proposal and that the goal of the facility will be to connect people to vital services, he also has concerns about a lack of details surrounding its costs and operations. He also said he doesn’t want to see another large-scale shelter like Sullivan Arena, and wants to prioritize adding more housing capacity and smaller shelters throughout Anchorage.

“I truly believe that stable housing drives a lot of other positive health outcomes,” he said.

Volland said he is also concerned about the impact of the impending closure of the Sullivan Arena mass shelter on June 30. The city has housed hundreds of people in the arena each night since the pandemic began.

“Where are those people going to go? We don’t have the capacity to shelter, the housing, right now. Our nonprofits are going to be full,” he said.

[North Anchorage voters are receiving ballots to elect the district’s 2nd Assembly member]

Taylor, a political ally of the mayor, said that under his leadership the city is “finally moving forward with some possible solutions, but we do have a long way to go.”

“We hear a lot about compassion. But rarely does the conversation include a measure of accountability. We need to have more compassion for the law-abiding, taxpaying citizens and businesses in Anchorage who are negatively affected by the issues surrounding homelessness,” she said.

The city should model its efforts after nonprofits and programs in other places that have had proven, measurable success and “found a way to actually change people’s lives and not just enable them to continue in their dysfunctional cycles,” Taylor said.

The city needs more treatment facilities, she said.

“With the amount of money that has been and is currently being spent, we should settle for nothing less than real results,” Taylor said.

Phillips, an administrative director for the Ted Stevens Foundation, said she believes a collaborative approach to addressing homelessness is needed in Anchorage, between the city, nonprofits, business and residents, in order to provide individuals all of the services they need to “move forward in a healthy way.”

“One mega-shelter is not the answer, but smaller locations throughout the city, so everyone feels they have a part of the solution would be a good choice,” she said. “... Anchorage doesn’t need to see what other cities are doing. Anchorage should lead the way and we should do that by coming together and finding the combination of a safe location, of the mental health, the organizations that can help with addiction, that can help with jobs, that can help with housing, that can help with child care — all together.”

Hotch, who is a program manager at Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and former vice president on the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, said she believes the city is approaching homelessness with the right initiatives, but that it is not implementing them in ways that will best help.

Hotch said she recently spoke with an old coworker who had been living at Sullivan Arena and that while he has received help to find more stable housing, that help is temporary and is set to last for just a year, she said.

“I think that our constant shuffle of folks that are in need of housing — that they only have it for 30 days for that short-term shelter — is not right. No one feels secure enough in their ability to move forward with getting jobs or making plans when you’re worried about where you’re going to sleep, and if you’re going to be safe while you’re sleeping,” she said.

Forbes, a local small business entrepreneur, said he believes that Anchorage is “at a tipping point” and that “it should really be all hands on deck” because the safety of Anchorage’s streets, parks, trails and wildfire danger from homeless camps are all at stake.

Forbes said he believes that the Assembly has not been prioritizing fully homelessness efforts and has instead been “focused on political games.” However, he said Assembly member Felix Rivera’s work in negotiating a plan with the Bronson administration to bring the planned East Anchorage navigation center and shelter online stands out as a positive example of collaboration and forward momentum.

“The navigation center is key because it’s going to go in and be a triage point,” Forbes said. “Every single individual is different, whether it’s their problems, their strengths, their weaknesses, their focuses — a navigation center is going to give us the ability to put those people in the right place to actually get help.”