We can do better than this

Are you like me these days, questioning how we ended up with what appears to be the worst, most incompetent Assembly and mayor Anchorage has ever experienced?

This is a particularly relevant observation in a time when our community desperately needs competency, ingenuity and tested leadership.

Although the degree of closures could be debated, I look at Florida, where schools and businesses are open and doing just fine. Gov. Ron DeSantis and the majority of the state’s municipal leaders are partnering to maintain commerce and limit closures of businesses and schools. There are other examples where functionality is occurring and illness rates are declining.

Here in Alaska’s largest city, the Assembly and appointed acting mayor claim there is little they can do to help small businesses, especially the second-largest private sector employer — the hospitality industry. Acting Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson argues she’s doing the best she can — and her emergency order protocols to close all of December will make a difference.

I disagree. The fact she recently came down with COVID-19 herself adds insult to injury. Her safety protocols obviously don’t work for herself.

Ultimately, we need to reset our response model. Things need to change — and immediately, not next year.

I recommend the following relating to business:

1. Open all businesses. Make mask-wearing a choice. Most will wear them. Those who don’t will make that choice at their own risk.

2. Forgive all new liquor license renewal fees. After all, the establishments for which the licensure is paid to the Municipality is not being used, since the acting mayor closed restaurants and bars for in-house service and patronage.

3. Forgive the special downtown tax used to enhance business. With a new mandate to close shops, why should business owners be forced to pay for city services and their brick-and-mortar stores and establishments?

3. Void out completely, or at least postpone for two years, the recently passed alcohol tax. First, this should never have passed in the spring of 2020, in the eye of a pandemic storm. I’m still shocked some voters would find it appropriate to tax an industry shut down and decimated by lack of revenues. But beyond being perplexed at a new tax, recall back in the early 2000s, then-legislators Lisa Murkowski and Andrew Halcro pressed for, and successfully facilitated passage of, a sizable statewide alcohol tax. The revenue generated was intended for curbing domestic violence, which Alaska has higher than any other state per capita today. It’s fascinating the lack of accountability there, two decades later and with a failed rationale (for passing the tax).

5. Immediately locate and distribute federal and state CARES Act monies intended for businesses but redirected by the Municipality to government operations, to the chagrin and detriment of numerous small business owners in Anchorage.

6. Rather than donate to archaic nonprofit group like the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation, completely disband AEDC and disperse all the millions of dollars in charges (for the organization’s membership to do surveys and have luncheons and conferences) to local businesses wavering on the cliffs of fiscal death. AEDC Manager Bill Popp and staff can get a private-sector job for once.

7. All of us should demand accountability, credibility, and results for future decisions by the acting mayor and liberal Assembly. To them, I implore working with Gov. Mike Dunleavy and our federal delegation rather than shunning them, because socialist and/or far-left principles are counter to most of the public’s beliefs. They should work with the forthcoming Republican-majority Legislature to get their jobs done on our behalf, instead of continued infighting and polarizing agendas. Assemblymembers ran with a theme of representing the people — which would be us, not themselves.

Things need to change, and fast, or our city, community and neighborhoods will sink into an abyss of further dysfunction and financial ruin.

To all the voters in the Municipality of Anchorage: Remember these failed leadership moments. Choose better and more wisely in 2021. We can do better!

Frank Dahl is the former owner of Blues Central and a past president of the Alaska Cabaret, Hotel, Restaurant and Retailers Association (CHARR).

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