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Assembly seeks strategic review of Anchorage alcohol-tax spending ahead of budget season
Summary
At an Aug. 14 Assembly Rules Committee meeting, members pressed for a structured review of how Anchorage27s alcohol tax is allocated, noting large past appropriations for homelessness, smaller 2025 allocations for mental-health programs and a charter restriction on funding preexisting services.
The Anchorage Assembly Rules Committee on Aug. 14 heard a detailed briefing on the municipality27s alcohol tax and agreed to schedule a focused budget discussion with administration before the 2026 budget is finalized.
The briefing prompted members to press for clearer priorities and a formal work session on how alcohol-tax revenue is spent. "There's so much to tell you about the alcohol tax," said Legislative services staff during the presentation, which pointed committee members to the Cheers Anchorage website for full strategic-plan documents and spending trackers.
Why this matters: Assembly members said the alcohol tax has at times produced large appropriations that were not fully spent, creating multi-year fund balances. That carryover changed the apparent distribution of spending across categories in some years, and members want a deliberate policy discussion before the administration publishes a final 2026 budget.
Committee members and staff outlined how the tax has been allocated in recent years and flagged several recurring issues. Legislative services staff said the annual totals fluctuate: early years showed smaller totals (2021 in the low millions), 2024 spending totaled roughly $23 million, and the 2025 budget was nearer $162017 million. "When you look at the total, total spent in 2021 . . . it's going to be smaller than 2022," a committee member noted while explaining why percentage charts can be misleading.
The presentation summarized spending categories: homelessness has consistently taken a large share of alcohol-tax dollars; prevention and child-abuse/domestic-violence programs comprised larger shares in early years but declined; mental-health and substance-misuse spending was minimal to nonexistent in the 2025 allocations. A committee member pointed out that some line items that appear in the homelessness bucket represent shelter services rather than direct housing placement or rehabilitation.
On legal limits, the committee heard that the charter and the ballot proposition that created the tax include a restriction: alcohol-tax funds must support services or service levels that are additional to municipal services in place when the tax passed (2020). "In general . . . this must be additional services that didn't provide [the same] levels of service," counsel summarized during the discussion.
Members raised overlap and classification concerns: some programs fall into multiple buckets (for example, mobile crisis response can be coded under public safety even though it is mental-health crisis response), complicating year-to-year comparisons. A member also noted that the voter-approved ACE fund (a separate marijuana-tax-funded initiative) and other revenue sources are now online and change how municipal prevention and youth investments are funded, which can obscure the full funding picture if observers look at only the alcohol-tax charts.
Committee members asked procedural questions about the spending data. When asked whether the spending tables were "actuals," Legislative services staff responded, "Spent. Actually spent. Yep," and pointed the committee to the funding tracker and the 2024 actuals posted on the Cheers Anchorage site.
Direction and next steps: Members agreed there should be a formal, facilitated discussion about alcohol-tax priorities rather than ad-hoc amendments. "I'll work with the budget and finance chairs to figure out how to do that," Legislative services staff said, and several members asked that administration staff be in the room for that conversation to align priorities before the administration releases a proposed budget.
The presentation also recommended that the assembly review the annual report and the strategic plan documents on cheersanchorage.org before the scheduled work session.
Committee members requested clearer communications materials and a one-page guide for constituents explaining the tax27s purpose and constraints. The discussion closed with an agreement to schedule a session tied to the broader budget process so assembly priorities can be considered before final budget decisions are made.
End note: The committee did not adopt any ordinance or motion on Aug. 14; members and staff agreed to set a work session and to review the posted annual report and spending tracker.
