Anchorage Municipal employees are about to get another day off. The Anchorage Assembly plans to add Juneteenth and Indigenous Peoples’ Day to the employee holiday calendar, and take away a day honoring civil rights leader William Seward.
Read the ordinance and materials related to it here.
Currently, there are 12 paid holidays for municipal employees, in addition to the minimum 80 hours of annual leave that each employee is entitled to (many get more, depending on years of service). Employees also get sick, bereavement leave, and time off for voting.
In addition to the new benefit, however, the new holiday will add one more day when Anchorage citizens cannot access the services of their government, and where some workers who must clock in that day (plow operators, for example) will be awarded holiday pay.
Currently, the municipal offices are closed:
- New Year’s Day.
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day (third Monday in January).
- Washington’s Birthday (third Monday in February).
- Memorial Day (last Monday in May).
- Seward’s Day (last Monday in March) effective 2015.
- Independence Day.
- Labor Day.
- Veterans Day (November 11).
- Thanksgiving Day.
- The day after Thanksgiving.
- Christmas Day.
- One personal holiday.
The addition of holidays will be the subject of a public hearing at the regular meeting of the Anchorage Assembly on Feb. 21; meetings begin at 5 pm at the Loussac Library in the Assembly Chambers.
The ordinance, AO 2202-17, is sponsored by radical members of the Anchorage Assembly, including Austin Quinn-Davidson, Felix Rivera, and Meg Zaletel, and would go into effect April 1.
That would make this year’s Seward’s Day, March 27, the last time that Secretary of State William Seward, who served under President Abraham Lincoln and who is credited with the purchase of Alaska from Russia, from being honored by the Municipality of Anchorage.
Seward, who was a civil rights leader of his day, was instrumental in the ending of slavery in America, and hand-carried the Emancipation Proclamation to President Lincoln for his signature. When he was the governor of New York, he refused to extradite slaves who had escaped to his state from Virginia. His stance against slavery cost him greatly in his career as an attorney and lawmaker.
A statue of William Seward, seen above, stands in front of the Alaska Capitol, where leftists are known to adorn it with disrespectful items.
Juneteenth is a new-ish celebration that marks June 19, 1865, the end of slavery in the United States. In fact, slavery continued in the District and Territory of Alaska for generations after slavery ended in the South, as Tlingit Indians traded slaves in the Northwest Coast until the early 1900s. President Joe Biden declared Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021.
Quinn-Davidson noted that it’s important to her to pass the ordinance during Black History Month, which is observed in February.
“In the spirit of celebrations happening across town this month, we are pleased to introduce a proposal to formalize cultural celebrations as paid Municipal holidays throughout the year.”
The ordinance also changes the current designation of Washington’s Birthday to President’s Day, the third Monday in February.
The addition of an extra day for employees to have off is expected to cost millions of dollars, but there is no fiscal note available as of yet. The ordinance adds a clause that permits it to avoid going through the personnel committee, which the Assembly says is dysfunctional.
