The mayor and the Assembly may disagree on whether Anchorage needs a navigation center to help homeless, vagrants, and transients get their feet on the ground, but the bills for the work that has been done on the center do need to be paid, and Acting Municipal Manager Ken Kohlhase intends to pay them.
Kohlhase today notified the Anchorage Assembly that money sitting in an account for the homeless navigation center, which was started late last year, will be used to pay the invoice of one of the contractors.
“As we all anticipated, Roger Hickel Contracting, Inc. has made a claim against the Municipality asserting an entitlement to payment for work it performed in construction of the Navigation Center prior to the time the project was terminated. The cost basis of that claim was carefully reviewed by The Boutet Company on behalf of the Administration, and largely found to consist of valid charges,” wrote Kohlhase to the Assembly, which is the appropriating body.
Kohlhase said it’s in the best interest to settle the claim, and that he intends to pay $2.455,351.93 to Roger Hickel Contracting on March 24.
Kohlhase referred to a resolution for $4.9 million that the Assembly passed last May that was “to be used for construction of an adult shelter and/or navigation center.”
The Assembly has been preparing to claw back that money because many of the liberal members don’t want Mayor Dave Bronson to finish the navigation center, even though funds were appropriated by the Assembly for that purpose. The struggle over what direction to take on homeless issues has consumed the Assembly and mayor’s relationship since the outset.
“This existing appropriation is more than sufficient to satisfy the claim at hand. Since the claim is for construction work falling squarely within the appropriation’s designation that it be used to pay for ‘”‘construction of an adult shelter and/or navigation center'”‘, it is the Administration’s intent to fund the settlement with this appropriation,” Kohlhase wrote.
Kohlhase also wrote that he acknowledged the appropriation was conditional on the Bronson Administration using the old Golden Lion Hotel for a substance misuse treatment center.” Since then, doubts have arisen about whether it could be used as such legally.
“The Mayor satisfied that condition on June 1, 2022, when he issued a statement acknowledging that direction was given to ‘the facilitation group guiding the mass care exit to recommend the best option to providing substance misuse treatment centers’ and promising to consider the former Golden Lion Hotel for this purpose.”
Several liberal members of the Assembly are determined to force the mayor to use the Golden Lion Hotel for a drug treatment facility, but the neighborhood opposes it. Bronson came into office with the idea that a navigation center near Elmore and Tudor Roads was a best practice that had worked in other communities. He convinced the Assembly to fund it, but they later reneged on the agreement and have fought the mayor ever since.
Meanwhile, Assemblywoman Meg Zaletel, who is paid well over $100,000 per year to run the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, opens her own navigation center in downtown Anchorage this month, in partnership with Catholic Social Services, after having fought the mayor over his navigation center concept. the ACEH-CSS center is on Third Avenue downtown.
Assembly approves funding for mayor’s navigation center for Anchorage homeless
