The Anchorage Assembly on Tuesday night postponed again the renaming of the Port of Alaska as the Don Young Port of Anchorage.
The reason given this time was that the matter was improperly advertised online under the “events” category, rather than under the “public meeting” category.
“Practically speaking, the public hearing wasn’t properly noticed, therefore, it effectively didn’t happen,” Assembly Chairman Christopher Constant said.
It was over 18 months ago that the mayor has proposed naming the port after the late congressman, who served in Congress for 49 years. Mayor Dave Bronson proposed the name change on March 22, 2022, just after Young’s death. It was one of the last things that Congressman Young had asked of Bronson before he died.
But it had to go through the naming panel process, and the Anchorage Assembly then delayed the matter, since the Assembly is a highly partisan body made up of mostly Democrats and Don Young was a Republican.
The matter now will go back to the city’s four-member naming panel and start the process over again, which gives time for the Assembly to inject more politically correct naming into the process, with a new naming panel it just created just in time. The naming panel will focus on indigenous names, rather than naming things after people.
The port opened as the “Port of Anchorage” in 1961 to support regional economic development. In 2017, the Anchorage Assembly renamed “Port of Alaska” to remind people that is is the port for most of the populated area of Alaska.
