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I think we can agree on one thing in Anchorage: the relationship between the Assembly and much of the community has felt broken for years. Newly elected Assembly member Erin Baldwin Day agrees. In a candidate Q&A this spring, she said:

“There is work yet to do in regaining the overall trust of the community and articulating a compelling vision for Anchorage’s future.”

That’s why it’s been sad, but perhaps unsurprising, to see many residents’ reactions to the Transit Supported Development Overlay (TSDO) proposal. They assume that Baldwin Day, her cosponsor George Martinez, and the municipality are acting in bad faith, lying about their intentions, and purposefully avoiding public input.

Say you had a longstanding dispute with a neighbor, and then a new person moved in down the street. You wouldn’t start directing your anger at them, too, right?

Baldwin Day and Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s staff are not the neighbors you may have had a feud with — they just moved in! I hope we can all take a step back and give the TSDO proposal and its sponsors the benefit of a clean slate, especially because I believe they are trying to do things differently this time.

The TSDO is a city ordinance that would support denser housing along major bus routes. This would allow more Anchorage residents to live closer to bus service, making it easier for them to commute, encouraging better public transit service, and helping chip away at our city’s housing affordability crisis.

This policy of “transit-supported development” is not new; it was included in multiple municipal land use plans as early as 2001, but has never been implemented. Noticing this, a group of residents who wanted to advocate for more housing, including Baldwin Day, met with over a half dozen community councils and the Federation of Community Councils to discuss the concept before approaching Assembly members Sulte and Martinez. They agreed to sponsor the idea and passed it along to the planning department to develop the policy.

Notably, this is the first time in years that the planning department is actively helping policymakers implement land use plans that the city drafted, with much public input, decades ago, at the request of residents. In recent years, the process of advancing housing policy has been much more top-down and less nuanced. Previous Assembly members have introduced sweeping initiatives for public hearing and debate, then completely rewritten the draft policies themselves, and punted them back to the planning department to try and sort out the details. It’s not perfect, but the system is now working as we designed it to, with ongoing, collaborative work that involves the public in refining the fine details of the policy before it goes to the Assembly for consideration and debate. Not behind anyone’s back, but with information regularly updated on a muni website. Case in point, Version 5 of the TSDO was just posted on Monday with notable changes made in response to public input and a detailed FAQ sheet.

[Read the latest city Planning Department memo outlining the TSDO proposal]

Since the municipality first sent out an official notice on the TSDO to every community council board in May, there have been no less than 15 public meetings, work sessions, community focus groups and presentations to individual community councils who have invited city staff to speak and listen. A planner from the muni showed up with two days’ notice to my local council in North Star and stayed until 9:15 p.m. — well outside working hours — to make sure we had a chance to be heard and ask all our questions.

I’ll be the first to say that our system of public participation needs work, and, in fact, Baldwin Day is actively working to improve the process by supporting an effort from the Federation of Community Councils, YWCA, and National Civic League called the Better Public Meetings project. Yes, city politics can feel overwhelming, but I encourage you to make the leap to get involved if you haven’t already in the coming months, because your voice does matter.

[Related news coverage: New Anchorage zoning initiative could allow taller buildings and small businesses in many residential neighborhoods]

At the request of the cosponsors, the Planning and Zoning Commission extended its Sept. 8 meeting to Monday, Oct. 6, at 6:30 p.m. at the Z.J. Loussac Library to allow for more work and public comment (see the agenda here). The Assembly doesn’t plan to take up the issue until November or December, at which point there will be an opportunity for additional in-person, phone, and email comments. There is much more process to come. I don’t think it’s fair to say the city and Assembly aren’t making the most of the established process, or that they aren’t doing what they were elected and trained to do — work together to address the city’s housing and affordability crisis.

If we can all agree that the relationship between the Assembly and the city is broken, we can also agree that the only way to fix it is with sincere conversation and engagement on the content of an idea. Applying past frustrations to our new “neighbors” in City Hall and the Assembly chambers undermines this. I have seen nothing but earnest effort from Baldwin Day and the hardworking staff at the municipality on the TSDO proposal. I think we owe it to them, ourselves, and our community to respond in kind.

Jacob Powell is a resident and homeowner in the North Star neighborhood in Anchorage.

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