By Suzanne Downing 
The Anchorage Assembly is preparing to move forward with a proposed 3% sales and use tax for the April municipal ballot, as proposed by Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, but the ballot language as written appears to directly violate the Anchorage Municipal Charter, which is the city’s own constitution.
On Tuesday, Dec. 2, the Assembly will take public comment on Ordinance AO 2025-133, which would place the tax before voters and earmark revenue for property tax relief, public safety, and infrastructure, childcare, and housing. But buried in the resolution is a crucial detail: It asserts that the tax may be approved by a simple majority of 50% plus one.
Here’s the final draft of the resolution: AO 2025-133_1_SALES TAX.11.13 FINAL.DOCX
This is our moment: Show up to Anchorage Assembly meeting and testify on 3% sales tax
That is not what the Charter says the city can do.
Anchorage’s Bill of Rights – in Article II of the Charter – explicitly guarantees “the right of immunity from sales taxes, except upon approval by three-fifths (3/5) of the qualified voters voting on the question.”
That threshold, 60%, was added in 1997 when voters amended the Charter specifically to raise the bar for any new sales tax after years of debate and failed tax measures. The amendment passed with 62% support.
The 60% requirement has never been repealed by voters. Yet in recent years the Assembly has simply ignored it.
When the Assembly advanced the marijuana sales tax, and the 5% alcohol tax, it used a 50%+1 threshold.
Those measures passed, largely because of the lowered requirement. The practice has never been legally challenged, but legality does not flow from repetition. A violation repeated four times is still a violation.
This year, the work-around is even starker. A general 3% sales tax, one of the largest revenue changes in city history, clearly falls under the 60% rule. The Assembly knows that. It also knows that Anchorage voters have rejected sales taxes before. Rather than attempt to amend the Charter honestly, the Assembly is again attempting to do an end run.
The strategy serves two purposes: avoiding the Charter’s supermajority requirement and maneuvering around the tax cap, a voter-approved fiscal limit first added to the Charter through a 1983 initiative led by Anchorage citizens and the business community.
For decades, the tax cap has been the primary restraint on the growth of government spending, and a recent political frustration for assemblies seeking new revenue.
Each time the Assembly secures a new tax outside the cap or rewrites its application, the cap becomes weaker. Once the cap is weakened, new spending is easier to justify. Over the years, the Assembly has shifted revenue sources outside the cap, excluded utility payments from calculations, and repeatedly sought new taxes that do not offset property taxes.
These tactics undermine the protections voters put in place when they approved their city constitution. The 60% rule for sales taxes was created precisely because earlier assemblies were looking for ways around the tax limitation. Those who helped craft the Charter recall that the higher threshold was intentionally debated, fought over, and finally inserted as a safeguard against runaway taxation.
This newest proposal, a broad-based 3% sales tax with a 50%+1 approval threshold, may be the most aggressive attempt yet to erode that protection.
If the public fully understood that the Assembly is bypassing the Charter, their might be political backlash. To many, the issue is not merely the tax itself, but the method: placing a sales tax on the ballot with rules the Assembly has no authority to change.
For Anchorage voters, the debate now goes beyond the merits of a sales tax. It is about whether the Assembly must follow the Charter — or whether it may rewrite the rules by ordinance whenever the Charter becomes inconvenient. The answer to that question may shape Anchorage’s tax structure for years to come.
Public testimony on the proposal begins Tuesday evening at the regular Assembly meeting. More information on how to testify is in this related column.
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