If Anchorage residents ever wonder why so many problems in this city feel unresolved, they need only watch the Anchorage Assembly in action. Or is it “inaction”?

As they have so often, some Assembly members turn their attention outward, weighing in on an issue far beyond their actual authority or sphere of influence, while the very real problems on Anchorage streets deteriorate.

The latest example is a resolution opposing federal immigration enforcement. It was presented as a moral stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But like many Assembly actions before it, this anti-ICE resolution they passed on Tuesday amounts to symbolism without substance, and it follows a pattern that has become all too familiar.

Is this another chapter in a habit of substituting political signaling for municipal governance? It appears so.

The fact is, Anchorage has no authority over federal immigration policy. The Assembly cannot direct ICE, cannot change federal law, and cannot alter enforcement priorities set in Washington, D.C. The resolution does none of those things. 

It also does not improve public safety or create housing. It does not reduce crime, addiction, or homelessness. It does not fix a single pothole or keep a single business from closing downtown.

What it does accomplish is signaling. It’s noise that sends a message to a national political audience that the Assembly is aligned with. That may play well on social media or in activist circles, but it does nothing for the people who live in Alaska’s largest city. You know, the folks who fund our city budget.

We’ve seen how far this kind of municipal overreach can go elsewhere. A few short years ago in Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkin authorized the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ/CHOP) and anarchy in the streets soon followed. This year, Mayor Katie Wilson has pushed her city into direct confrontation with federal authorities, far overstepping her responsibility and accountability. She has authorized direct resistance to ICE enforcement. The result is a city government consumed by fights it can’t win, including fights between the mayor and uniformed officers who work for her but don’t want to arrest ICE officers, per her order. 

Anchorage residents should take note.

If this all sounds familiar, you’re not wrong. In 2024, the Assembly passed a resolution weighing in on the Israel- Hamas conflict and calling for a ceasefire. 

At the time, some in Anchorage made a straightforward point: the Anchorage Assembly was not elected to adjudicate complex international conflicts that have gone on since before the 1967 Six-Day War. Foreign policy is federal terrain.

Today’s anti-ICE resolution follows the same impulse. Different issue, but the same instinct: insert the Assembly into national or international debates while local responsibilities go unaddressed.

The Assembly also has inserted itself into symbolic nonsense with the recent decision on the city seal, erasing the history of Captain James Cook and disappearing the city’s aviation history. It was a gesture perceived by many residents as an erasure of Anchorage’s Western heritage and history — national leftist cancel culture here at home.

Regardless of one’s view, that debate consumed time, energy, and political capital, while public disorder, urban decay and basic maintenance problems continued to mount. And it still irritates normal Anchorage voters.

Even worse is when adhering to a failed national progressive woke agenda, the Assembly does turn its attention to local policy that involves public safety. The results are not merely a waste of taxpayer resources, they can be deadly. The jaywalking ordinance is a case in point. The intent may have been “pedestrian liberty,” but the outcome has raised serious concerns. Pedestrian deaths have increased, and enforcement changes appear disconnected from how people actually move through the city. This is what happens when policy is driven more by woke theory than by careful consideration of real-world consequences.

So Anchorage residents are left with a troubling pattern: symbolic resolutions on matters the city cannot control, cultural skirmishes that divide rather than fix, and local policies enacted without sufficient seriousness about their effects.

Meanwhile, the problems people actually live with are impossible to ignore. Public inebriation and drug abuse is widespread. Shoplifting, theft, and vandalism have overtaken commercial areas. Street disorder has driven people to avoid the downtown business district as public safety concerns shape daily routines, grocers in Anchorage set up a wall of shopping carts and chains that harken to a Mogadishu-like gauntlet that we all have to pass through to get a loaf of bread or gallon on milk after 10 pm, and storefronts empty out while sidewalks fill with human excrement.

The way that people experience Anchorage on buses, in parking lots, and on sidewalks, is the exact business of the Assembly. And it’s the business that they struggle to stay focused on.

At some point, the line between governance and activism has to be drawn. City assemblies exist to manage the responsibilities entrusted to them, not to pretend to be an advisory board to Congress or an activist council chasing national applause for promoting their woke agenda in Anchorage – our home. Anchorage residents did not elect an Occupy Wall Street organizing committee, even if Assemblyman George Martinez is more or less that group’s seat on the dais. They elected a municipal body to run a city.

The Assembly has eroded its own credibility, then comes to the taxpayers asking for a $12 million special levy. Expect the full court press on this using all the national progressive strategies of pushing emotion and not discussing the policy and of identity politics where anyone that disagrees anti-education and kid haters. But, we see the dysfunction and the lack of logic and we will not allow it to go unchecked. 

Anchorage does not need more meaningless resolutions. We could, however, use a few more serious-minded members on the Anchorage Assembly.

Brett Huber is Alaska state director for Americans for Prosperity.