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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3

Borough-City Merge

Does anyone have a map and/or know the square mileage of the City of Anchorage before the merge of the city and borough? --Criticalthinker (talk) 17:25, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

No map. (I'll see if I can locate one, but may take some time.) I can tell you that in the early 1970s, the city limits extended from Dimond blvd to Muldoon rd, limited to the north by the military base and to the east by the Chugach National Forest. Zaereth (talk) 17:47, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
Chugach State Park was created by that point, leaving some distance between the forest boundary and the Anchorage bowl. Since I brought that up, the article doesn't really explain that Anchorage was created from land originally designated as part of the Chugach National Forest. As to the old city limits, from the maps I've seen, they never extended much farther past Tudor Road to the south and Patterson Street to the east. Much of the western end of city limits only went as far south as Northern Lights Boulevard so as to exclude Spenard. Muldoon and Dimond may have given in to urban sprawl by that point, but that's different than being within city limits. The borough, and before that the public utility districts, created an entrenched constituency which had reason to keep Muldoon and Spenard and the Southside apart from Anchorage (namely, control over public utilities and other infrastructure which could enable said urban sprawl). The state labor department has uploaded historical census data to its website. There, you may be able to find the city's land area as of the 1970 Census, which won't take into account the final round of annexations prior to unification. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 20:20, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, couldn't locate any map, nor any online ref you can use. However, the City and County Data Book of 1975 (page 811) says the city and borough of Anchorage was 50.8 square miles, and that was a 213.6% change from 1970. The 1980 version says 1700 sq.mi. Hope that helps. Zaereth (talk) 23:55, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for that information. If you all find any maps from 1970 or 1975 showing the city limits, just let me know. Anyway, I think this would be an interesting fact to add somewhere to the page, either in the geography or history section. Sounds as if Anchorage just decide to unify with the borough government sooner after 1970 since it was annexing in a major way, anyway. If it had already grown by 213.6% since 1970 in 1975, I imagine that it must have annexed almost all of the urbanized population. --Criticalthinker (talk) 14:16, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
Just checked the aforementioned state labor department website. It appears that in past censuses, land area was only published for (boroughs/)census areas, not for cities.
The unification issue really needs its own article, but this is another topic which would depend mostly upon ancient offline sources. The entire process lasted approximately a decade, from early 1966 (when borough residents held a "what to do" convention at West High one weekend to discuss pending state legislation allowing the formation of unified municipalities), to late 1975 (when voters approved the current municipal charter). Along the way, voters twice rejected unification (in 1969 and 1970, if I remember correctly) and Chugiak and Eagle River attempted to spin off into its own borough (which lasted for about eight months in late 1974 and early 1975 before being invalidated by the Alaska Supreme Court).
The various controversies led to a series of compromises which allowed unification to go through: the Hillside and parts of Chugiak/Eagle River were mostly protected from encroaching urbanization (though progress had made that a moot point by the end of the 20th century), a labyrinth of service areas and taxing districts were created, and existing services were retained as much as possible (mostly under George Sullivan; other mayors had other ideas). It took a while for the municipality to catch up to its status, as there was lots of city/borough factionalism still occurring after unification. BTW, Bill Sheffield and Arliss Sturgulewski both served on the 1975 charter commission, but neither article really reflects that.
As for the old city, it never grew very much in its first few decades for one simple reason: cities couldn't obtain home rule prior to statehood. At the time of statehood, the city limits probably only stretched to 16th Avenue to the south and Gambell Street to the east. Anchorage began aggressively expanding after obtaining home rule. This map, dated 1962 with minor revisions in 1967, shows Anchorage as having expanded to Boniface Parkway to the east, but not very far to the south. I don't know if you've ever heard the term "Eastchester Flats". If not, it was an area to the east of the Sullivan Arena and Cal Worthington Ford. It was basically a lawless party zone, which thrived because it was outside of city limits and jurisdiction mostly fell to the U.S. Marshal's office during territorial days and later to state law enforcement. In those days, neither agency had hundreds of officers at their disposal like the present-day APD or other larger agencies do. After annexing as much of Spenard as they could get away with in 1960, Anchorage then annexed most, if not all, of Fairview and Mountain View in 1963 and 1964. The Eastchester Flats area was eradicated not long afterward through urban renewal. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 15:23, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
I've looked up land areas for cities in my state through various Censuses. For whatever reason, I can't seem to find this information for Alaska, though, if you're interested, maybe you might find it (http://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html). I went through the 1970 Census, but couldn't find square miles. --Criticalthinker (talk) 15:50, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
I skimmed through some census stuff myself, but found it very difficult to deal with, because they break everything into census districts, not necessarily by city/borough borders. That's why I went to the City and County Data Book. It has nearly any statistic you could want on a city. I found this 1972 version by doing a quick search on google. Scroll down to page 840. It says in 1970 the area was 18.2 sq.mi. You may find different years if you search deeper, or try altering the keywords a bit.
By the way, there are maps near the end, but nothing like the detail you're looking for. For that I may need to actually go to the library, of start checking muni archives.Zaereth (talk) 19:09, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I do think an article on how this came to be and the various jurisdictional areas would be useful. I was rather confused myself recently as I was unfortunately involved in a car accident just outside of Girdwood. The local FD and paramedics had already come and gone and we and a federal forestry cop (who can respond but apparently not file the needed paperwork) just sat their waiting and waiting for over an hour for a state trooper to arrive, the area apparently being their jurisdiction despite legally being in Anchorage. (and due to some sort of snafu the troopers in and around Anchorage were at that time being dispatched out of Kenai but I suppose that's another matter.) Beeblebrox (talk) 23:24, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Sorry to hear that. I hope everyone was ok. I know it's a mess. The troopers are technically supposed to patrol the highways and APD the city. The city wanted all the tax money from the surrounding borough, but didn't want to absorb the cost of patrolling the highways, so they left that to the state. When funding problems recently threatened to shut down trooper operations on the Turnagain Arm, APD basically said they weren't going to patrol the area either, leaving the towns of Girdwood, Bird, and Rainbow without any protection. Luckily the troopers decided to stay, or your wait for APD could've been several hours. It was a long time and tough legislative battles before Eagle River got a police station of their own. (On the flip side, I try to avoid that highway as much as possible because they'll pull you over for the slightest little thing out there. I've always felt it wrong to fund government with fines, because cops shouldn't be tax collectors.)
Kaos probably knows a lot more about this than I, so perhaps he can help. I think it would be an interesting article. Zaereth (talk) 01:30, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

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