Bill Popp sat down with TNL in January to discuss his plans for bolstering development in Anchorage. Photo by Mark Zimmerman.
In Anchorage’s upcoming mayoral election, Bill Popp says he wants to carve an economic path through Anchorage’s headlining challenges.
Popp — who recently stepped down from his role as 16-year head of the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation (AEDC) — is on the ballot as an independent. His time in South Central Alaska began in 1968 when his military family moved to what is now JBER.
“Coming to Anchorage was an adventure — we fell in love with the city when we first moved here,” said Popp.
From his East High School Graduation in 1972 to his adulthood in the ensuing 30 years, his ambition grew with his business experience. Unable to complete a double-major at UAA, he slowly worked toward management at Safeway, opening their first location in Soldotna before marrying his wife in 1979. This moved Popp toward entrepreneurship, in two different capacities.
Capitalizing on the novelty of CD music, Popp opened two combination CD/bookstores that flourished for five years before competition forced him to close their doors.
“In 1996, one of the box stores in town — I won't name names — but they marked all their music down to cost and all their books down to cost and we're out of business in a year.”
However — by the year 2000 — Popp would rebound by establishing a branch of the national Challenger Learning Center, which is still in operation despite its origin in a small office with $23,000 in seed capital. This spurred him to a successful run for Kenai Borough assemblyman, while also peddling commercial trucks, the ladder of which Popp described as “Capitalism at its purest.”
“That got a little tiring,” Popp said of balancing two jobs with seven-day-a-week commitments, “the mayor of the borough at that point in time in 2002 offered me a position”
That position was Oil and Gas Liaison for Republican Kenai Borough Mayor Dale Bagley, which Popp was kept in through Democrat John Williams’ administration. Popp’s business and public policy experience attracted the AEDC’s attention in 2007, which, after multiple attempts, convinced him to successfully apply for President and CEO.
It was through Popp’s unexpectedly-long tenure that he became alarmed at Anchorage’s demographic trends
“In 2010, we started getting wind of the population demographics that foretold a fairly significant cliff.”
This cliff — the mass-retirement of the baby-boomer generation — spurred AEDC’s “Live. Work. Play.” initiative, but the outpouring of young talent from the state proved challenging to surmount. While advising the Anchorage School Board’s Workforce Development Initiative and the College of Business and Public Policy at UAA, his work would lay the foundation for his 2024 campaign.
“We are now seeing [comparable] wages and benefits in many communities with much lower costs of living than we have in Anchorage.”
Popp framed his policy within the city’s — and the state’s — ability to attract and retain young talent. This was emphasized in his university-related remarks, calling the U-Med District an economic “Diamond in the rough.”
“I don't want to discard the commuter students, but in the same hand, I think we need to build our resident students,” Popp said, referring to his proposed plan for a commercial and social “University Main Street,” referring to similar setups across the United States, such as Westwood Village near UCLA. This is in the face of AEDC’s opposition to gubernatorial budget cuts to the UA system, which he described as “Drastic and draconian.”
Beyond architectural plans, Popp aims to improve the University through access and transportation. This is central to his critique of the city’s snow removal process, which was funded and equipped to handle 10 inches of dry snow prior to 2022 according to Mayor Dave Bronson. With winter storms in 2022 and 2023 burying Anchorage in 24 and 40 inches of snow respectively, Popp believes Anchorage’s wintertime safety and economy depend on pivoting to broader strategies.
“We live in a time of change — we live in a time of climate change,” he said, asserting that these storms would become more common in the future due to high precipitation brought on by a warming climate.
Popp explained his three-point plan to address winter road maintenance while still tempering the city’s ailing budget:
1. Diverting seasonal employees to other municipal maintenance beyond wintertime operations.
2. Setting long-term boundaries with the state to avoid having to maintain state-owned roads, like the city did this past winter.
3. Establishing an emergency fund for winter maintenance, akin to a loss reserve, to soften the blows of intense winter storms and allow the city to compete for private contractors.
For a commuter campus such as UAA, citywide winter storm response is a must for commuters — but those commuters are ultimately subject to where they come from and how they get to campus. For Popp, easing transportation burdens for students is an administrative conundrum.
“Because of Anchorage’s sprawl, the odds of [the People Mover bus system] paying for itself are thin-to-none,” he said of the city’s struggling bus network.
For this reason, Popp believes that the primary priority for public transit in Anchorage is simply attracting enough drivers to staff the system. He believes the shortage of drivers is mostly influenced by substance abuse and personal safety shortfalls, though recently drivers have also expressed concern about health risks such as silica dust.
On the cycling and alternative transport front, Popp sees an opportunity arising in the form of trail expansions and safety improvements.
“We're jamming bicyclists, in addition to walkers, strollers, wagons, dogs, all onto what is generally if you're lucky, a 10 foot wide path,” he said of the trails throughout the city.
Popp wishes to improve access between areas such as Westchester and the UAA campus with trail expansions should he be elected. He also believes that widening turns, clearing more brush and improving trail sightlines could help pedestrians and cyclists contend with wildlife, among other safety risks.
Elaborating further on public safety, Popp was wary of the large gaps in law enforcement in the city. He compared the situation downtown to “street theater” in reference to fights, public urination and loitering that forced the 6th Avenue Kaladi Brothers’ recent closure. He congratulated the mayor on bringing foot patrols downtown, but said the issues that led to it are part of a broader problem. For other strings of crime closer to campus and the rest of Anchorage — such as car theft or incidents of stalking — Popp asserted that a determining factor is staffing. Highlighting staffing shortfalls in everything from the Anchorage School District to the Fire Department, he wants the city to compete for public safety personnel.
“We're down at least 50, badged officers. We've got a retirement wave sweeping through public safety in terms of older leaders,” said Popp
“We're not having a huge amount of success finding candidates to replace them.”
His proposed solution is offering pensions and stronger salaries to officers — something potentially complicated by a strained city budget — but something he believed was necessary to protect public and private property.
While Popp identified homelessness in the context of public safety, he clearly stated that homeless individuals weren’t all criminal actors. Corroborating this, UAA’s position in East Anchorage puts it squarely in the issue’s domain, being near the sites of both Mayor Bronson’s proposed Navigation Center and the now-defunct Golden Lion shelter. He agrees with both the mayor and the assembly that homelessness is a humanitarian crisis in Anchorage.
“We've got to work harder and helping the community to better understand who [the homeless] population is,” he said in reference to the myriad conditions that lead to chronic — rather than transitional — homelessness. “We've lost opportunity to get solutions moving through the acrimony that has been taking place between the assembly and the administration.”
Focusing on Anchorage’s outsized population of homeless individuals — a figure Popp correctly pinned at 70% of the state’s overall count — he said the city must use proven effective strategies. While he commended both the mayor and the assembly on adopting Houston’s “housing first” model of tackling this large, complex issue, he also used critiques based on Oklahoma City as a model.
“I became a student of Oklahoma City on a number of things,” Popp said, referring to a conversation with its former mayor Mick Cornett.
Using a “hammer and nail analogy,” he likened government to a blunt instrument that could use sweeping edicts to quickly solve single issues. To permanently solve component issues, however, a consistent partnership of public and private entities was his solution to permanently addressing this crisis.
“I’ve been to the warming shelter on [56th Avenue] a couple times,” said Popp. “The vast majority of that population is incapable of going to work; mental health issues, substance abuse issues, behavioral issues, physical infirmities.”
Popp used this example to criticize the state as “not a reliable partner” to the city, since they have frozen their funding for rehabilitation and behavioral health services since 2016.
Moreover with housing, Popp was adamant about tackling fundamental development issues that led to the city’s current housing shortage. Total housing vacancy sat at 3% at the end of 2023 and property owners recently saw a 9% spike in valuation. Calling on his work experience, Popp believes Anchorage needs to build its way out of unaffordability.
“We're land poor. We don't have, you know, thousands of acres sitting around waiting to be developed,” Popp said in reference to Anchorage being out of available land for development.
Popp believes Anchorage’s sprawl has contributed significantly to both shortages and a lack of walkability in most areas of the city. His plan for increasing the supply of workforce affordable housing includes:
1. Building on deregulatory steps taken by the assembly — such as axing parking minimums and restrictions on Accessory Dwelling Units — to encourage redevelopment.
2. Enabling the creation of “mixed use” — or compound commercial and residential spaces.
3. Identifying generational needs for “efficiency” in housing.
His focus on younger Millennials and Gen Z in his housing proposals likely extends from the needs of UAA students — less than six percent of whom live in on-campus housing according to UAA’s estimates.
For this policy to be put in place however, Popp would need cooperation across sections of city government — something he doesn’t think the Bronson Administration is capable of.
“What I see in the current administration is a series of just one dumpster fire after another of issues and violations of municipal code failure to execute appropriately,” Popp said of Bronson’s record, accusing the mayor of “Learning on the job.”
Popp vaguely referenced “political appointees” within the Bronson administration, likely referring to ousted library director Judy Norton Eledge and resigned City Human Resources Director Niki Tshibaka — both of whom were political allies of the Mayor.
Popp cited his 10 years of municipal government experience in the Kenai Peninsula, identifying his successes under both Republican and Democratic mayors.
“I'm about Anchorage. My party is Anchorage. That's it. And I'm not about appointing people who wrote me a check for my campaign.”
Desiring both to rehire administrative professionals that were shed during the Bronson and Berkowitz mayorships — Popp aims to revitalize the city’s professional workforce. This, he said, would allow the city to reinvest in itself after significant population declines.
“I want to bring vision to our government.”
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