Sharon Lechner gave Bronson her resignation letter April 30 just after the Assembly unanimously approved revisions to the city budget that evening.
Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Sharon Lechner, said last week that she will resign from the municipality unless she is reassigned to a new position, according to the mayor’s office.
On Thursday, the mayor’s office said in a written statement that the Assembly had surpassed the taxing capacity of the municipality by about $605,000 when it made changes to the budget. The Assembly then held a special meeting Friday and unanimously approved changes that fixed the problem. “It’s routine for those things to need to be recalculated. It is a complex budget. There are fixes that need to be made. Mistakes can be made. We made a mistake based on the limited information we had, and the implications of what we did. So then to turn around and make it into a political fight when we were working collaboratively to fix a small technical problem is infuriating,” Brawley said.
Lechner previously worked for the city as its chief fiscal officer and in other positions prior to 2010, according to herAssembly Vice Chair Meg Zaletel, who also co-chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, said that she believes part of the problem came about because Lechner wasn’t involved in setting the original budget.
“If we need to make shifts based on some problem from 2022, or later some problems from 2023, I don’t necessarily want to be hemmed into giving up a particular policy promise,” Zaletel said. In a social media post Friday, Bronson said, “Sharon is the most experienced and professional individual to have in this position. The effects of losing her will be felt throughout the entire municipality. Without her expertise, we would have never caught the Anchorage Assembly’s very serious budget error: passing a budget last Tuesday that was over $600,000 above the tax cap.”
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