Former Fairbanks Mayor Jerry Cleworth sailed to an easy win Tuesday over Shannon Vargas by a nearly 2-to-1 vote for another term on the City Council.
Cleworth says he’d like to once again focus on improving and maintaining the city’s streets.
“For me, it’s always been infrastructure, number one,” he said. “We can’t go backwards on our general maintenance, and working on the roads.”
Complicating that already difficult process is the compressed schedule that the mayor and council must operate under to develop the coming year’s budget. The mayor must submit a draft budget by the end of the month, and the council must approve it by Dec. 15.
The council also must accommodate increasing personnel costs for the city’s unionized workers.
“We have the labor contracts that are hanging out there,” he said. “Which is usually not a part of this, but unfortunately it is right now.”
Cleworth says he realizes street work will be hard for the city to afford, given the likelihood of continued reductions in funding from the state, which is strapped due to declining revenues and increasing spending. He predicts city officials will be forced to make tough decisions on whether to cut more or look for new sources of revenue.
“I think the city in the next 12, 24 months can get through fine,” he said. “But we do have to start looking down the road, in that if we’re not going to grow our revenue any more than 2 or 3 percent a year, then we either keep our costs in that line or you have to seek out new revenues.”
In the other council race, David Pruhs was leading Chris Anderson by four percentage points after all precincts reported in. But City Clerk Janey Hovendon said she was not yet willing to make a call on the outcome, because of absentee and questioned ballots.
