Anchorage: better, smarter, safer.

• Author: Bohi, Heidi
• Position: Towns in Transition - Anchorage Economic Development Corp

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It's a tale of two cities.

Along with its smaller sister communities across the state, Anchorage faces many of the challenges that are simply inherent to local government - shrinking budgets and spending cuts, keeping up with public safety, improving education, pulling through the economic slump, and trying to keep up with the never-ending demand for local services.

At the same time, as the city turns an eye toward emerging as a global presence, the Anchorage business community increasingly dedicates resources to marketing and visioning efforts with hopes these essentials will eventually pay off in the form of a better quality of life and a consensus on how to ease into the next couple of decades.

AEDC's STRATEGIC FOCUS

"It's a great city, but we can always improve," says Bill Popp, president and chief executive officer of the Anchorage Economic Development Corp. (AEDC).

AEDC's "Live. Work. Play." initiative, based on the board's vision statement developed in 2010, is one of the ways this economic development organization launched what it is calling a "strategic-planning process." A long-term grass roots exercise, AEDC's goal is to engage the community in developing a narrative that defines the elements of what it would take to make Anchorage the No. 1 city to live in by 2025.

An email survey being conducted by AEDC is being distributed to tens of thousands of Anchorage residents and asks two questions: Why do you live here? Why would you leave? Responses can be any length, Popp says, and will be condensed into a narrative with a list of quantitative metrics that can be measured locally and benchmarked nationally to describe Anchorage in several categories that could include high school graduation rates to employment numbers and the number of trails. The data will be presented to the AEDC board this month and by November the organization hopes to finalize mid- and long-term plans for partnering with other organizations to achieve these visions.

"Rather than taking outsiders' definitions, we are defining it ourselves based on what we're good at and what we can be best at by taking a bottom-up, grass-roots approach instead of a top-down prescriptive approach," Popp says, adding that it is an effort to make Anchorage more competitive globally by attracting new business that helps make it the community residents want it to be. "This is not some marketing slogan effort, but real work that focuses on outcomes."

THE MAYOR'S...