Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan learned much from his idol Sarah Palin.

(This picture was undoubtedly taken after Sullivan brags to Sarah that someday he will outdo her when it comes to ripping off the people of Alaska. Sullivan is on the left. Picture courtesy of AKM.)

As incredible as it may seem, before there was a Mayor Dan Sullivan, there was a Mayor George Sullivan. (Yes I know the people of Anchorage are slow learners!) And in 1982 the city, in it's infinite wisdom, decided to provide George Sullivan with a life insurance policy.

On Jan. 19, 1982, about two weeks after he left office, the Assembly passed a resolution thanking Sullivan "for the many outstanding contributions he made to the general well-being of the citizens of the Municipality of Anchorage during his years of public service." The resolution asked the city's Commission on Salaries and Emoluments to consider granting him life insurance coverage for the rest of his life, with the same rate for the same coverage he had as mayor.

Now THIS was highly unusual. In fact it had NEVER happened before, or since. However the decision was made and for the last 27 years the Sullivan family has been paying for this insurance.

Except that the premiums that were paid did NOT go to an insurance company. Instead it went into a city account.

Twenty years later, in 2002, Deputy Employee Relations director Karen Moore was baffled when Dan Sullivan, who was on the Assembly at the time, came to the city to make that year's premium payment, according to e-mails from the time. She asked the city's insurance carrier about a policy for Sullivan. The company didn't know about it either. The premiums paid by Sullivan and his family had been deposited into a city account, not given to Aetna.

The city, then headed by Mayor George Wuerch, talked about buying a real insurance policy for the elder Sullivan but Aetna would not cover him since he was no longer a city employee and suggested that the city simply return the money to the family. Well the city did not do that, they did this instead.

The city finance director at the time, Kate Giard, told fellow city officials they could put an end to it by just telling the Sullivan family the city would no longer provide the insurance. Giard said another option was for the city to try to buy a life insurance policy for the former mayor, but she suggested that would likely be too expensive because of his age. She suggested the city put $193,000 into a reserve account, the coverage amount that was described in a 1982 memo, then pay it out to the family when George Sullivan died.

Last year ex-Mayor George Sullivan did indeed pass away. And just last week the Anchorage Assembly voted to pay this $193,000 of our city's money to George Sullivan's survivors.

And can you guess who the beneficiary of this bizarre, city provided, pseudo life insurance payout might be? That's right, none other than current creepy Mayor Dan Sullivan, George's much less capable offspring.

You remember Danny boy don't you? Here let me refresh your memory.



Yeah THAT Mayor Dan Sullivan!

So now thanks to a vote by our current Assembly and some very strange shenanigans by the 1982 Assembly Mayor Dan Sullivan suddenly became $193,000 richer and our fair city became $193,000 poorer.

How is that for justice?

And just to make matters much, much worse, our current Mayor Sullivan has been cutting, or attempting to cut, essential services in the city ever since he took office because, in his own words, "Anchorage's economy is in a delicate balance."

So delicate in fact that Sullivan attempted to cut $174,000 from the city budget, part of which would have gone to fund our libraries and arts programs.

So delicate that he vetoed 3.2 million to build a storm drainage system for downtown and $250,000 for a new ambulance.

The economy in Anchorage is so delicate that just last month Mayor Sullivan saved the city $150,000 by disbanding the Anchorage Fire Department's wilderness rescue team and cutting back some other specially trained teams like divers.

For God's sake this is Anchorage freaking Alaska! Every year we have a dozen or so people fall off of a mountain, get stuck in the mudflats, get attacked by a bear, fall overboard, get lost in the wilderness, or succumb to the elements. When it comes to "essential city services", this certainly applies. But hey, if the city does not have the money then what are you going to do?

Except that the city, whose economy is in a "delicate balance", apparently has plenty of money when it needs to hand Dan Sullivan a big fat check for $193,000 dollars now doesn't it? I wonder how many books that would buy? Or how many lives it might save? Or how many other necessary city projects it might help to fund?

There was only one dissenting vote on the Assembly which voted to give Danny this money, and that came from the always ethical Harriet Drummond.

"If there were enough (Assembly members) who realized this was stupidity and voted no, then Anchorage's taxpayers would still have $200,000 in the bank," Drummond said later. "And the Sullivan estate could have gotten the $20,000 in premiums back. Maybe that was the appropriate thing to do. But it was certainly not appropriate for the city to be acting as an insurance company, which it is not."

And before you think I am being too unfair to little Danny Sullivan let me remind you that he is the same guy who charged the city $12,115.20 for a period of time BEFORE he physically took office, simply because he could. The fact that other mayors, including his predecessor and nemesis Mark Begich, had chosen not to take the money did not bother him in the least.

Dan Sullivan clearly views the job of mayor as a stepping stone to higher office and an opportunity to grab as much cash as possible, and cares not one little bit about the people who elected him or who need him to run their city effectively.

I am sure Sullivan would have felt quite at home with his grifter role model Sarah Palin and her "swarm of locusts".

(I only gave you the Reader's Digest version of George Sullivan's odd life insurance kerfuffle. If you want to read about it more in depth, then just click the title of this post for the ADN article on the subject.)