Sen. Mark Begich’s campaign got a boost from the International Association of Fire Fighters’ political action committee, a group he previously helped as mayor of Anchorage with contracts that have since proven controversial.
The union’s committee, known as FIREPAC, recently spent $165,000 on TV ads against the Alaska Democrat’s Republican opponent in one of the most competitive Senate races this year.
Because Alaska is a comparatively inexpensive media market, the six-figure ad buy is significant.
After Begich won his Senate seat in November of 2008, he delayed his resignation as mayor of Anchorage to oversee the signing of five-year contracts with the International Association of Fire Fighters and three other unions representing municipal workers, electrical workers and police in his final days in office.
Some members of the 11-member Anchorage Assembly, the local government body, later complained that the contracts were overly generous, according to the Anchorage Daily News.
One former Assembly member, Chris Birch, said the ad buy raises questions about Begich and the firefighters’ union.
“I think the question that really needs to be asked is, what is that relationship?” he said, adding that the nature of the unions’ lucrative contracts “very clearly reflected a quid pro quo relationship.”
Jennifer Johnston, a member of the Assembly who also opposed the new contracts, said the contracts exceeded what the city could afford and the city later passed an ordinance to limit future contracts to just three years.
“He went on to D.C. We were left cutting budgets,” she said. “We had these large contracts we couldn’t afford, so there was an effort within the Assembly and the current administration to not have that problem happen again.”
Unions pushed back against the ordinance, and got more than three times the necessary signatures to put it on the ballot this November for a referendum to overturn it.
The city’s municipal attorney investigated the contracts, concluding that Begich knew that revenue was “reasonably certain” to fall short of the amount they approved and “did not timely report this to the Assembly.”
An internal audit also faulted Begich for “lack of strict compliance” with the city code for changing collective bargaining agreements without running changes by the Assembly.
Begich’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
