Anchorage Assembly members query extra journey data from George Martinez

It’s attainable the Anchorage Assembly doesn’t have the authorized authority to power East Anchorage member George Martinez to resign solely primarily based on marketing campaign finance violations. But two Assembly members have introduced further journey Martinez took as another excuse to hunt his resignation.

After calling for Martinez to step down from the Assembly final week primarily based on marketing campaign spending violations, Chugiak-Eagle River representatives Donald Handeland and Jared Goecker are scrutinizing an Assembly enterprise journey he took to Puerto Rico for a convention in 2025.

Martinez, in an interview Monday, stated the journey was “pre-approved and properly accounted for.”

Handeland and Goecker final week launched municipal journey data acquired from the clerk’s workplace surrounding an Assembly-related work journey that they stated raises “legitimate questions that warrant review,” given the current marketing campaign spending violations investigated by the Alaska Public Offices Commission.

[Regulators recommend fine for Anchorage Assembly member over wrongful campaign spending]

In a prepared statement Thursday, Handeland and Goecker scrutinized each the size of time and objective of the November journey. They requested Martinez’s Puerto Rico journey data be included in an investigation they hope to provoke in July — pending approval from different Assembly members — if Martinez chooses to not voluntarily resign by July 7.

Handeland and Goecker’s request follows an Alaska marketing campaign finance investigation into Martinez’s use of marketing campaign funds on a round-trip flight to Florida throughout his current marketing campaign for a second time period. State regulators stated the journey was not “reasonably related” to the marketing campaign.

Handeland and Goecker acknowledged his misuse of marketing campaign funds had triggered a “loss of public trust.”

“The remaining question is whether the public can have confidence in an elected official who has been found to have misused campaign funds for personal benefit and who, according to APOC findings, misled investigators about that conduct,” Goecker stated in the course of the June 23 Assembly assembly. “At a time when trust in public institutions is already declining, we should be setting a higher standard, not a lower one.”

In their effort to take away Martinez from the Assembly, Handeland and Goecker plan to invoke a piece of a code that outlines plenty of offenses constituting a breach of public belief. Among the code’s listed causes are perjury, falsification of data, continuous absences from official conferences, nepotism and accepting bribes.

But in response to city code, offenses occurring whereas the offender acted in a “private capacity” don’t represent a breach. Removal requires a two-thirds vote of the 12-member Assembly.

Chair Anna Brawley requested members “proceed with caution” throughout a June 23 Assembly assembly. Campaign funds usually are not taxpayer funds, she stated, and it’s a piece of code that has by no means been used.

When the code change went earlier than the Assembly in 2022, residents voiced a “strong aversion to the Assembly exercising this power against another elected official,” she stated.

“(It raised) the big question of: At what point would the Assembly essentially overturn the will of voters by removing somebody from office who is elected?” Brawley stated. “I think that is a question we should all grapple with.”

‘Reacting to partial information’

According to former Assembly Chair Chris Constant, who signed off on the Puerto Rico journey authorization, Handeland and Goecker are “reacting to partial information.”

Martinez’s journey prolonged from Nov. 3 via Nov. 12, making a 10-day journey surrounding a five-day convention. He was allotted two journey days and eight enterprise days, in response to the authorization. Airfare, lodging, registration, per diem funds and a rental automobile price $2,780.

Constant stated he authorized two journey days at the beginning of the journey and one on the finish, and a day after the convention spent in conferences with native officers. He licensed an additional day to forestall Martinez from reserving a lodge room as an earlier flight would have resulted in an in a single day layover, he stated. Some of this correspondence occurred over e-mail, he stated.

“The procedures were followed, the authorizations are in place, there were no shenanigans,” Constant stated in an interview Friday.

As the chair of the Assembly’s Community and Economic Development Committee and a member of a nationwide affiliation of Latino elected officers, Martinez stated he was invited to attend the 2025 SOMOS El Futuro Conference in Puerto Rico, in response to a duplicate of the journey authorization.

Handeland and Goecker requested Martinez’s current Assembly-related journey data after APOC commissioners reviewed Martinez’s elite airline standing. A Puerto Rico journey caught his consideration, Handeland stated.

“Members of the Assembly are allowed to travel as part of doing the job, but there gets to a level where it’s potentially extreme,” Handeland stated.

“We saw the purpose of the trip, we saw the number of days, (and) it raises a lot of questions,” he stated.

SOMOS Inc. is a nonprofit dedicated to addressing the wants of the Hispanic inhabitants of New York state, according to its website. Martinez moved to Alaska from New York City, the place he was closely concerned within the progressive Occupy Wall Street motion and ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s seventh Congressional District.

Martinez stated the unique journey request paperwork the rationale for the journey, together with conversations across the aspirations of traditionally underrepresented communities, utilizing arts and tradition for tourism and infrastructure redevelopment.

The convention, he stated, impressed new Assembly laws and allowed him to “bring back ideas to our community that have mattered.”

Following the APOC investigation into his Florida journey, Martinez paid the $5,300 in fines inside 72 hours of the fee’s last order and in addition determined to “voluntarily” donate 10,000 airline miles to the Special Olympics of Alaska, he stated.

Residents name for resignation

A gaggle of residents, many holding indicators that learn “Resign George,” requested Martinez to step down throughout final week’s Assembly assembly. Before public testimony started, Martinez left the assembly and joined once more by telephone.

“We count on each and every one of you on the Assembly for your integrity,” stated East Anchorage resident Loran Baxter.

“If you do not remove or encourage resigning, you are losing the trust of the people that you represent,” he stated.

Fellow Assembly member Erin Baldwin Day stated she hopes Martinez reconsiders the best way he’s responded to the APOC violation and “takes steps to repair the trust that has been broken.”

“I would love to see Member Martinez make a full accounting for his choices,” Baldwin Day stated. “I think that’s appropriate as a public official. I think that’s appropriate as a leader.”

Martinez stated he appreciated the chance to listen to from his colleagues and members of the general public.

“I often close our meetings by saying we do complicated work with imperfect tools, and we try the best we can, and so I appreciate the opportunity to hear folks,” he stated final week. Martinez added that he had left the assembly for a “family reason.”

Brawley stated the Assembly requested that the municipality conduct an inner audit of the Assembly’s journey processes and the current expenditures. She deliberate to share extra particulars at a Municipal Audit Committee assembly Wednesday.

[Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Loran Baxter’s first name.]