At $20, Anchorage’s parking tickets are a bargain. That could be about to change.

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Stuff costs more in Alaska.

Gas and electricity prices are among the highest in the nation; shipping costs can be painful. And you can buy a flight from Los Angeles for Tokyo for less than a plane ticket from one rural Alaska community to another.

There’s one specific item in Anchorage, though, that’s still a pretty good deal. The item, however, is something nobody wants: a parking ticket. 

For more than two decades, Anchorage has charged $20 for a citation — which, today, allows scofflaws to skate at a price far below cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Spokane, where parking tickets range from $30 to more than $100.

But the days of Anchorage’s cheap tickets may be numbered: The city’s parking agency is now formally proposing to raise the fine to $35 — a hike it says it needs to cover the cost of enforcement.

“People used to think 20 bucks was a lot of money,” said Mike Robbins, executive director of the Anchorage Community Development Authority, or ACDA, which manages city parking. “This is just a fee that hasn’t changed in a long time. And we’re trying to get it in line.”

The voting members of the authority’s board, who are appointed by the mayor, unanimously approved advancing the parking-ticket increase earlier this year — though one non-voting board member, Assembly Member Yarrow Silvers, was opposed, citing “costs going up right now across the board” and “super bad optics.”

Any increase would have to be approved by the city Assembly, based on a recommendation from Mayor Suzanne LaFrance. A spokesperson for LaFrance, Emily Goodykoontz, said the mayor would “carefully review” ACDA’s plan to “address a longstanding operational imbalance” once it’s formally drafted as a proposed city ordinance.

“Because parking citation fees have not been updated in more than two decades, the cost to administer enforcement currently exceeds the revenue generated — meaning parking violations are effectively being subsidized by regular parking fees,” Goodykoontz wrote in an email. “Citations exist to encourage community compliance, not to generate profit, and the proposal aims to correct that operational gap.”

ACDA’s parking enforcement arm is called EasyPark, which has six parking officers on the job on a typical day, according to Robbins. 

Those officers might write 100 tickets in total on a typical day, he added, and perhaps 35,000 or 40,000 over the course of a year.

Those tickets generate some $650,000 in revenue each year. But enforcement-related costs — like officer salaries and payment processing — total some $1 million a year, meaning that each $20 citation actually costs more like $30 to write, according to EasyPark.

That gap, Robbins said in a phone interview, shouldn’t have to be bridged with revenue from drivers who pay for parking like they’re supposed to.

“If I write a ticket to you, and it’s costing me $10 more than the price of the ticket, it means I had to sell 10 hours of parking to all the people who complied,” Robbins said.

ACDA staff initially proposed raising the parking fine to $40 at a board meeting earlier this year. After questioning from board members, the agency’s parking director, Jeff Read, said a $35 fee would be sustainable, and the board approved.

“I think it’s justified, and it’s been a long time coming,” ACDA’s chair, Anchorage attorney Mike Mills, said at the meeting. “So, I fully support it.”