2 first-time candidates join perennial candidate in competition for West Anchorage Assembly seat

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Three candidates are competing for West Anchorage’s assembly seat on the ballot for the April 4 election.

Registered nonpartisan candidate Austin Quinn-Davidson is not seeking re-election after more than four years of elected service — eight months of which as Anchorage’s acting mayor.

The three candidates competing for Quinn-Davidson’s seat on the Assembly are middle-right candidate Brian Flynn, progressive-leaning candidate Anna Brawley and perennial candidate Dustin Darden.

This is Flynn’s first time running for an elected office. Flynn has been involved with commercial real estate for more than two decades and is on the Land Bank Advisory Commission, the Zoning Board of Examiners and the Budget Advisory Commission. He was also treasurer of the Bayshore/Klatt Community Council.

Flynn says there’s a lot of spending going on in the city without a lot of results.

“A lot of what I hear from people is that they feel their taxes are too high and there’s too many,” Flynn said. “They want to see more return on investment. If there’s going to be high taxes, they want to know where that money is going, and what services are provided and can they be done more efficiently.”

This is also Anna Brawley’s first time running for an elected office.

Brawley works as a planning consultant for various cities around the state.

She’s former president of the Turnagain Community Council and former chair of the Anchorage Budget Advisory Commission — positions she stepped aside from to run for Assembly.

Brawley is undeclared politically.

“Local government needs to be less partisan,” Brawley said. “I believe we’ve seen that ramp up over the last few years and it’s not helping anybody in Anchorage. Things like snowplowing, schools, housing, those are not partisan issues. Everybody wants to have good services and wants to have opportunities to have a good life here.”

Candidate Dustin Darden is a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party and has run without success for a variety of elected positions over the years including for the U.S. Senate, the Assembly and for mayor of Anchorage. Darden says he’d like to see COVID-19 vaccines and 5G towers and routers abolished. He is also opposed to mail-in ballots.

“A ballot needs to be handled by a human being and it needs to be processed and counted by (a) human being, never to be put into a technological aspect, and there needs to be more oversight of these elections,” Darden said.

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