Girdwood Property Taxes Soar Under Recent Muni Assessment

Many Girdwood residents are fuming over a sharp rise in property values set by the Municipality of Anchorage that show up annually on light green postcards in mailboxes. (file photo)

Residents See Increases Above 30 Percent

By Soren Wuerth

TNews Editor

Many Girdwood residents are fuming over a sharp rise in property values set by the Municipality of Anchorage that show up annually on light green postcards in mailboxes.

Homes in the Girdwood valley saw hikes in tax assessments that, on average, are nearly double those of the Anchorage bowl. 

Amanda Tuttle, owner of Coast Pizza, said her tax evaluation went up "136 percent in two years" on her home in Old Girdwood.

"This is why you have killed our local economy," Tuttle said during a Girdwood Board of Supervisors meeting last Monday.

Zac Johnson, who represents Girdwood and South Anchorage on the Anchorage Assembly, said the Municipality receives no benefit from tax rate assessments that have climbed as high as 30% in his district. 

Johnson said changes in property appraisals were made to conform to state standards, and, actually, the Municipality loses money for its budget due to the way funding for the Anchorage School District is calculated.

"There's no political motivation to all this. Increasing valuations don't actually increase the amount of revenue the Municipality gets. That's determined by the tax cap, so it doesn't do anything to bolster the Municipal budget," Johnson said at the GBOS meeting. "If anything it actually harms us a little bit because it increases our required contribution to the state for [Anchorage School District] funding."

Municipal officials have justified increases based on changes in methods for evaluating property values, such as evaluating values based on a "market area" approach and consolidating market zones from about 400 zones to less than 20.

"The grand result of all of this is that the average increase in valuation for the entire Municipality is around 4 percent," Johnson said, "which seems to roughly track with what we'd expect given the state of the housing market."

"But there were some exceptional cases where people saw their valuations increase by 20-30 percent, which is certainly understandable why people would be concerned about that," he said. He added that assessing home values is an "imperfect process" given, particularly, that Alaska is a "nondisclosure" state and can only acquire limited data.

Nevertheless, land being prepared for home building in a new, highly-contested development called "Holtan Hills" did not see a similar increase, according to an analysis by Brice Wilbanks, who serves as co-chair of Girdwood's Land Use Committee and is running for a GBOS seat.

"While Girdwood property owners absorb increases at twice the municipal rate without the benefit of the proactive review afforded to Anchorage Bowl neighborhoods, the feverishly controversial Holtan Hills development saw a rather interesting lack of change between 2025 and 2026," Wilbanks wrote in an editorial. "This, despite major investment in the off-site improvements including the addition of road, sewer, and water access to the widely-opposed project."

Wilbanks developed an online tool to view Girdwood properties and changes in property appraisals.

Late last week, four neighborhoods in the Anchorage bowl, around 660 homes, had properties re-appraised and will receive lower assessments, according to a Municipal press release. The statement cited over-valued construction costs and how the homes were grouped into market areas "that likely reduced final valuations", the Muni update said.

Property owners have until February 11 to file an appeal with the municipality. Instructions are listed on the green assessment notices sent in the mail.