I believe the scratch-paper approach he is referring to deals with the fact that for many years the Anchorage Cemetery was poorly neglected. If you reread the article you will see that John Bagoy identified "more than 2,000 unmarked graves". That doesn't seem to me, a city that is barely 100 years old caring about its history. Thank god for Jon Bagoy and the countless hours he spent literally tracking down descendants of those buried there. I highly doubt that anyone but Jon could have been so effective since he grew up with these families and was able to make contacts with people to figure out who was buried where. The last point I want to make was Anchorage didn't have a historic preservation plan until 2007 compared to the many boroughs in the state that have had them for much longer so yeah it does feel like Anchorage has had a scratch-paper approach that we are finally starting to correct.