At their national convention, Republicans fought to turn a perceived weakness of their vice presidential nominee — a lack of experience — into a signature strength, saying Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had more executive experience than both members of the Democratic ticket combined.
Six years of her executive experience came as mayor of Wasilla, a city north of Anchorage that had about 5,000 residents when she took over. As much of Palin’s hometown now rallies with pride, 1,400 miles away — in a National Archives warehouse in Seattle — three boxes of documents help capture her mayoral experience.
These records, from a federal wrongful-termination lawsuit, combined with accounts from her hometown newspaper, show how Palin’s first year as mayor could easily have been her last.
She became embroiled in personnel challenges, a thwarted attempt to pack the City Council and a standoff with the local newspaper. Her first months were so contentious and polarizing that critics started talking recall.
But the situation calmed, and rather than being recalled, Palin was re-elected. She later acknowledged, “I grew tremendously in my early months as mayor.”
Palin’s criticism rebuffed
When Palin ran for mayor in the fall of 1996, she was 32 years old and a four-year veteran of the City Council. Her opponent, John Stein, then 52, had been mayor for nine years.
In a questionnaire published in the local newspaper, when asked about issues facing Wasilla, Stein wrote about “construction of a city collector street grid” and an “architectural planning process.”
Palin wrote that people asking city hall for help encountered “complacency, inaction and even total disregard.” She decried the town’s “current tax-and-spend mentality” and its “stale leadership.”
To five of the city’s department heads — including Irl Stambaugh, the police chief — Palin’s characterization was unfair. They wrote to the local paper, saying: “If these allegations were true, and they most certainly are not, why does Ms. Palin, as a member of the city council, allow the practices to continue?”
In October 1996, about a third of Wasilla’s registered voters went to the polls. Palin collected 616 votes, 58 percent of the total.
Right after the election, speculation set in about the fate of Wasilla’s six department heads, who served at the pleasure of the mayor.
Stambaugh had supported Stein during the campaign. He also had negotiated a contract with the previous mayor saying he could be fired only “for cause.” But whether a new mayor had to honor that clause was in doubt.
In the summer of 1996, Stambaugh encouraged Wasilla and the Mat-Su Borough, the regional governing body, to pass ordinances requiring bars and liquor stores to close earlier than 5 a.m., the latest hour allowed by state law. Because bars in Anchorage closed earlier, some people drove to Wasilla to keep drinking, endangering themselves and others, Stambaugh argued. He wanted Wasilla’s bars to close at 2:30 a.m. on weekdays and 3 a.m. on weekends.
Opponents talked of an encroachment on their individual freedom. The borough’s leadership rejected the proposal, and afterward so did the Wasilla City Council, by a 3-2 vote. Palin was in the majority.
The week after Palin was elected, Stambaugh asked her whether he still had a job.
“She answered that she was elected to make change,” according to notes of Stambaugh’s that he kept. “She went on to state that the NRA (National Rifle Association) didn’t like me and that they wanted change.”
The day Palin took office, she told Stambaugh she wanted him to stay on provided he would support her as mayor, his notes say. He agreed. She also asked him to drop the issue of bar hours. He agreed to that too.
On this day, Palin fired the city’s museum director, one of the department heads.
Ten days later, Palin wrote to all the department heads, including Stambaugh, asking for letters of resignation. She said she would then decide which to accept. When Stambaugh declined to provide one — pointing to his contract — Palin replied in a letter: “I will expect your loyalty.”
Weekly report sought
Palin kept a jar with the names of Wasilla residents. Once a week she pulled a name from it and picked up the phone. How’s the city doing? she’d ask.
The day after Christmas, Palin sent a memo to Stambaugh and the other department heads. “What a wonderful time of year!” she wrote. “As we enter 1997, let’s take this opportunity to start the new year off on a positive note.”
From now on, the memo said, Palin wanted each department head to send her a weekly report with an “update of activities” and “at least two positive examples of work that was started, how we helped the public, how we saved the City money, how we helped the state, how we helped Uncle Sam, how we made operations run smoother, or safer, or more efficient.”
Police chief fired
Stambaugh kept the reports coming. But on Jan. 30, he was on the phone with the town’s librarian — who said she had just been fired — when an assistant of Palin’s walked up and gave Stambaugh an envelope.
Inside was a letter from Palin, saying Stambaugh, too, was fired.
“I do not feel I have your full support in my efforts to govern the City of Wasilla,” she wrote.
For Palin, the firing of Stambaugh was only part of the drama that unfolded in her first months as mayor. The Frontiersman and Anchorage Daily News wrote one story after another about the turmoil.
After notifying the librarian that she was fired, Palin backtracked and decided to keep her on. Palin had twice asked this librarian what she thought about banning books, to which the librarian responded it was a lousy idea. Later, Palin told the local paper that any questions she’d raised about censorship were only “rhetorical.”
Palin put in place what the local paper called a gag order, prohibiting top city employees from talking to reporters unless she cleared it first.
After Stambaugh and the museum director were fired, two of the four remaining department heads quit. One, the public-works director, accused Palin of undermining him by meeting secretly with contractors and employees.
When three women who worked at the city’s museum were asked to decide among themselves which one should be let go, all three quit.
Palin tried to fill two vacancies on the City Council herself, even though an ordinance said that wasn’t her prerogative. It was the council’s. After the city attorney stopped Palin, the mayor said she’d merely engaged in a ploy. “It was brilliant maneuvering I had to do to deal with the impasse,” she told the Frontiersman.
The Frontiersman ran blistering editorials, condemning Palin’s philosophy “that either we are with her or against her.” The newspaper accused Palin of mistaking the 616 votes she received as a “coronation.”
The newspaper’s readers chimed in. “Mayor Sarah Palin behaves like a petulant, spoiled teenager,” wrote a woman who ran a flower shop.
A tool-and-die maker defended Palin, writing, “We didn’t want ‘business as usual.’ ”
Some residents talked recall.
By the end of Palin’s first year as mayor, things had settled down and talk of recall had faded. She was re-elected mayor in 1999. In 2002 she ran for lieutenant governor and lost. In 2006 she ran for governor and won.
Lyda Green, the Republican president of the Alaska state Senate, had been one of Palin’s biggest supporters back in 1996. But she’s a fan no more. Green recently told the Anchorage Daily News: “She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?”
But Palin had won other folks over. When she ran for governor, one opponent ran an ad quoting one of those blistering editorials from the Frontiersman. Vicki Naegele, the former managing editor who wrote the editorial, defended Palin.
“As a community newspaper, we held her feet to the fire,” Naegele wrote. “This was one of those scorching editorials. I remember the need for such harsh words diminished as the months wore on.”
