WASILLA, Alaska — Though Sarah Palin depicts herself as a “pit bull” fighting old-boy politics, in her years as mayor of Wasilla, she and her friends received special benefits more typical of small-town politics as usual, an Associated Press investigation shows.
When Palin needed to sell her house during her last year as mayor, she got the city to sign off on a special zoning exception — and did so without keeping a promise to remove a potential fire hazard.
She accepted gifts from merchants: a free “awesome facial” she raved about in a thank-you note to a spa; the “absolutely gorgeous flowers” she received from a welding-supply store; even fresh salmon to take home.
She also stepped in to help friends or neighbors who had dealings with City Hall. She asked the City Council to add a friend to the list of speakers at a 2002 meeting — and then the friend got up and asked attendees to give his radio station advertising business.
That year, records show, she tried to help a neighbor and political contributor fighting City Hall over his small lakeside development. Palin wanted the city to refund some of the man’s fees, but the city attorney told the mayor that she didn’t have the authority.
Palin says she has more executive experience than her opponent and the two presidential candidates, but most of those years were spent running a city with a population of fewer than 7,000.
Some of her first actions after being elected mayor in 1996 raised possible ethical red flags: She cast the tie-breaking vote to propose a tax exemption on aircraft when her father- in-law owned one and backed the city’s repeal of all taxes a year later on planes, snow machines and other personal property. She also asked the council to consider looser rules for snow-machine races. Palin and her husband, Todd, a champion racer, co-owned a snow-machine store at the time.
Palin often told the City Council of her personal involvement in such issues, but that didn’t stop her from pressing them, according to minutes of council meetings.
James Svara, professor of public affairs at Arizona State University and author of “The Ethics Primer for Public Administrators in Government and Nonprofit Organizations,” suggested such behavior is part of small-town politics.
“Small towns are first-person politics, and if people are close, it’s hard to separate one’s own personal interest and one’s own personal property from the work of the city,” Svara said.
The key questions from an ethics standpoint include whether the politician makes a potential conflict of interest known and removes himself or herself from actions related to it, he added.
“I think in a small town, there is a greater likelihood that people will accept that you will pay careful attention to friends and neighbors,” he said, adding that there may be some local gossip about it but not a lot of public scrutiny.
But at the national level, he said, “there will be far more people watching; there will be far more pressures to come forward to try to influence the outcome.”
