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For Palin, some pork is kosher
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
October 10, 2008 09:25 PM EST
Last year, when a Juneau Pentecostal church asked the Alaska state government for cash for a new youth center, Gov. Sarah Palin, who had recently started worshipping at the church, vetoed the legislative appropriation from the capital budget, explaining it was “not a state responsibility.”
But by the time this year’s budget negotiations rolled around, Palin had become very involved in the Juneau Christian Center, attending an increasing number of services there, touring the youth center with her family, citing the pastor as among her spiritual guides, and appearing with the pastor at a Martin Luther King Day celebration and a religious conference where he laid hands on her while praying.
During this year’s capital budget writing process, Palin penned a letter to lawmakers “in support of the Juneau Christian Center’s new state-of-the-art youth center,” and she approved $25,000 for the center in May, even as she sparked a backlash from officials around the state for slashing spending from projects they deemed crucial to their areas.
Her reversal on the church funding is one small example of what both her critics and supporters in both parties in Alaska say is a trend in Palin’s political track record: She supports spending taxpayer cash on initiatives that tickle her fancy, even as she rails against funding for other — sometimes similar — projects and does little to slow overall government spending.
It’s a pattern that runs counter to the cost-cutting, anti-pork crusader persona that Palin has fashioned for herself from the dawn of her political career in the hometown municipal politics of Wasilla, Alaska, through her 22 months as Alaska’s governor, and now in her surprise turn as John McCain’s running mate on the Republican presidential ticket.
On the campaign trail, Palin’s denouncements of wasteful government expenditures — and her boasts of vetoing “nearly a half a billion dollars in reckless spending” from Alaska’s capital budget — dovetail with McCain’s own pledges to veto pork barrel spending.
But Palin over the years has approved billions of taxpayer dollars for discretionary projects, including some to which she had personal, political or parochial connections.
From the $25,000 for the Juneau Christian Center to $2 million for an academic conference meant to dispel the broadly-accepted idea that climate change is threatening polar bears (she actually preferred the money be used for the state’s lawsuit arguing the bears shouldn’t be listed as threatened) to $630,000 for a kitchen in a hockey arena complex the self-described hockey mom built during her second term as Wasilla’s mayor, Palin has tended to approve line items in Alaska’s capital budget — essentially the state version of federal earmarks — for projects favored by her and her supporters.
“Anything she proposed is a good earmark,” said Bob Weinstein, mayor of Ketchikan, Alaska, and a supporter of Palin’s Democratic rival Barack Obama. “Anything that somebody else proposes is not necessarily a good earmark,” added Weinstein, whose city was stung when Palin last year withdrew her support from the infamous bridge to nowhere, which would have connected Ketchikan to its airport.
On the campaign trail, Palin joined McCain in denouncing the bridge as epitomizing government waste. But Weinstein points out that Palin has not withdrawn her support for the Knik Arm Crossing, which has also been lampooned as a "bridge to nowhere,” but which would cut commute times for Palin’s neighbors in Wasilla and the surrounding Matanuska-Susitna — or Mat-Su — Valley.
Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Palin, pointed out that Palin has called for an independent cost analysis of the Knik Arm bridge before there’s any further state action. Comella said the Juneau church’s teen center had widespread community support and that Palin “saw firsthand how this nonprofit organization meets community needs.”
As for Palin’s overarching approach to government spending, Comella said Palin has fulfilled pledges to fight wasteful spending and reduce pork and inefficiencies “by cutting more than $500 million from the state budget in the last two years, vetoing wasteful spending and putting an $8 billion surplus to good use, including setting aside billions of dollars in the state's savings account.”
Palin did, in fact, veto $499 million alone in state lawmakers’ hometown projects from the two capital budgets that came across her desk as governor.
But absent from her stump speech and campaign talking points is that the $4.8 billion in capital spending she approved ($3.2 billion of which was proposed by her own office) made her average capital budget $264 million a year costlier than those signed into law by her predecessor Frank Murkowski, whom she had blasted as a free-spender during her 2006 Republican primary campaign against him.
Likewise, Palin had campaigned for mayor of Wasilla pledging to slash government spending. Once in office, however, she spent heavily on big-ticket projects — including the hockey complex, which was primarily funded by a $15 million voter-approved bond but was still requiring payments from the city last year, and major street and water improvement projects. She also managed to find at least $10,000 to help fund the snowmobile race her husband has won several times. All told, she took the city’s long-term debt from $1 million when she took office to $25 million when she left.
To be sure, both Wasilla and Alaska were raking in revenue during her stints at the helm — the city from rapid retail expansion, which brought a growth in sales taxes that allowed her to cut property taxes, and the state from taxes on oil companies, which she increased, allowing the state to sock away $7 billion while suspending its gas tax and adding $1,200 a year to its payments to citizens.
But during her tenures as both mayor and governor, operating budgets ballooned by 55 percent in Wasilla and 25 percent in Alaska.
It was easier — and splashier — for Palin to slash the capital budget than to rein in the operating budget, said state Sen. Bert Stedman, a Republican who co-chairs the Senate Finance Committee.
“Vetoes make great sound bites, politically,” he said, “but the capital budget is not the side of the equation that will cause long-term troubles for any state. The issue is growth of the operating account, because you’ve got to feed it every year, regardless if you have excess revenue or if you have tight years.”
Stedman, who said he supports Palin and is “very proud of her being nominated on the VP ticket,” nonetheless said she based her vetoes on “arbitrary decisions” and did not consistently adhere to the criteria she said she used for approving funding for capital projects: that they be related to education, public safety, health or infrastructure.
In 2007, Palin slashed funding from the capital budget for 40 sports-related projects, ranging from school baseball and soccer fields to $2.5 million in roof repairs at an Anchorage arena, because she asserted sports did not constitute an essential government service. Yet she approved cash for Wasilla’s hockey complex and several other sports projects in the Mat-Su Valley, including new lights at one high school field and new bleachers at another.
And after this year’s round of capital budget cuts, officials in the Mat-Su Valley, unlike those in many other parts of the state, expressed relief that their top projects were mostly spared Palin’s veto ax.
On the flip side, last year leaders in Anchorage complained that their capital projects got shortchanged. A state budget analysis obtained by Politico shows the vetoes last year and this year inordinately zeroed out projects in Southeast Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula — areas represented by some of the lawmakers who most often butted heads publicly with Palin, including Stedman.
“There were projects that I was astounded were vetoed in light of some of the projects that made it in the Mat-Su Valley, and particularly Wasilla,” said Bruce Botelho, the mayor of the state capital of Juneau, located in the southeastern part of the state.
Palin eliminated the $347,000 Juneau was seeking to improve safety at its schools, access to a park and drainage at a city ball field, and she slashed in half the $2.8 million the city was seeking for its top priority, an extension of power lines to a weather-monitoring station essential for its airport.
Meanwhile, Botelho also wrote a letter supporting the Juneau Christian youth center’s state funding request, even though he said the city considered it a low funding priority and that he wrote letters supporting many local nonprofits seeking state cash.
In fact, Juneau’s City Assembly rejected the church’s request for $45,000 from the city, partly because the arrangement raised church-state separation concerns for some City Assembly members.
“That was my judgment,” said Botelho, an Obama supporter, who noted that funding the center would “kind of open the Pandora’s Box.”
Representatives from the church, which created a separate nonprofit group to run the youth center, did not return telephone and e-mail messages from Politico inquiring about Palin’s involvement with the church or the funding push.
“She’s certainly in a position to favor those projects that she likes and that satisfy her personal interests,” said Botelho. “Every executive has that prerogative.”
This post was published to Ronn's Blog at 7:38:43 AM 10/11/2008
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