Going Rogue: An American Life (17 page)

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me about a group that called itself WOW (Watch on Wasilla) that was looking for young, “progressive” candidates. “The city would do well to have you serve,” he said. In those days, the word “progressive” wasn’t necessarily associated with liberalism, although that’s what they meant by it. I took it in the more common sense spirit of”progressing” our young city by providing the tools for the private sector to grow and prosper. The group, which was backed by the local newspaper, the
Frontiersman,
also supported Carney and Mayor Stein. I fit the demographic they were looking for: as the newspaper editor put it, a “young, sharp Wasilla resident who lived inside the city limits.” Finding a young, sharp person in Wasilla proper wasn’t difficult; finding someone willing to brave the swamp oflocal politics was. I talked it over with Todd. On the one hand, I was a typical busy mom, not too familiar with the low-level intrigue of a smalltown city hall. On the other hand, Wasilla was starting to grow beyond its prior claim to fame as the “Home of the Iditatod;’ and the city’s leadership was on the verge of making decisions that would affect my family and my community for a very long time. Todd thought it was a great idea. He knew that I wanted to make a difference, and he encouraged my instinct that it was time to get involved.

My first campaign waS exciting, and exactly what you would expect for a small town. I focused on reducing property taxes and redefining government’s appropriate role. Without knowing that I was setting a pattern for years to come, I ran an ultra-grassroots campaign with hand-lettered signs that read, POSITIVE-LY PALIN. Track and Bristol were still tiny, so I went door-to-door asking for people’s votes, pulling the kids through the snow on a sled. Ar the time, believe it or not, Wasilla didn’t even have a police fotce. The Alaska State Troopers had patrolled the area but said that Wasilla had better grow up because we wete big enough to suppott our own police depattment.

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Of course, we’d have to pay for it. There were two options on the table: increase property taxes or adopt a

tax. I didn’t like

either, but raising property taxes meant more government control over what residents owned. A sales tax would be fairer and more optional, with a broader base of support in a town like Wasilla, which is a hub for commerce and tourism.

So in the campaign I supported the 2 percent sales tax only if it correspondingly reduced property taxes. That got me off on the wrong foot with some local Republicans who heard the word

“tax” and assumed I actually
wanted
one. When the polls closed, the sales tax had passed, Nick won Seat F, and I won Seat E, defeating a guy who was married to Mayor Stein’s secretary.

After the election, I went to meet the mayor. We both assumed we would be allies since he and the Carney crew had recruited me to run. We were both wrong.

The city council chambers had once been next to my second-grade classroom, before the old school was converted to City Hall. It also doubled as a polling station, and when I later became mayor, my office was directly above.

The council met twice a month on Monday nights, and among its members, I stuck out like a Brownie at a Cub Scout meeting. Most of the guys were around my grandfather’s age. In some ways, they had a kind of paternalistic way of governing. For example, they wanted to regulate how many kids a mom could babysit in her home, whether signs on businesses should be allowed to flash, and whether the town barber pole should be permitted to spinshould one ever be installed. But Valley residents, like other Alaskans, are not “master-planned-community” kind of people. We are extremely independent, no community organizers necessary. Not a lot of zoning regulations needed either. We are do-it• 65 •

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yourselfers. (As proof, after our local Wal-Mart broke the world record for duct tape sales, Wasilla was named the’honorary Duct Tape Capital of the World.) I agteed with that spirit of independence, and I voted in ways that honored people’s ability to think for themselves.

Sometimes council members’ plan,S went beyond paternalism to conflicts of inrerest. For example, Nick tried to spearhead a development plan that would require people living in homes built in new subdivisions to pay for weekly trash removal instead of hauling their trash to the dump themselves, as most Valley residenrs did and I still do.
Ir
was a convenient ptoposal: Nick owned the town’s garbage truck company. I opposed that, too. Now, Nick was the de facto leader of the council, and even though he said Wasilla would do well to have me serve, he became extremely annoyed when I didn’t vote the way he did. That didn’t bother me; had to live with my own conscience, sa I voted according to my principles and let the chips fall where they may. A vote on garbage seems like small potatoes. But it was not a litrle thing to me. I wanted our local government to position itself on the side of the people and preserve their freedom so that Wasilla could ptogress, and not restrict opportunities.

Almost immediately, my fiscal conservatism kicked in. For one thing, Mayor Stein, Nick, and others on the council wanted to raise the mayor’s pay. I thought he made enough money and that there were people whose roads needed fixing before the mayor’s paycheck did. I voted no, but the pay raise happened anyway.

Because Todd was on the Slope a lot, the Carter

usually

babysat Track and Bristol during the Monday-night meetings. Later in my first council term, the kids started school and I got involved in the PTA. Then our third child, pretty litrle Willow Bianca Faye, came along. I went into labor with her on the Fourth

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of July while kayaking with the Menards on Memory Lake. I so wanted a patriotic baby that I paddled as hard as I could to speed up the contractions, but she held out until the next day. After she was born, I took Willow to council meetings with me, toting her in her car seat and tucking her next to my legs under the old wooden council table. I didn’t care too much what the good 01’

boys said about it either.

Away on the Bristol Bay fishing grounds, Todd missed Willow’s birth but sure made up for it. Later he would take time away from BP to run our business, Valley Polaris, a snowmachine and ATV dealership and mechanic shop where Willow was pretty much raised on ‘his hip for a few years. She grew into a little motorhead and spoke the mechanics’ lingo. To this day she is our athletic powerhouse, riding snowmachines and ATVs with more skill and confidence than a lot of guys twice her age. (She’s at the age now where she can’t figure out whether she’d rather kick a guy’s butt racing across the snowpack or not muss up her hair under the helmet. I tell her my vote is to kick butt.) While I served on the council, a local politician asked me to cut a radio ad for his campaign. I liked his conservative message and said I’d help. Into the KMBQ radio studio I brought my hungry, grumpy baby in a Snugli, and the only way to calm Willow was to inconspicuously nurse her while we rolled tape. I acted like I didn’t see the shocked look on the politician’s face as he turned red and pretended it didn’t bother him at all.

As a council member, I focused on what I believed to be the key functions of local government: infrastructure development, fiscal responsibility, and simply being on the side of the people. At the time, I thought the issues we

tackling in our small

town were the political be-all and end-all. And in some ways they were. It’s a serious responsibility to be elected and make decisions

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about how to spend other people’s money. As much as any policy that rolls down from Capitol Hill and state houses, the policies coming out of City Hall hit people in their pocketbooks and at their kitchen tables.

That’s why I poured my heart into the responsibilities of Seat E. Maybe the nerd in me kicked in again, but I made it my business to know every line item in the budget, to review every word of proposed regulations and ordinances, and to really know my constituents’ concerns. One Christmas Eve, a man called me at home ro give me his take on the city’s burdensome sewer system. I talked ro him for
two hours.
Here I was surrounded by little kids and all the wonderful clutter of Christmas and Todd making “wind it up” signals, and I’m talking ro this guy about sewer systems. I knew I couldn’t be tude, so I gritted my teeth and let him talk, thinking,
Someday I’m going to look back on this as proof that I
really cared about my job.

In local politics, your consrituents are your neighbors, family, friends, and sometimes even your enemies. You s.ee rhem ar the grocery store, the post office, and the hockey rink. Often politicians who make it to state and national office forget that those good people-the gas station mechanic, the local farmer, the scores of shop owners who form the backbone of

our economy-put them into office, and they are the ones who
should be at the forefront of our minds.