Going Rogue: An American Life (40 page)

SARAH

PALIN

in a month”), and we refused the housing per diem as well. I also stayed in our own house in Wasilla while working in rhe Anchorage office when plumbing repairs kept us OUt of the mansion

for months, rarher rhan have the state put me up-as it had for previous governors-in an expensive hotel or a rented apartment. ‘

In fact, we slashed living expenses, and I drove myself to rhe Anchorage office and to most meetings and events. I was never paid to sleep ,in my own home, and I accepted only a meal per diem, despite what some critics would later accuse me of doing. This while Juneau’s own legislators, including Senator Kim Elton who lived right there in town, pocketed more than $20,000

in food and housing per diem payments in just one year. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to find a hotel in Anchorage that will put up a family of seven and feed five hungry kids for sixty bucks a night.

In Juneau, the one thing that’s required during the session is passing a budget, and that one task is the subject of endless hours of discussion, deliberation, bartering, and whining. Again I was thankful

my training gtounds as a mom.

My first budget was inirially assembled by Murkowski’s administration on its out the door, so I Cut $150 million out of

it right off tbe bat when I handed it over to lawmakers. I asked my legislative director to draft a letter to lawmakers to make them aware that I wanted a smaller, smarter budget and that I wouldn’t be afraid to use my veto pen to achieve it. My thinking was that we could be proactive about the whole process: if they didn’t send me pork, I wouldn’t have to kill it. Simple.

The director’s letter was to convey two messages. First, I wanted lawmakers to know that to be approved, their funding requests must be centered on core services that government appropriately

Going Rogue

provides: public safety, education, and infrastructure. Second, I asked them to prioritize their funding requests because I assumed that they were in contact with those on the front lines in their districts and that they could better tell me where cuts could be made.

There would be cuts one way Ot another, which the letter was to make

I took a fitm stance, but I didn’t want to sound adversarial. My doot was open, I was willing to listen. I just wanted them ro know where I was coming from.

On the lawmakers’ end, part of the budget process was of the smoke-filled backroom variety and ultimately was in the hands of just a few powerful politicians. They crafted the budget and voted it into law at the eleventh hour, then dropped it in my inbox and rocketed out of town.

That first year, what they turned in was a budget that didn’t look prioritized and was so lacking in detail that on some pages it was simply a subject

Cages for Kids”) and a number

(“$100,000”). And so began our marathon budget breakdown.
Ir
was late June 2007, just after the solstice, and we worked late into the night with the warm midnight sun still pouring through my office windows. My chief of staff and our budget director were there. Meg (who was nine months pregnant and ready to meet her first baby at any moment), Kris, and another budget staffer sat with me around my conference table. Pens in hand, we combed through the budget, line by line, page by page-my inner nerd coming out again, just like Wasilla City Council days.

I felt a serious sense of responsibility for this.
It
was other people’s money we were spending, and I

the one who had to

sign off on this multibilliondollar budget. I had to know what was in there, or I wasn’t doing my job. We spent days trying to decipher who put in what and why.

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SARAH

PALIN

Late one night, I looked up from the table and asked out vetetan staffets, “What did past governots do? How did they get through these budgets

so little detail?”

“They didn’t;’ was the tesponse.

Befote, othets skimmed thtough it and governots signed off
on it.

Well, it was a new day, and we sifted through funding tequests fat schools, roads, pOtts, AstroTurf and batting cages, blueberry farms, and, believe Or not, a lawmaker’s friend’s suicide memorial. State spending increases wete unsustainable. I was looking for cuts. Lawmakers long ago learned that they could get almost anything thtough if they couched it as “It’s for the children.” Thus, one yeat, a lawmaket didn’t bat an eye in his request fat $43,000

a landscaping project at a school in his disttict. Apparently some shrubs had died and due ro the leafless twigs, according to the funding request, “The risk of a child impaling themselves On the shrubs is substantial.”

Killet shrubs!

I asked the obvious: was thete some reason the district couldn’t remove the potentially lethal shrubs using patt of the
billion dollars
we had alteady allocated? Or maybe have the local Girl Scout troop volunteer to chop to them down?

During my 2007 budget powwow, the legislative director should have been at the table with us so that there would be no surprises in the state house come veto time. Occasionally, he would wandet in and out, plop down in the chair at the end of the table, nibble cookies, and absently thumb his BlackBerry. Evety now and then a tired staffet on a bathroom bteak would pass behind him, glance down, then mouth over his head, “It’s BtickBreaket.” One day Meg I caught up with him in the hallway to