Going Rogue: An American Life (42 page)

When you talk about a city’s needs, the buck stops with rhe person ordering porholes filled and equipping the local police deparrment-the· mayor. My philosophy has always been that rhe most responsive and responsible level of government is the local level. Local government is besr able to prioritize services and projects. That’s the basis of the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which, paraphrased, says rhat the powers not delegated specifically to the federal government or prohibited by the states are reserved to rhe srates or the people themselves. My insistence on this, as well as my commitment to trickling down state resource development revenues to local governmentsknown as municipal revenue sharing-infuriated some legislators. They saw it as a usurpation oftheir power.
In
their eyes, I was bypassing them as the keepers of the state purse strings and responding directly to rhe people.

I released my budger, having rrimmed ir as much as I believed the public would stand for. At the same time, I insisted on showing rhe real numbers, including a “true up” ofeight hundred existing state positions that previous administrations had funded off the books. This led some critics to claim that I had grown government by eight hundred people. No. These positions already existed. Prior administrations had simply tefused to disclose it on the books.

I welcomed public scrutiny and invited the legislature and the public to look hard at othet places to CUt. I honestly hoped the people would find mote government programs and ptojects

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Going Rogue

wanted cut. Then we put out state checkbook online fot all the wocld to see-we weten’t the fitst, but it’s a pcactice that has spread to othet states.

The House of Represematives introduced my administcation’s ethics tefOtm bill, a cawhide-cough package of measures meant co pey state government away fcom special intetests and put it back on the side of the people. Our bill fullowed that period of embarcassing political scandals that occurted befure I was elected. Qrdinary Alaskans were expressing outcage at what was going on in Juneau, and I had pcomised co clean house.

The ongoing FBI investigation had revealed legislative conflicts of interest, so our ethics package required that lawmakers tepott outside income. In addition, we shoved a wedge

the employment revolving door between special interests and the Capicol. Remember the young political appointee who was supposed to be the ethics supervisor ovet AOGCC? In 2006, he was wotking as Governor Mutkowski’s chief legislative aide, tepresenting the state in gasline negotiations with ExxonMobii and other companies. A few months later, he was earning $10,000 a month lob·

bying the state

ExxonMobil. The public’s obvious question:

whose side are these guys on?

We wanted Alaskans to have faith that the people in state government were working

the people’s benefir and not simply

greasing the skids for their own fueure.

In early March, the Senare passed its own ethics bill, authored by Democcat Senacor

French. It was watered down. It

rejected all but one of the amendments we had asked be included fcom the tougher House bill. In particular, I was asconished that French and the Senate didn’t adope provisions s.uch as a ban on gifts from lobbyists.

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SARAH

PALIN

The Senate’s action was politicsas-usual. We wete detetmined to keep the presSure on.

That

paid off when legislators approved an omnibus

ethics bill. It included my administration’s ethics proposal, as well as the House’s muscular amendment that imposed criminal penalties on lawmakers who traded votes for campaign contributions. Plus, any legislator convicted of a felony would forfeit his or her state pension.

We were pleased rhat no one could claim pride ofauthorship on this. Finally rhe Capitol had pulled together and passed a strong bill. A Democrat lawmaker noted: “This is one of the best pieces of work I’ve seen come out of the legislature because it came out as a policy document and not a political document.” It was music to my ears:
policy,
not politics. As with ethics reform, my team and I determined to fundamentally change the game when ir came to the natural gas pipeline. Instead of negotiating behind closed doors wirh the monopolistic industry, we wanted to get back to comperitive freemarket principles, ethically employed. To that end, we built a team of energy experts and lifelong Alaskans whose focus was on crafting a bill that would provide a framework within which any company could compete.

This was a multibilliondollar project,. the largest privatesector energy project in North American history. It was a in-a-lifetime opportunity. So we had to demand that the resource owners’ needs be met.

To get the project off the ground after decades of politicians just talking about it, we cried a “newfangled” approach: freemarket principles. We asked willing and able companies to compete for the right ro build Alaska’s gasline. Our approach would

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