Palin on earmarks:
If Sarah Palin tries to tell you she did in and refused the money for the bridge-to-nowhere in Alaska, she’s lying to you. And if she tells you she’s a hardnosed fiscal conservative and as against earmarks as John McCain, she’s lying to you some more.
Fiscal year 2008 was the first year for which there was a complete listing of all earmarks contained in all appropriation bills. That information was loaded into several databases, including the one developed by Taxpayers for Common Sense. According to that data, the average state got about $50 per person in earmarked funds in 2008. Alaska, represented by Ted Stevens, the Senate’s earmarker-in-chief, got $506 per person-about 10 times the national average. Wasilla between 2000 and 2003 was getting well over $1,000 per person-twice the Alaska state average in 2008.
So says the former top staffer of the House Appropriations Committee.
Yet Palin has advertised herself as a reformer and a skeptic of earmarking while maneuvering to become the earmark queen of the earmark state.
The Chicago Tribune notes that three times in recent years, McCain has himself attacked specific pork and earmarks to Wasilla. The town never had earmarks / pork before her, and she hooked up with the earmark king, Senator Stevens (presently under Federal indictment for corruption), hiring his former chief of staff as the 6000-person town’s lobbyist. With Stevens’ connections, the money flowed in - $27 million from 2001 to 2003 alone. She rolled in the cash, happily. (Here’s a handwritten note on her joy.)
This year as governor, Palin requested nearly $200 million in earmarks (about $300 per Alaskan). In keeping with Alaska’s historical reliance on pork, it’s a haul that would exceed any other state’s per capita. Her first year in office, the state requested $550 million in earmarks ($800 per Alaskan).
Oh, yeah, that lobbyist she hired for Wasilla and the former chief of staff to Stevens? His other big clients were fixer and shaker Jack Abramoff, who just got sentenced to four years in prison for bribing federal officials, along with Stevens (soon to be on the dock) and similarly under-federal-investigation-for-taking-bribes Alaska Congressman Don Young. All of the Alaska corrupt pols were helping her get the boodle:
The Palin earmarks came when Stevens was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Young was a senior member of the House transportation committee.
Even with all that money, Palin, who came into politics with a position of ‘fiscal conservativism’, still ran the town into colossal amounts ($20 million) of debt - to pay for a grandiose sports center, amongst other things - that crippled the town’s finances (still). She also supported as Governor other tons of pork for the state, including the ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ run up to Capital Hill by her same pet lobbyist.
“OK, you’ve got Valley trash standing here in the middle of nowhere,” Palin said, according to an account in the Ketchikan Daily News. “I think we’re going to make a good team as we progress that bridge project.”
She campaigned for Governor with her support for the bridge as part of the ticket:
The Alaska governor campaigned in 2006 on a build-the-bridge platform, telling Ketchikan residents she felt their pain when politicians called them “nowhere.” They’re still feeling pain today in Ketchikan, over Palin’s subsequent decision to use the bridge funds for other projects - and over the timing of her announcement, which they say came in a pre-dawn press release that seemed aimed at national news deadlines.
“I think that’s when the campaign for national office began,” said Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Weinstein noted, the state is continuing to build a road on Gravina Island to an empty beach where the bridge would have gone - because federal money for the access road, unlike the bridge money, would have otherwise been returned to the federal government.
There were actually two ‘bridges to nowhere - one was in Ketchikan, elsewhere in the state, and the other was over the Knik Arm - a branch of the Pacific. I’ve driven on the road out of Anchorage - both through Wasilla and Palmer - and you have to do a BIG loop around the Knik arm to get north to Fairbanks, the only other major town in the state - or up to Wasilla. Of course, (see larger version of map here) if there was a Really Good supershortcut to Wasilla and Fairbanks by putting that bridge over the Knik Arm…
The agency charged with coming up with a bridge plan - the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority - recently estimated the span would cost $667 million if construction begins next year. The authority, which made the estimate in response to a request from the governor’s office, said that figure could increase to $824 million by 2015.
Did I mention that the Knik Arm Toll Authority is another client of that lobbyist? They’ve paid him $200,000 so far…In Palin’s speech Wednesday night, that message couldn’t have been clearer: “I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere,” she proclaimed. “If our state wanted a bridge, we’d build it ourselves.”
Funny, but that’s not where the money’s gonna come from. And part of that Bridge thing is still going. And the $223 million the federal government handed over to Alaska for those bridges wasn’t returned to DC by Palin. She kept it for the state’s other projects, as she saw fit. She turned on the project in late 2007 because the state was short $323 million in various ambitious works projects, and because (as she says in the statement at the time) (a) she could use that money for the other projects and (b) the prices for the bridges was $400 million and rising, and the public uproar over the project after the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis was such that it was politically dead, anyway.