Anti-zoning key to Palin's early record
Sought to block plan for Wasilla
By Sasha Issenberg, Globe Staff | October 12, 2008
WASILLA, Alaska - Days after Sarah Palin became Mayor John Stein's only serious challenger in 1996, the 32-year-old city councilwoman stood and cast a proud, dissenting vote against one of Stein's greatest achievements: the first zoning plan in Wasilla's history.
"Once again the public input didn't account for much," she said. "The people are frustrated and I'm frustrated."
Over the next two months, Palin surprised and excited many in Wasilla by introducing social issues such as abortion and guns to the city's nonpartisan elections on the way to defeating the incumbent. But the centerpiece of her campaign was opposition to Stein's effort to bring zoning to the community.
Wasilla today reflects the results of her free-market approach to development. Running for a second mayoral term in 1999, Palin cited as one of her greatest successes luring a Fred Meyer mega-supermarket to Wasilla. The zoning plan, adopted over then-councilwoman Palin's opposition, proved no impediment for the store, which went up just a few feet from the banks of bucolic Lake Wasilla, with a parking lot that contains Kentucky Fried Chicken, Blockbuster Video, and Carl's Jr.
They are among the dominant landmarks in a city that councilwoman Dianne Woodruff says "looks like a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other."
Palin's property-rights agenda exploited a deep anger toward the expansion of local government, an attitude that had defined politics in the Matanuska Valley since its settlement 80 years earlier as a way station for gold miners heading north.
She used opposition to land-use restrictions to tap that vein of frontier libertarianism and a conspicuous display of her social views to connect with the new middle-class families who had suburbanized the valley in the 1980s. In doing so, Palin created a microcosm of the modern conservative coalition in Wasilla, exploiting a period of radical growth and progress while feeding off the resentment it created.
"That probably was the reason she was elected mayor," said David Chappel, who joined Palin as the only two of six council members to vote against the city plan and later became her deputy mayor.
As a vice presidential candidate, Palin has suggested that a similar attitude toward growth would prevail nationally if she were elected. "We will get out of the way of private-sector progress," Palin said last week at a Colorado rally. "It's the small business, the mom-and-pops, that are the cornerstone of America."
The municipality Palin repeatedly heralded as a classic "small town" in her convention speech has no discernible center and a Main Street in name only. To its critics, Wasilla has become a famously bad example of suburban growth even by the standards of Alaska, a place where city planners have long noted a dangerous combination of too much land and too few rules about how to build on it.
"Every time we meet with people for the first time, they say, 'We don't want our town to be like Wasilla,' " said Thea Agnew Bemben, a planner whose firm has worked in neighboring communities.
"You'll hear that a lot of times in meetings. They're afraid Wasilla is coming their way," said Kathy Wells, executive director of the pro-planning Friends of Mat-Su. "The joke now is: Can we put a wall around it and not let it spread?"
Until the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline a generation ago, Wasilla was little more than a general store at a corner of the Parks Highway. In 1984, the city began growing by 20 percent annually, one of the fastest rates in the country. Many were fleeing Anchorage, the energy-and-cargo hub that the writer John McPhee called a "condensed, instant Albuquerque." Disgruntled Alaskans - who saw land becoming both expensive and scarce - preferred "Los Anchorage."
An hour's drive to the north, Wasilla had few natural barriers to growth, and government did not add any hurdles. With no zoning or building code, a resident able to finance a house on his or her property could build without oversight. Despite the fact that the city sits in an earthquake zone with extreme weather conditions, Wasilla enforced no standards on building materials, methods, or dimensions - and no construction documents needed to be filed at city hall.
In return, government was truly hands-off: Most residents lived on gravel roads and off their own septic tanks. They paid no sales tax. State troopers were the only police presence. There was no trash collection and the only firefighters were volunteers.
In the mid-1980s, a borough manager who proposed a zoning plan was chased out of office after being burned in effigy. "The reaction was so vehement, and so widespread, that politicians were loath to propose any land-use planning that had any teeth to it," said Richard Deuser, a former Wasilla city attorney.
When Wal-Mart expressed interest in building a store in the Wasilla area, the company faced few restrictions. Residents, who had a smattering of small, locally owned stores but were used to driving into Anchorage for other purchases, appeared to be uninterested in dictating the terms of the development.
"I think Wal-Mart won: They weren't asked to do much," said Stein, then mayor.
Stein, who had been looking to create a police department for the city, knew that national retailers preferred sites in areas with a local police presence, and that the sales tax revenues created by their presence could fund the establishment of his new force.
In 1992, voters by a small margin accepted a 2 percent sales tax proposed by Stein. A newcomer to local politics was on the ballot, and her first comment after being elected to the City Council was an endorsement of the tax. "Wasilla finally sees the light," Palin told the Frontiersman newspaper.
Wal-Mart opened two years later. Its sales quickly exceeded projections, generating a surplus that allowed Stein to continue building the infrastructure necessary to support a bedroom community blossoming with subdivisions. His government set off to build sewers, pave streets, and expand the city's water system.
"With the growth of a middle-class constituency came a demand for planning," said Deuser. "But in an era of change the reaction was quite dramatic: There was a vocal part of the community condemning the growth of government."
When Stein sought reelection under the slogan "Protect the Progress," Palin presented herself as both a defender of small-town Wasilla and an opponent of the curbs on its growth.
After voting against Stein's comprehensive plan, she called upon the mayor to veto it, on the grounds that it did not do enough to limit the location of halfway houses, day-care centers, and group homes in residential neighborhoods - despite advice from Deuser that the restrictions could be unconstitutional.
"Governor Palin believes the rights of property owners must be respected, and adhered to that belief as she improved the city's infrastructure, public work projects, and business incentives that ultimately turned Wasilla into the region's economic hub," campaign spokeswoman Maria Comella said in a statement.
In her first year as mayor, Palin repeatedly signed ordinances to rezone lots for denser uses, often turning plots of land from "rural residential," the most restrictive category, to the looser "commercial."
Fearing that substandard construction on these new lots would undercut their members' work, the Mat-Su Homebuilders Association pushed the city to adopt building codes. In February 2007, Palin broke a 3-to-3 tie to defeat a proposed building-code ordinance in the council. When, in a nonbinding referendum later that year, voters joined her in rejecting the proposal, Palin called it "a good message sent." Homeowners who needed financing were already getting inspections because banks required them, Palin and her allies argued.
Those involved in planning issues at the time say they can recall no major instances where Wasilla used its regulatory power to limit a developer's plans. Michelle Church, a local planning advocate, recalls that when she left a planning commission meeting where a conditional-use permit for the Fred Meyer store was approved with only modest restrictions, she saw two company representatives in the lobby, laughing. "They couldn't believe the city didn't care what they did," she said.
In Palmer, a neighboring city that had refused entreaties from Wal-Mart, local planning authorities used their power to keep Fred Meyer in a relatively small store connected to the city's contained, pedestrian downtown. Throughout the process, city officials had Wasilla in mind as a cautionary example, according to Palmer councilman Mike Chmielewski. "That's a matter of a social choice of that community over the years," he said.
"Palmer has a very solid sense of identity: They know who they are and they know what they want to be," said Woodruff. "Wasilla has just kind of grown willy-nilly."
© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Micro: EVIL FREEDOM-LOVING PALIN! THE PROPERTY RIGHTS! THE FREEDOM, IT BURNSSSSSS USSSS!!!
