Bearings

Much has been made by Republicans of Gov. Sarah Palin’s executive experience, beginning with her two-term tenure as mayor of the small Anchorage suburb Wasilla. As a former professor of public administration who has taught municipal management and helped prepare hundreds of students for careers in local government, including city managers, I know something about running small and big cities.

Small town adherents love to talk up the positives of the small town experience, how everyone knows each other and is likely to help out in a crisis. True, but the flip side is that local leaders, who are generally not trained in public administration, are more likely to cross the line between official responsibilities and personal agendas.

Case in point: As mayor of Wasilla (pop. 7,025), Palin set out to fire a librarian who didn’t share her interest in book-banning (resulting in a community outcry); requested the resignation of city employees who had shown support for her opponent; and successfully terminated the well-liked police chief.

That Palin allegedly demonstrated the same lack of professional judgment as governor when she removed the state public safety director for refusing to fire a state trooper who was involved in a messy marital situation with Palin’s sister should come as no surprise, but let’s stay in Wasilla.

In my experience, the city’s form of government is atypical for such a small community. Wasilla has what’s considered a “strong mayor” system, where the mayor has executive responsibilities. This system is usually associated with larger communities (250,000 or more), where there is a significant number of interest groups in competition with one another. It is therefore important for the mayor to have the executive power and political leverage to garner sufficient support for his/her goals and policies. In cities of this size, the mayor is also likely to have a deputy trained in public administration.

Some large cities instead adopt a strong mayor/administrator model where the administrator reports to the mayor but has the primary responsibilities for day-to-day operations. The mayor would be more concerned with relations with the city council, business and civic organizations, and state and federal governments — in other words, the “politics” of running a large municipality.

Small or medium-sized communities often adopt the council/manager form, where executive power is given to an appointed manager who has appointment responsibilities, oversees all departments and presents the budget to the elected council members for approval. The manager, who serves at the pleasure of the council, is usually trained in public administration and has earned the MPA degree. The MPA program is analogous to that of the MBA, but with courses focusing on public finance, intergovernmental relations, and other areas relevant to local government management.

In communities under 10,000, such as Wasilla, we usually see the “weak mayor” system, which simply means that the mayor is a member of the city council with no additional powers or duties except ceremonial ones; hence the term “ribbon cutter.” That’s because in most small communities, especially those that are not undergoing rapid change, a full-time executive would spend a lot of time daydreaming or, worse, interfering unnecessarily in municipal operations.

Despite being elected as a full-time mayor with executive responsibilities and a salary of $68,000, which she subsequently reduced to $64,000, Palin hired a city administrator, John Cramer, thus adding another salary to Wasilla’s budget. Apparently this was brokered by Republican party leaders after some Wasilla residents, upset by Palin’s inability to differentiate between official responsibilities and personal preferences, threatened a recall.

To have a full-time administrator in a municipality of less than 7,000 residents, when you already have a full-time mayor, smacks of managerial overkill or a mayor that can’t do the job.

On the other hand, maybe Palin was simply too busy seeking earmarks from Alaska’s federal legislators (something her campaign partner John McCain bitterly opposes) to pay attention to how the streets were being cleaned or whether the garbage was being picked up.

But this doesn’t fly, either, because although Palin traveled to Washington annually in search of pork barrel items, and successfully obtained $27 million for her small locality, she did it with the help of a paid lobbyist. Prior to the recent corruption scandals, getting earmarks was no big deal; the Alaskan delegation garnered more earmark dollars on a per capita basis than any other off the 49 states.

As a municipal manager would say, here’s the bottom line: Hiring an administrator to help a full-time mayor run a municipality of the size of Wasilla is practically unheard of and raises serious questions about Palin’s executive abilities — the very same abilities that have been touted by the McCain campaign as one of the reasons she was selected to be the their VP candidate.

In all fairness, it may be that Palin was as good as or better than the many thousands of other small government mayors. But it’s noteworthy that none of them have been nominated to be vice president of the United States, a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world.

As for the argument that Palin has 20 months worth of executive experience as governor, well, the differences between being governor of Alaska, which is ranked 47th in population, and being governor of a state with less oil money and less federal funding and more people and more problems is the subject of another column.