Serious question...What type of city government does Wasilla have?

[hutash]

Most small cities have a mayor who leads the city council, but has a city manager that actually runs the city day to day. The CM hires and fires staff, deals with the day to day activity et cetera. The Mayor and council really don't do anything, other then give the CM directions. The set policy, but the CM carries it out. In the city I was involved with the mayor had very little actual power beyond what any councilman or woman had.

So does Wasilla actually have a mayor that runs the city day to day, or does the city manager?

[spindrift]

This struck me as an interesting question. A quick google & a quick click - and a first dead end: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080910205549AA95WPh The original question was "why did the city of Wasilla hire a City Manager?"

While not literally a 404, I think Palin/McCain must have some form of supernatural 404 powers...

[Mathematics]

I dont know if they have a city manager, but the city hall itself is about the size of a pizza hut, so I cant imagine they'd need that many people to run the place.

[BFD]

Wasilla has a strong mayor type of government. The mayor is paid and makes most decisions. Palin hired a city manager named Cramer to help her run the city. This was a new position. He was a political hire for the Republican party. Her race was the first election I can remember where partisan politics played an important role. As has been pointed out she brought the AK. republican parties platform to the local election, making abortion and guns an issue.

[Adolf Allerbush]

I dont know if they have a city manager, but the city hall itself is about the size of a pizza hut, so I cant imagine they'd need that many people to run the place.

Shit, for a second there I thought that was the Whitehouse.

[hutash]

Wasilla has a strong mayor type of government. The mayor is paid and makes most decisions. Palin hired a city manager named Cramer to help her run the city. This was a new position. He was a political hire for the Republican party. Her race was the first election I can remember where partisan politics played an important role. As has been pointed out she brought the AK. republican parties platform to the local election, making abortion and guns an issue.

Thanks for the info. I just wanted to make sure she was qualified to run a super power. Sure looks qualified to me:rolleyes:

Wait, she can't manage to run a town of 7,000 with out a city manager, yet wants to be VP?=FAIL

[natty dread]

As has been pointed out she brought the AK. republican parties platform to the local election, making abortion and guns an issue.

^^More evidence of her lack of character and fucktardedness. Bringing abortion and guns into a non-partisan, small town election?
A small town mayor has about zero influence over these issues--roads, sewer, police, fire, sure--but abortion??
Then she wins and replaces department heads loyal to the ex-mayor and issues a gag order. Again, this sort of thing just doesn't happen in most small towns.
What a nutjob.

Excerpt from Time.com:

But in the first major race of her career — the 1996 campaign for mayor of her hometown, Wasilla — Palin was a far more conventional politician. In fact, according to some who were involved in that fight, Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.

In the early '90s, Wasilla was little more than half as big as it is today, and much more loosely confederated. The main issue then, says longtime resident Chas St. George, was public safety. "We needed a police department," he says. "So we set up a group to make it happen." That group — Watch on Wasilla — included a handful of the town's most influential figures: St. George; the town's mayor, John Stein; and Palin, who wasn't in elected office yet. Her father-in-law Jim Palin and his wife Faye were also in the group.

Eventually, they started a police department, led by chief Irl Stambaugh. Kaylene Johnson, author of Sarah, a Palin biography published earlier this year, says one place where the power group met was a step-aerobics class that Stambaugh and Stein took along with Palin. That class signed the original petition for Palin's first political race, for city council in 1992, which she won.

Four years later, she took on her former workout buddy in a race that quickly became contentious. In Stein's view, Palin's main transgression was injecting big-time politics into a small-town local race. "It was always a nonpartisan job," he says. "But with her, the state GOP came in and started affecting the race." While Palin often describes that race as having been a fight against the old boys' club, Stein says she made sure the campaign hinged on issues like gun owners' rights and her opposition to abortion (Stein is pro-choice). "It got to the extent that — I don't remember who it was now — but some national antiabortion outfit sent little pink cards to voters in Wasilla endorsing her," he says.

Vicki Naegele was the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman at the time. "[Stein] figured he was just going to run your average, friendly small-town race," she recalls, "but it turned into something much different than that." Naegele held the same conservative Christian beliefs as Palin but didn't think they had any place in local politics.

"I just thought, That's ridiculous, she should concentrate on roads, not abortion," says Naegele.

St. George worked on Stein's campaign at the time, and while he says he has no reason to dispute Stein's recollection of events, he doesn't remember Palin's conduct being beyond the pale. "Our tax coffers were starting to grow," he says. "John was for expanding services, and Sarah wasn't. That's what the race was about."

One thing all sides agree on is that the valley was in flux. The old libertarian pioneer ethos was giving way to a rising Christian conservatism. By shrewdly invoking issues that mattered to the ascendant majority, Palin won the mayor's race. But while she may have been a new face, says Naegele, she was no maverick — not yet. "The state party gave her the mechanism to get into that office," says Naegele. "As soon as she was confident enough to brush them off, she did. But she wasn't an outsider to start with. She very much had to kowtow to them."

Governing was no less contentious than campaigning, at least to begin with. Palin ended up dismissing almost all the city department heads who had been loyal to Stein, including a few who had been instrumental in getting her into politics to begin with. Some saw it as a betrayal. Stambaugh, the police chief and a member of Palin's step-aerobics class, filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination, alleging that Palin terminated him in part at the behest of the National Rifle Association, because he had opposed a concealed-gun law that the NRA supported. He eventually lost the suit. The animosity spawned some talk of a recall attempt, but eventually Palin's opponents in the city council opted for a more conciliatory route.

At some point in those fractious first days, Palin told the department heads they needed her permission to talk to reporters. "She put a gag order on those people, something that you'd expect to find in the big city, not here," says Naegele. "She flew in there like a big-city gal, which she's not. It was a strange time, and [the [ITALIC "Frontiersman"]] came out very harshly against her."

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

[Big Balls]

I don't know about Wasilla but I think the state of Alaska may have some things to run.

[BFD]

I will add that I lived in the mat-su valley from 1981 to 2003 so my comments were from my own personal experiences. Being in construction I worked on several of the projects she had federally funded.