Left In Lowell

More information is coming out on Governor Sarah Palin hourly. Aptly, amid our local discussion of managerial incompetence, I read a very interesting look at how she left her town in the lurch when she left its mayor’s office:

Sarah Palin left the finances of her town Wasilla in tatters when she moved on in 2002 (h/t xgz). She wanted a legacy as mayor, it seems, and pushed hard for the town to build a hyper-expensive sports complex. But Palin screwed the process up badly. Instead of buying the land for the complex when it was offered, her administration allowed a developer named Gary Lundgren to snap it up. Then Wasilla tried to seize the land from Lundgren through eminent domain. In the end, what with court costs Wasilla paid at least $ 1.7 million for land it could have bought for less than one tenth that sum - if the purchase had been handled properly. For this incompetence, Wasilla is still paying a steep price: higher taxes and cutbacks in services. In other words Palin is about as efficient as Michael Brown, onetime head of FEMA.

Diarist loyalson, a resident of Wasilla, has more to say about the damage Palin did to his town while she was mayor.

There’s so many parallels to a previous local administration here, it’s astounding. And would anyone in their right mind think our previous CM would be qualified to be President should something happen to a ticketmate?

Couple that with her apparent lack of knowledge about the Iraq war (she knows less than the average blogger, it would appear from her quotes on the matter) or even what the Office of the V.P. even does, and her mention of being Alaska-centric today in her speech (that’ll go over well with the other 49 states) and Troopergate, which while not as bad an ethics investigation as Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is undergoing, is still fresh and immediate.

I dunno, this is looking pretty flimsy. It doesn’t seem like this was very well thought out by the McCain campaign. Then again, it’s hard to polish your reputation when your whole party’s in the ditch, and besides, who else was there? Romney? The base would hate voting for Mormon. Lieberman? Similar problem with the base, on abortion and other things. Guilani? Again, same. Huckabee? Rove wouldn’t hear of it I’m sure.

There were, to my mind, many more qualified candidates (including many qualified yet acceptably conservative women) they could have picked. How weird they arrived on someone McCain doesn’t appear to know very well at all.

So say the reports. Sarah Palin is the 2006-elected new Governor of Alaska.

Does McCain think picking an extremely conservative, anti-choice, inexperienced, potentially ethically challenged (a pending investigation, and given Alaska’s current ethics troubles all ’round…) woman would woe disgruntled Clinton supporters?

I will give him one thing, though, it is a historic pick for the Republican party, to have a woman on the ticket. At least that’s something. More barriers are breaking down.

However, if McCain wanted to hit Obama hard on inexperience, he just sort of completely undermined it. Since Palin would be a heartbeat from the presidency should McCain (heaven forfend) get elected, he can hardly criticize Obama when he’s the one putting someone with even less “experience” on his ticket.

It doesn’t help at all that she’s married to a oil baron.

Finally, the day has arrived. Can we take this off our plate now? Can the Lowell Sun stop teething on this silly thing? Good lord.

You can download the now-public Stoklosa School report, done for the City by its lawyer in the case, here. Note that once you arrive one the page you can hit the link to download the PDF, but it’s 16MB. I’m sure City Manager Lynch is relieved to get this off his desk.

Kudos to the sane handling of this by Lynch, who came in long after this mismanaged mess was created, and had to make lemonade with those lemons. Jeers to the Lowell Sun who not only attained illegally leaked information from City Councilors and used it as a battering ram for their save-the-former-CM’s-reputation agenda, but who also distracted us with non-issues while the very real issues were largely unattended to. We now have a settlement, which was probably the best we were going to get, without a protracted and expensive court battle. Let’s put this baby to rest, now.