Boston Globe: 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....
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."...
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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?"...
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Those involved in planning issues...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....
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/10/12/anti_zoning_key_to_palins_early_record/?page=full
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