Sarah Palin Took a Pay Cut that Gave Her A Higher Salary as Mayor
Sarah Palin frequently cites her pay cut as mayor to support her reformer image.
“As mayor I took a voluntary pay cut, which didn’t thrill my husband; and then as governor I cut the personal chef position from the budget, and that didn’t thrill my hungry kids.”
While Sarah Palin did appear to get a pay cut ordinance passed upon entering the office of mayor, several years later her salary had actually gone up to the point where it ended up four thousanddollars higher than it was just before she took office, local press reports at the time show.
Two reports in the local Alaska press in 1999, three years after she became Mayor, say explicitly that her salary at that time was $68,000, higher than the $64,000 it was just before she took over as mayor. The pay hikes were apparently due to mandated salary increases that the City Council refused to overrule, though the answer to that increase is not obvious.
The McCain camp was unable to explain why her salary had gone up and how that squared with her claim of taking a cut as mayor.
Asked for proof of her claim that she took a pay cut, the McCain- Palin campaign provided us with the minutes from a Wasilla City Council meeting held on November 13, 1996, which appear to show that Sarah Palin introduced and passed some sort of measure to reduce her own mayoral salary by 10 percent.
Three years later, on March 12, 1999, an article ran in the Wassilla local paper The Frontiersman which explicitly reported that Sarah Palin’s salary was higher at that time than it was when she took office as mayor. The article describes a City Council vote where the Council, in the words of the paper, “decided to leave the mayor’s salary at $68,000.” It was $64,000 when Palin took over, according to the paper.
This leaves a baffling question that needs to be answered.
Source: http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/did_palin_really_take_a_pay_cu.php
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[...] profit. She didn’t kill the Bridge to Nowhere. She didn’t go to Iraq. She didn’t take a paycut as mayor. She does judge homosexuality. She doesn’t know how much oil production Alaska [...]