$68,000 salary for the Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska?

Alaska must be one of the most corrupt states in the nation if they are paying the mayors of tiny bergs like Wasilla, pop. about 8,000, that kind of money.

Heck, I was a town Council Member in a town in Bergen County, NJ of about 18,000. My salary was $2,000 and the Mayor's was $2,500. In many towns in my area that are even larger the mayor and council serve without any salaries at all. These are part time positions, with meetings one night every two weeks and the towns (like Wasilla) have full time managers that handle all the day to day work that a mayor would have to do if he/she were full time and didn't have a manager/administrator. Only large cities have full time mayors like Jersey City, Newark, Trenton and maybe a handful of other cities.

Why in the world would a town of 8,000 people need a full time mayor? I wonder if this is typical in the rest of Alaska and around the country.

to keep the lobbyists on task silly!

68,000 dollars is quite excessive for a Mayor.

I am in the wrong line of work! Of course depending upon where you live, that might not be as much as it sounds like here in my little podunk berg...

he says it's a lot like WI only without the culture;)

We made good money, too, and that was way back in the early '80s.

Our cost of living is very high, and thus salaries are high to match. I was making over $50,000 a year as a legal secretary in 2000 when I semi-retired. I'm sure it would be considerably more now if I was still in the work force.

Sorry, but I can't understand why a town as small as Wasilla has a full time mayor. Hell, I served on the council of a town at least twice that size and we didn't need one, not by a long shot.

Eagle River

And I wasn't actually trying to make excuses for Sarah's salary, just saying that things do cost more here, and people's salaries are higher generally. As a for instance, our gasoline is still at $4.20 a gallon or so, and anything that has to be brought up from Outside has astronomical shipping costs.

I'm in the Bay Area, more expensive than Alaska overall and in a city almost 10 times the size of Wasilla, the mayor here is paid a fraction of what Wasilla is paying.

we certainly don't in our little towns around here...

only the independently wealthy can afford to be mayor and they may not have the best interests of working people in mind.

It is not a big deal time wise to be a small town mayor when you have a full time administrator to handle everything. There is no way in hell that a town with 8,000 people should need a full time mayor

If the time demands exclude some people from running, volunteerism may not always be the best thing. That is the situation we have had here in Eugene, OR, a town split between liberals and conservatives. The mayor gets squat in salary, but does break tie votes on budget items so we have a string of right wingers whose campaigns have been heavily funded by pro-development interests and the result has been tax breaks for big companies that have later abandoned the community, sprawl, asphalt over wetlands, etc.

That's ridicules. How do you justify 68k for being the mayor of a town that size? What is your source on this? Because if this is true, it could be huge.

There is no way that size of a salary is justified here.

and left the place in huge debt.

You just can't find anyone that can do that.

I think $68K per year is probably not bad considering that she was doing some professional screwing.

she was so bad at her job that they HAD to hire a city manager...who she fired at the end of her term to prevent a smooth transition to the next mayor's administration.

As for the ice rink, my feeling is she bought her son Track a practice rink so he could try to make it on the UAA hockey team......he couldn't keep a C average to stay on the team.

And Levi, too, I suppose.

The population is over 19,000 and the salary is $5,000 a year. He had to keep his full-time job, which he works at night, when he was elected. I'm sure he would love to have the type of salary Palin was pulling in.

The Mayor gets about $2,500 and the rest of the council gets $2,000. We have a Township Manager that gets about $150,000. Palin hired an Administrator. How much does the town pay him? In a town that size that has an administrator or manager, the mayor should not be payed such a salary. It has nothing to do with the cost of living in Alaska.

I'm in New Jersey, the cost of living is outrageous here.