3 bids so far for Palin’s former city vehicle

WASILLA — Someone, it seems, wants to party like its 1999 — or at least in the 1999 Ford Expedition Sarah Palin drove when she was Wasilla mayor.

Since putting Palin’s former city vehicle up for sale on the online auction website eBay.com, three bids have come in for the gold sport utility vehicle. The highest bid Monday afternoon with a little more than two days left until the auction closes was $10,200, nearly five times its estimated $2,100 Kelley Blue Book value.

“Yay!” exclaimed Wasilla mayor Verne Rupright about the bids. “What’s going to be good on that is instead of dipping into the general fund for some vehicle maintenance, this is going to be found money. If it’s up over 10 grand, so much the better.”

The 5.4-liter Expedition XLT model has 74,188 miles on it, was purchased new in 1999 and was Palin’s official vehicle until she left office in 2002. Palin was thrust into the national spotlight in August 2008, when she was chosen to be Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s running mate. At the time, she was Alaska governor.

Cashing in on the Palin name and political interest that she continues to generate was the idea behind selling the vehicle on eBay rather than through a typical city surplus auction, Rupright said.

“While she’s out there doing her thing, people are going to want to collect that stuff,” he said, adding that two of the three bids are from people in Great Britain.

That the city could sell the vehicle for many times its worth because of its association with Wasilla’s famous former mayor has the current mayor speculating — albeit with tongue in cheek — about what other possible collectibles the city could sell to make some extra cash.

“Hey, the very chair I’m sitting in? It was Palin’s,” he said. “Hmm, if I can sell this one for $1,000 and buy another one for $100. … We have plenty of stuff around here from her era. If I had kept the wallpaper she originally had in the office, heck, I could’ve cut it into scraps and sold them.”

The city placed the ad on eBay.com on Nov. 18 and saw no action for the first few days, but Rupright said he was never worried it wouldn’t sell. The bidding will close at 12 a.m., Nov. 28.

In addition to the eBay bids, Rupright said he’s had a few other contacts about the sale.

“We had somebody who emailed and said, ‘I’d give you that much and I’d bulldoze it,’” the mayor said.

Contact Greg Johnson at 352-2269 or greg.johnson@frontiersman.com.