Candidates clash over newsletters

WASILLA — Candidates for District 7 in the state House of Representatives opened the campaign season with a flurry of barbs this week.

Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright, who is hoping to unseat Rep. Lynn Gattis to win the seat representing parts of Wasilla and areas to the east of the city, accused Gattis of political “puffery” and taking credit for things she didn’t do in a letter to the editors of the Frontiersman. Gattis countered that Rupright’s accusation was hypocritical.

Rupright’s accusation focuses on two newsletters in which Gattis “feigns or creates the impression that she obtained quite a number of things for Wasilla, which is without merit,” the mayor wrote.

He specifically enumerates $1 million for police dispatch upgrades, $900,000 for water utility improvements and $180,000 for a Lake Lucille weed harvester. Rupright claimed Gattis took undeserved credit for those funds allocations, saying instead that his cooperation with Gov. Sean Parnell — along with the work of other present city officials — provided the dough. In many cases, the appropriations pre-date the creation of Gattis’s House District, Rupright wrote.

“In 2011 the city, when the legislature was not in session, sought help from the governor to replace the wooden dam at Lake Lucille, which was threatening to breach,” Rupright wrote. “The governor, from his direct discretionary funds, granted the city $500,000 dollars. The city replaced the dam with a steel construction and brought it in way under budget.”

In addition, Rupright said, the newsletters were sent using taxpayer money, and may represent a taxpayer-funded campaign effort.

The listed amounts appear among a list of other capital budget items at the top of the End-of-Session 2014 newsletter sent out by Gattis’s office. At no point in the newsletter does Gattis explicitly take credit for their passage, though they are listed directly below letterhead bearing her name.

Gattis accused Rupright of political gamesmanship.

“That’s the one part I hate about elections,” she said. “I jab at you, you jab at me. I’m not going to play that jab game.”

The bottom line was that the legislature delivered the funds, Gattis said.

“Do your readers really care how the budget process actually works?” she said.

The newsletter is vetted by the legislative ethics office, and is designed to talk about things that constituents want to hear about, Gattis said.

“In my last newsletter, I think I finally got it,” she said. “You want interaction, you want people to read it. One of the ways to determine if they read it is if there’s some common interest that they read and respond to it. It’s kind of been less pictures of legislators handing out awards and more roads and documents.”

For example, the latest edition of her newsletter makes reference to a local political lightning rod, the proposed Wasilla ATV ban.

By asking constituents about it, Gattis is interfering in local affairs, Rupright said.

“That’s a city issue,” he said.

Gattis’s staff included the issue in part because her office has received thousands of calls and letters on the issue, she said.

“People are crazy over this and they see it as more about freedom being taken away than about ATVs specifically,” she said.

Gattis, an avid snowmachine user, lives outside Wasilla but sometimes commutes through the city using a snowmachine. She’s reasonably certain she hasn’t broken Wasilla ordinance, but can’t be sure. Gattis said she typically moves very slowly along roads.

“I ride probably more than 10 miles an hour on the lake,” she said. “In the city limits, I don’t have to be told to ride 10 miles an hour. That is not an unreasonable request. But do I have to ride 10 miles an hour if I’m on a lake?”

ATV-using nonresidents pay the same sales tax as residents, but can’t vote in the elections, creating a situation akin to “taxation without representation,” Gattis said.

She also pointed to the “Mayor’s Minute” weekly radio segment, which in the past has been used as a platform for criticizing the state legislature.

“You’re down here with your hand out to us and I hear you slamming the legislature on the radio,” she said. “Talk about hypocritical. You got a lotta balls, buddy.”

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com