Sarah Palin's $28 Million Veto of Stimulus Funds Overturned by Alaskan Legislature

Two weeks after Sarah Palin left office, newly minted Alaskan Gov. Sean Parnell has a message for the federal government: We'll take that $28 million now, thank you.

On Monday, the state legislature voted to overturn Palin's rejection of $28 million in federal stimulus dollars for energy spending. The vote was 45-14, just meeting the three-fourths majority the Alaskan legislature requires for a veto override.

While governor, Palin initially turned down $288 million of the $930 million available to Alaska as part of the federal stimulus package. She later moved to accept those funds, except for the $28 million for energy-efficiency spending that the Alaskan legislature recently requested. Palin complained at the time that the money came with strings attached.

She echoed that rhetoric on Sunday as the legislature looked likely to overturn her veto, saying on her Facebook page, "As Governor, I did my utmost to warn our legislators that accepting stimulus funds will further tie Alaska to the federal government and chip away at Alaska's right to chart its own course." She warned that Alaska would now need to adopt federal building codes and added that the state has "hundreds of millions of dollars already budgeted for conservation, weatherization and renewable energy development."

One would assume that Alaska has already been pretty solidly tied to the federal government since becoming a state in 1959. But responding to Palin's allegation about building codes, CNN reports that state Finance Committee co-chair Mike Hawker told the legislature that Alaska would qualify for the money even without adopting new statewide codes.