Alaska Beacon

As election day results came in late Tuesday night and into early Wednesday morning, Alaska’s sitting U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski’s ever so slight lead over Trump-backed Republican challenger Kelly Tshibaka widened. By Wednesday afternoon, the trend continued.

“Alaskans made it clear they want a Senator who puts Alaska first, always. Seniority matters. Honesty matters and understanding the needs of Alaskans and being able to deliver on those needs matters,” Murkowski said in a statement Wednesday.

With 395 of 402 precincts reporting at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Murkowski led with 68,800 votes over Tshibaka’s 61,994. Democratic Party-endorsed candidate Patricia Chesbro held the third spot with just over 6% of the votes, or 9,620, and Republican Buzz Kelley rounded out the final four with 2.22%, or 3,450 votes.

What new primary contest means for Murkowski

This was the first time Alaska voters participated in an open and nonpartisan contest for the primary. Instead of primaries based on party or affiliation, every single candidate, regardless of party or affiliation, was on a pick-one ballot.

This new primary is part of the ranked choice system narrowly approved by voters in 2020. Instead of one candidate emerging from each primary contest, the top four vote getters get to advance to the general election in November. In the case of Alaska’s 2022 U.S. Senate primary race, that likely means three Republicans and one Democrat.

University of Alaska Southeast political science professor Glenn Wright said the 2020 ballot measure was designed in part to reduce the incentives for politicians to “move to the wings of their respective parties.” A moderate Republican like Murkowski, he said, didn’t have to worry about being bumped in the primary by a more conservative Republican, like Trump-backed Tshibaka.

“The basic intuition is that the old primary system and the general election system as well created a series of incentives that made it challenging for moderates to successfully run for office, especially moderate incumbents,” Wright said.

Murkowski was first appointed to U.S. Senate in 2002 by her father, Frank Murkowski, who was serving as Alaska’s governor at the time. She won a partisan primary in 2004, then beat out Democrat Tony Knowles in the general election. In 2010, Murkowski lost in the Republican primary to Joe Miller, only to defeat him in a successful write-in campaign during the general election. In 2016, she again won the Republican primary, and then beat Miller again, who ran as a Libertarian, in the general election.

Since then, with her vote to impeach former President Donald Trump and her support for abortion rights, Murkowski has arguably emerged as more moderate.

While Alaska is a red state, most Alaskan voters are in fact “quite moderate,” Wright said.

“You would think that given Alaska’s sort of center-right political culture, that we would have a lot of center-right politicians but, of course, over the last decade here, just like at the national level, incentives created by the party primary system tended to push politicians to the fringes,” Wright said.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that politicians can’t be conservative Republicans or liberal Democrats. But it does mean that if you’re a moderate, especially in a state like Alaska, which is relatively moderate, that you know, you don’t have to worry about the extremist primary challenge as much,” Wright said.

Looking ahead

A post on Tshibaka’s campaign website late Tuesday night said described Tshibaka as heading “to the general election with momentum and in prime position to defeat 21-year incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski.”

“I am grateful to the people of Alaska for the support they showed me today – we accomplished this together as a team, and we will prevail together in November as a team. I am also thankful for the strong and unwavering support President Trump has shown Alaska. I look forward to the next three months of conversations with Alaskans, and to a great victory on November 8th!” she said in the statement.

With two Republican candidates receiving most of the vote, Amy Lauren Lovecraft wonders what direction Republicans nationally will go to be successful in the midterm in November as well as in 2024. Lovecraft is a professor of political science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks

“Who will they fund? Will they fund the incumbent? Will they give airtime to both of them? That kind of stuff is definitely in the air,” Lovecraft said.

“From a total party perspective, right, they want to fund who they think is going to win. And they want to fund on a national level in a way that they think the wind is shifting. Are Trump’s picks winning most of the primaries or only a few. Right? So that’s going to be heavy fisticuffs within the Republican Party. They’re going to have to figure that out, and it’s going to be a tell for 2024.”

Third and fourth place

Likely third-place finisher Chesbro, the lone Democrat in the U.S. Senate race, said Wednesday she wished she had received more votes, but she’s not quitting the race. She hopes, by November, to convince people to vote their values, as opposed to voting for someone who doesn’t align with their values for fear of a more extreme candidate winning.

“I think there are a lot of people in Alaska who share my values,” Chesbro said. She listed Roe v. Wade, the environment, curbing gun violence and addressing firearm-related suicide as some of those values.

“I think people have become discouraged,” she said, adding that if voters assume that their values cannot be represented in DC, “then they won’t vote for me.”

“I don’t know exactly how to get people to allay their fears. And I think maybe that might be what we’re going to be trying to do between now and November.”

Fourth-place finisher Republican Buzz Kelley did not return requests for comment.

When the polls close at 8 p.m. Tuesday for Alaska’s primary election and the special U.S. House election, Alaska starts a wait of more than two weeks for the final result.

The state’s first-ever ranked choice election, which will decide who represents Alaska in the U.S. House until January, will be finalized Aug. 31, the last date that mailed-in ballots can arrive from Alaskans overseas and still be counted.

Though there’s weeks to go, some results will be released late Tuesday night, and political consultants say there’s some things to watch for.

Expect Peltola to take an early lead, but it may not last

On Tuesday night, said political adviser Jim Lottsfeldt, the “conventional wisdom” is that Democratic candidate Mary Peltola will be leading the special election, followed by either Republican Nick Begich III or Republican Sarah Palin.

That’s been indicated by the few available public polls of the race.

Though we won’t yet know the end result of the new ranked choice voting system, the Alaska Division of Elections has said it will publish the first choices of Alaska voters after polls close on election day.

Alaska has many more Republican and Republican-leaning voters than Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, but Republican votes will be split between two candidates, likely giving Peltola an early lead, but not one large enough to clinch victory outright by taking more than 50% of the first-choice votes.

Mailed ballots will arrive through the 31st and could change the ranking, but if Peltola is leading, the experts say to look at second place for hints at what happens next.

Who’s in second place?

Under the ranked choice system, if no one has more than 50% of the vote, the person with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated from contention first.

Anyone who voted for the eliminated candidate then has their votes go to their second choice.

But what happens if voters don’t have a second choice?

In that case, there are fewer votes needed to reach 50%.

Here’s a hypothetical. Imagine 100 people are voting, and the vote splits 40-32-28. The 28 votes are redistributed, and if they all go to the person in second, the split is 40-60 and the second-place person wins.

But if those 28 voters don’t rank a second choice, the final tally stays 40-32, and the person in first place wins.

“The big thing — but we’re not going to know (on Tuesday) is how many people actually elected to rank,” said Sarah Erkmann Ward, who has advised some Republican candidates this year.

The Alaska Republican Party has been running a campaign to prevent that circumstance, telling voters to “rank the red” and to leave Peltola off the ballot entirely.

That effort has been undercut by former President Donald Trump, who has urged voters to rank only Palin. The candidate recorded herself early voting, and her ballot had only one mark, that for her.

Some Nick Begich voters have also said that they will not rank Palin.

Tom Anderson of Optima Public Relations has advised Palin’s campaign and said he believes supporters of both Republicans will leave their second choices blank, and some may choose to write in Tara Sweeney, a Republican who missed the cutoff in the June special primary election.

If the Republican running in second doesn’t get a significant boost from the Republican running in third, Peltola could win.

The likelihood of that happening will depend in part on how wide the margin is on election night. If Peltola has more than 40% of the vote and both Republicans are below 30%, it creates a gap that is more difficult to overcome.

Tom Begich, the Alaska Senate’s Democratic minority leader and an uncle to Republican candidate Nick Begich III, noted that about half of voters in last year’s ranked choice election for New York City mayor didn’t fill out their entire ranked choice ballot.

Statistics published by FairVote, a national organization that supported the installation of ranked choice voting in Alaska, noted that 13% of voters in that election chose only one candidate.

FairVote also noted that in 522 ranked choice races since 2004, the candidate with the most first-choice votes has won 96% of the time.

How will primary candidates perform?

The special U.S. House election is only one side of the ballot. On the other side are the primary races for U.S. Senate, governor, state House and Senate, and the full two-year U.S. House term.

Up to four candidates will advance from each primary to the Nov. 8 general election.

In the race for U.S. Senate, Republican challenger Kelly Tshibaka and incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski have raised large amounts of money and campaigned aggressively. Democratic candidate Pat Chesbro has the label of a major party.

All three are expected to advance in the primary, and it’s possible that Tshibaka finishes ahead of Murkowski in the primary.

Lottsfeldt, who operates an organization backing Murkowski, downplayed that possibility, saying it would be akin to Murkowski losing the 2010 Republican primary. (She went on to win the general election with a write-in campaign.)

It’s not known who the fourth candidate will be, and there’s a wide range of possibilities, including a Libertarian and a series of independents.

In the governor’s race, incumbent Republican Mike Dunleavy, Democratic candidate Les Gara and independent Bill Walker are all expected to finish among the top four, and there’s a competition between two Republicans — Charlie Pierce of the Kenai Peninsula, and Christopher Kurka of Wasilla — to fill the fourth spot.

What do the legislative results look like?

In all but one of the state legislative races on the ballot, there are four or fewer candidates for office. That means someone is eliminated in only one race — the one for House District 35 in Fairbanks.

That race features two Republicans, two Democrats and a member of the Alaska Constitution Party.

“There is almost a sigh of relief from all of our clients that there’s not a primary battle,” said Anderson, who is advising many Republican and Republican-leaning candidates.

Joelle Hall, president of the Alaska AFL-CIO, said there are some places where primary results may matter. In districts dominated by one party — she offered downtown Anchorage’s firmly Democratic House District 17 as an example — the electorate may not change between August and November.

A victory by Democratic candidate Harriet Drummond or Democratic candidate Zack Fields in that district would be a stronger signal of victory in November, she said.

For other legislative seats, the noncompetitive primaries are effectively an August opinion poll. A close margin indicates — but doesn’t guarantee — a close race in November.

Anderson, who is advising many Republican and Republican-leaning candidates, said he expects lots of close results.

“What we are seeing unfold in a lot of state legislative races is a very competitive environment, because you have incumbents at the municipal, borough and state level running against other incumbents,” he said.

He pinpointed the state Senate race in Fairbanks between Republican Jim Matherly and Democratic incumbent Scott Kawasaki, and the state Senate race in Anchorage between Republican incumbent Mia Costello and Democratic challenger Matt Claman, a sitting member of the state House.

If a legislative candidate walks away from the primary with 70% of the primary voters, Erkmann Ward said, “that’s a really good indication that they’re well positioned to win in the general. If it is a nail-biter, then we won’t have much more insight other than it’s going to be a very close race.”

What does turnout look like?

All of this comes with a big caveat, experts say. Turnout in primary elections is typically lower than it is in November, and primary voters are typically more partisan.

The fewer people who vote on or before Tuesday, the less representative August’s results will be of November’s outcomes.

“If the turnout numbers are 30% or lower, that implies fairly low interest in the election, which doesn’t necessarily translate into November numbers,” Begich said. “But if the numbers are higher, that’ll be of more interest.”

Lottsfeldt said he is skeptical of drawing conclusions until after the rankings are released on the 31st.

“I think tomorrow’s a big nothingburger,” he said on Monday.

Erkmann Ward noted that this year’s primary elections are open to every voter, unlike past elections that limited participation by party. That’s a point in favor of August working as a preview of November, at least for the U.S. House contest.

“So when we see those percentages come in tomorrow, it should be a pretty good indication of — barring anything dramatic — how this race is going to look going into November,” Erkmann Ward said.

“For things like U.S. Senate, governor, the legislative races, this will be basically a fascinating poll for us to see where everybody’s landing on these candidates,” she said.

Tuesday, Aug. 16, is an election day in Alaska. This is an in-person election, so voters who haven’t voted early or absentee will need to go to a polling place on Tuesday to cast their votes.

Voters will be weighing in on two elections: a pick-one regular primary election for U.S. Senator, U.S. Representative, governor/lieutenant governor, state senator and state representative; and a ranked choice special general election to decide who will fill the remainder of Congressman Don Young’s term. Both elections are on the same ballot.

How to vote

Polling places are open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 16.

“People should plan their time accordingly,” said Alaska Division of Elections Director Gail Fenumiai. “If you are in line at the polling place by 8 p.m. and haven’t made it to the front yet to get your ballot, as long as you’re in line by 8 o’clock, you’ll be able to vote.”

If you don’t know your polling place, there are a few ways to figure out where you should vote. You can enter your address into the Alaska Division of Elections Precincts map, enter your name and city in Division of Elections Voter Information website, or call any Division of Elections regional office. All methods will give your polling place and precinct number. The precincts map will also list your House District number and Senate District letter.

As an alternative, any voter can also vote at a Division of Elections regional office in Juneau, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Nome or Wasilla; the 8th floor of the State Office Building in Juneau; the Anchorage airport; or Service Area 10 Camp in Prudhoe Bay from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday. Each location will have ballots for all 40 different House districts. Certain House districts also have other alternative polling places.

Voters should bring a government-issued ID, such as a voter ID, driver’s license, state ID, tribal ID, military ID, passport, or hunting or fishing license. You can present a current utility bill or paycheck, government check or bank statement or other government-issued document that shows your name and current address.

“If somebody doesn’t have identification and is not personally known by one of the workers, they’re going to have to vote a questioned ballot. And that’s a requirement of state law,” Fenumiai said.

Two different elections, two different ways to vote

Voters on Tuesday are weighing in on two elections. You can see a sample ballot based on House district to familiarize yourself before you vote.

For the regular primary election, which is on one side of the ballot, voters will see lists of candidates for multiple races: U.S. senator, U.S. representative, governor/lieutenant governor, state senator and state representative. Pick only one candidate for each race. Up to four top vote-getters in the primary races will advance to the November general election. Only one state Senate district, which includes the North Slope and Northwest Arctic boroughs, will not be voting on a state senator during this election.

On the other side of the ballot, you’ll see a list of the top three candidates for the 2022 special general election for Alaska’s U.S. representative and a space for a write-in candidate. This is the ranked choice voting election to decide who will fill the remainder of Congressman Don Young’s term, which goes until Jan. 3, 2023.

“You will rank your candidates in order of preference. You can rank one, you can rank them all; it is entirely up to the voter individually to decide how they want to do that,” Fenumiai said.

Language assistance or special needs

The Division of Elections will have voting tablets at the election day polling locations, said Fenumiai.

“People that have an accessibility issue, such as being visually impaired perhaps or needing language assistance, we have tablets,” she said. “They have audio instructions and you could vote your ballot by using the audio instructions on there.”

Precincts will also have ballot magnifiers to take into the booth to read the ballot if a voter doesn’t want to use a tablet.

According to the Division of Elections website, language assistance is available for Alaska Native languages and Tagalog for voters who have limited English proficiency.

“Any voter can also have any person of their choosing to assist them in the voting process. They can take them into the booth. The person could read the ballot for them,” Fenumiai said.

That person cannot be a candidate in the election, your employer, agent of your employer or agent of your union. Assistance may be provided during each step of the voting process, including assistance inside the voting booth with reading and/or marking the ballot, according to the elections website.

“There also is a process called special needs voting where a voter can request someone to go get a ballot for them and bring it to them and have them voted. The voter would vote it, fill out the envelope and the personal representative would then take it back to a voting location on behalf of the voter,” Fenumiai said.

How to decide who to vote for

On its candidates website, the Division of Elections offers information for candidates in the 2022 primary election, and information on the top three candidates and write-in candidates for the 2022 special general election. You can find candidates’ websites and official candidate statements if they were submitted.

You can also learn about the candidates through questionnaires the Alaska Beacon sent to candidates. Read them here:

• Q&A with Alaska’s 2022 U.S. Senate candidates
• Q&A with Alaska’s 2022 U.S. House candidates
• Q&A with Alaska’s 2022 governor candidates
• Q&A with Alaska’s state Senate candidates
• Q&A with Alaska’s state House candidates 

Find other Alaska Beacon election coverage on its Election 2022 webpage.

Alaska is closing out what is likely to be the state’s seventh-biggest wildfire season since 1950, wrapping up a summer notable for record-breaking fires in the tundra of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the southwestern part of the state.

In all, more than 3 million acres have been burned by wildfires this year, according to the federal-state Alaska Interagency Coordination Center. The 2022 total of 3.08 million acres, as of Friday, is slightly less than Alaska’s sixth-biggest season, when 3.189 million acres burned in 1990, according to University of Alaska Fairbanks data.

The high 2022 total was driven in large part by the fierce fires in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, said Rick Thoman, a scientist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at UAF.

Those include the two largest Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta tundra fires on record, the 166,760-acre East Fork fire, which started on May 31, and the 89,909-acre Apoon Pass fire nearby, which started about a week later.

Those fires and others like it are products of new conditions created by climate change, Thoman said.

“Decades of warmer springs and summers means there is so much more vegetation on the tundra now. From the fires’ perspective, it means there’s much more fuel,” he said. “There’s just more vegetation to burn.”

Until 2015, tundra fires in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta were small and infrequent. That changed suddenly seven years ago.

“Obviously, there’s been a sea change in southwestern Alaska, starting in 2015,” Thoman said.

Fires on the tundra and in the boreal forest can have particular impacts on climate change because they can burn the layer of vegetative duff within the ground, a vegetative layer that often insulates permafrost below.

A newly published study by scientists with the Woodwell Climate Research Center and other institutions calculated the carbon released by the 2015 Yukon-Kuskokwim tundra fires – nearly 1 million metric tons – and urges more attention to the way tundra fires are adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The study calculated the climate-warming effects of those fires as continuing for 80 years into the future. “Our results stress the importance of considering tundra wildfires in assessing climate feedbacks and the need for future research that more explicitly discerns the warming effect of fires across the tundra biome,” the study concludes.

This year’s Yukon-Kuskokwim fires posed their own logistical challenges, said Beth Ipsen, a public affairs specialist with the Alaska Fire Service.

“All of these fires were not accessible by road. You either had to fly in or boat in,” Ipsen said. But even fires in road-accessible areas require some similar off-road travel, like the boat travel that was required for firefighters assigned to some Interior fires, she said. “That’s the way it is in Alaska.”

As of Friday, there were still two fires being actively managed, and conditions in the northeastern Interior remained warm and dry, she said. Otherwise, most fire activity has quieted, according to managers’ reports.

Preliminary estimates for this year’s fire-management costs will not be available until later in the fall, Ipsen said.

Geographically, wildfires this year ranged from nearly Alaska’s southernmost point – Adak Island in the Aleutians– to the Beaufort Sea coastline in the Arctic, according to the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center.

The Adak fire, which was reported at 919 acres, was human-caused, though the Alaska Fire Service does not have many details about it, Ipsen said. The fire was reported to have started on May 8 and determined to be out on Aug. 3. It was handled by the military, Ipsen said.

The Beaufort Sea coastline fire was a small blaze set off accidentally on June 30 by workers shooting explosives to shoo a caribou away from a runway that serves the Point Thomson natural gas field on the North Slope, according to fire managers’ reports. That fire was only about a tenth of an acre and was quickly extinguished.

The Alaska Legislature may not set multi-year budgets for public education and other state agencies unless it provides up-front funding, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled Friday. The decision settles a three-year-old dispute between the Legislature and Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

It also represents a limit on legislative power and signals a victory for Dunleavy, who had sought to cut funding for K-12 schools and opposed a legislative attempt in 2018 to set the state’s schools budget for two years.

Dunleavy later recanted the cut, but his administration argued the principle of the matter in front of the Supreme Court, leading to Friday’s ruling.

“We conclude that a requirement that funds be appropriated annually is implied in the Alaska Constitution’s text and was intended by the framers,” wrote Justice Peter Maassen on behalf of the court, which ruled unanimously.

The ruling reinforces a 2017 decision that upheld the ability of a governor and legislature to set the amount of the annual Permanent Fund dividend annually, regardless of a formula in state law.

“We see no textual justification for a different rule in the education contest,” Maasen said, referencing the 2017 ruling.

“Allowing this form of forward funding for education for a year in advance would open the door for forward funding in other contexts and more years in advance, weakening the annual budgeting process intended by the constitution’s framers,” he said.

“The Alaska Supreme Court is upholding the Alaska Constitution with this opinion,” said Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor in a prepared statement after the ruling. “The ruling says the legislature is always okay to spend money they have in this year or future years. What’s not okay is to spend money they don’t yet have, because that takes away the funding prerogative from future legislatures.”

The legal dispute resolved Friday began with actions taken in 2018, when state lawmakers passed a bill setting the amount of K-12 school funding for two years — fiscal years 2019 and 2020.

Then-Gov. Bill Walker signed the bill into law but was defeated in the 2018 governor election by Dunleavy.

The new governor proposed cutting spending for K-12 schools in fiscal year 2020 as part of a plan to pay for a larger Permanent Fund dividend. Lawmakers rejected the idea and didn’t include K-12 school funding in that year’s budget, saying the amount had been set the prior year.

Dunleavy’s attorney general at the time, Kevin Clarkson, opined that the decision was unconstitutional and left schools wholly unfunded as a result.

With the executive branch prepared to halt all school funding, the Legislature filed suit to compel payments according to the 2018 law.

As the legal proceedings commenced, the Legislature and governor negotiated an agreement that allowed continued funding, and in November 2019, Superior Court Judge Daniel Schally ruled in favor of the Legislature and an education group that had joined the lawsuit on the Legislature’s side.

The executive branch appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in March 2021.

Maassen noted that the constitution does not explicitly state that forward funding is prohibited, but the intent of the constitution’s framers is clear from context, he said.

“Implicit in the budgetary clauses (of the Alaska Constitution) is a requirement that the budget be determined annually; when examined together, the budgetary clauses, the sources from which they were drawn, the underlying policies they were designed to promote, and our case law all support this conclusion,” Maassen wrote.

Crucially for the current budget, the court’s ruling does not preclude all forward funding. If the state has enough money on hand to pay for two years’ worth of services, it may set the budget for two years.

Lawmakers did just that this spring, paying K-12 funding for fiscal year 2023 and setting aside $1.2 billion in funding for K-12 schools in fiscal year 2024, which will begin after this year’s election for governor. Dunleavy signed that budget bill.

“We acknowledge the importance of providing school districts with advance notice of their annual budget, and we agree that the Constitution may allow for some degree of creativity to ensure this is accomplished,” the ruling says.

A committee of the Alaska Legislature voted unanimously on Wednesday to spend another $50,000 on its investigation into the firing of Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. director Angela Rodell, bringing the investigation’s total budget to $150,000.

Sen. Natasha von Imhof, R-Anchorage, the chair of the House-Senate Legislative Budget and Audit Committee, said the money is needed to get the investigation “to the finish line,” and she expects a full report in October.

“I’ve asked that the report be finished by mid-October and presented to this committee. We have not set a date, but it’s going to be somewhere in the middle of October,” she said.

Members of the committee hired a special investigator in January to determine whether political factors played a role in the December firing of Rodell by the corporation’s board of trustees.

The corporation manages Alaska’s $78 billion Permanent Fund, and a transfer from the Permanent Fund to the state treasury accounts for at least half of the general-purpose revenue used for services and Permanent Fund dividends, making management of the corporation a critical operation to the state.

Rodell’s firing came after the corporation’s most successful year on record, and Rodell said at the time that she believed the firing was motivated by Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposal to spend more from the Permanent Fund than allowed by a 2018 law.

Dunleavy dropped that proposal after oil prices rose, and a subsequent public records request revealed years of conflicts between Rodell and the board of trustees. Some conflicts predated Dunleavy’s election as governor.

The firing alarmed state legislators, who generally held a positive view of Rodell, and in an extraordinary step, the budget and audit committee said it was prepared to issue subpoenas to compel testimony from the board of trustees.

After initially indicating that they might fight the subpoenas in court, board members agreed to voluntarily answer questions from a special investigator.

That investigator, Howard Trickey, has spent much of the year conducting interviews with trustees and other witnesses familiar with the events that led to Rodell’s removal.

Trickey is employed by the law firm of Schwabe, Williamson and Wyatt, and in an Aug. 9 memo, the firm said it had exhausted the $100,000 previously allocated by the budget and audit committee.

The additional $50,000 approved Wednesday includes a 15% reserve and is expected to be enough to finish the investigation.