A Seattle-based seafood company accused of stealing groundfish from the Bering Sea has agreed to pay up.

American Seafoods will pay $1.75 million to settle violations on three of its catcher-processors. The American Dynasty, the Ocean Rover, and the Northern Eagle were all accused of tampering with their scales for weighing fish at sea over a five-year period.

Unalaska's Accu-Vote machine tallies absentee ballots Friday morning. (Annie Ropeik/KUCB)

Yudelka Leclere has officially won a seat on Unalaska’s city council, with 52 percent of the vote.

As KUCB’s Annie Ropeik reports, she’s unseated a veteran incumbent -- and left him with some unfinished business.

When the city’s canvass committee counted the final votes from the election Friday morning, not too many people came out to watch. There was just Zoya Johnson, who ran unopposed to keep her city council seat -- and Leclere, who was waiting for confirmation that she’d beaten a four-term incumbent councilor.

There’s no winner yet in Unalaska’s contested city council race.

Preliminary results have Yudelka Leclere with 212 votes, and incumbent Dennis Robinson with 190.

Leclere was at the polls Tuesday night to hear election workers read off those numbers. But she said she didn’t want to comment on the race until the votes are recounted on Friday.

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Robinson said the preliminary results came as a surprise.

At a special meeting Tuesday, Unalaska’s school board approved a policy they hope they never have to use -- one that tells teachers what to do if a student becomes violent or out of control.

A state bill passed this year requires schools to train staff on using what’s known as “restraint and seclusion.” School boards have to put a policy in place by Oct. 14.

Unalaska City School District Superintendent John Conwell says he doesn't recall the issue "ever coming up" in his 18 years in Unalaska. 

Update, 5 p.m. Tuesday:  Turnout started strong in Unalaska’s local election today, but it’s tailed off this afternoon amid rough weather.

Just over 260 people had voted by 5 p.m. There was a steady stream of residents coming in and out of the polls after getting off work. City clerk Cat Hazen hopes that’ll mean more voters before polls close at 8 p.m.

Courtesy: City of Unalaska

The Unalaska Lake watershed is prime spawning ground for salmon in the heart of the city’s historic downtown. It’s also some of the least healthy habitat in the Aleutian Islands.

Now, the city has a $1 million grant to clean it up -- but as KUCB's Annie Ropeik reports, residents are worried they’ll spend it on the wrong issues.

Subsistence users had a chance to weigh in on the watershed’s problems at a meeting with the city and its engineering consultants last week. 

Lauren Rosenthal/KUCB

With less than a month until election day, the race to become Alaska's next governor is heating up.

Independent candidate Bill Walker and his Democrat running mate are canvassing the state for votes -- all the way out to the Aleutians. 

It might be a big port community, but it’s not unusual for political campaigns to skip Unalaska. The town is hard to get to and there aren’t a lot of voters on the other side.

With the first ebola case in the U.S. confirmed in Dallas, Texas last week, public health officials in Alaska are on alert.

But even in Unalaska, with its huge transient workforce from all around the world, they say chances of an outbreak are low.

That’s because the city’s seasonal workers typically don’t have strong ties to West Africa -- which is where ebola cases are centered right now.

In the Bering Sea, it’s normal for pollock fishing to continue all the way up to Halloween. That’s what Krista Milani has seen in her time tracking the harvest for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Unalaska.

"I looked back several years, and that tends to be how it usually goes," Milani says.

But this season, the trawl fleet wrapped up a full month early thanks to an abundance of mature pollock.