Tight race for School Board Seat B

Vote counting in the contests for the other three school board seats on the ballot Tuesday was handing the leaders a more comfortable edge, though elections officials said thousands more early and absentee ballots remained to be counted and wouldn't be on the books for more than a week.

With all 119 precincts counted, Mackie was running ahead of Costello by less than 1 percentage point of the votes cast. More than 39,000 ballots had been counted in their race for Seat B on the seven-member board. Eleven other candidates who were after the same post were trailing far behind, with none of them breaking double digits in percentage of the vote.

In the race for Seat E, Kathleen Plunkett, an accountant and longtime community volunteer, held a solid lead. Her closest challenger, James LaBelle, was more than 10 percentage points behind. Four other candidates in that race were trailing the two leaders.

Seat E incumbent Macon Roberts chose not to seek re-election. In the third race, incumbent Jeff Friedman won re-election to Seat F by a margin of better than 2-1 over his lone challenger, Dawn Bundick.

And in the fourth seat on the ballot, incumbent Crystal Kennedy was running unopposed for Seat G.

The seven-member school board shapes policy in Anchorage's 50,000-student school district and administers a budget of $750 million.

Mackie, a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother, has held the seat she's trying to keep since mid-February, when board members chose her over two dozen other applicants to fill the spot left vacant by Chris Tuck when he joined the state Legislature in January.

Mackie outspent all candidates for the school board with some $35,000 she had accumulated. Costello spent $18,000 in her bid.

The winner in the contest for Seat B will serve only one year, the time remaining on Tuck's term. Winners in the other races will serve three-year terms.

Costello, who sweated out the vote counting Tuesday night at Election Central downtown at the Dena'ina Convention Center with her husband and two little children, said she ran a different kind of campaign than Mackie. She characterized her run as grass roots.

She spoke on the radio, visited schools, even had lunch with a family she had never met before to talk about their dyslexic child and the difficulties they had with the school district. "Even this morning I was on the phone for half an hour with a voter," she said.

Reached Tuesday night when counting was showing her building a good lead, Plunkett hadn't yet heard the results. "Wow," she said. "I felt good this time but I couldn't put my finger on it."

Plunkett, who was making her second bid for a school board seat, said during her campaign that she wants standardized school designs to cut back on the costs associated with building new schools. She has been active in the Russian Jack Community Council, a member of Weed and Seed East Anchorage, and chair of the Anchorage Parks and Recreation Commission.

Plunkett said she believed her community involvement won over voters. She also thinks voters appreciated her accounting skills. "Those are pretty essential in these times," she said.

Friedman watched returns at Election Central for much of Tuesday night. As vote counting showed him well on the way to re-election, he said he was feeling pretty good about the margin but tipped his hat to opponent Bundick. She ran a respectable race considering she got in late and didn't have much funding, he said.

Bundick spent less than $1,000 compared to Friedman's $14,000, according to spending reports.

Election officials said that about 3,000 early and absentee ballots would remain to be counted after Tuesday night. They were not expected to be tallied until April 17.

Find Megan Holland online at adn.com/contact/mholland or call 257-4343.