Dumped last year after questioning a land deal involving Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, former Seward City Manager Clark Corbridge swept to victory on Tuesday as the town's new mayor.

Corbridge unseated Mayor Vanta Shafer, who presided over the City Council meeting last November in which Corbridge was fired.

The FBI and other federal agencies are now investigating the deal involving the Alaska Sealife Center, a research facility and visitor center built with federal and state money on the Seward waterfront. Seward is gateway to the popular Kenai Fjords National Park.

Under a deal worked out by Stevens, Congress transferred money from the city of Seward to the SeaLife Center, which used some of the money to buy property from Trevor McCabe, a former aide to Stevens.

In his role as city manager, Corbridge wrote a letter to the Sealife Center, arguing that such purchases needed to be run through the city to avoid "possible allegations of impropriety."

The Anchorage Daily News has revealed that the land deal is under examination by the Inspector General of the U.S. Interior Department, and is part of a broad FBI investigation into relations between Stevens, McCabe, and Ben Stevens, the senator's son and a former McCabe business partner.

The federal dollars came from a grant to build a new federal building in downtown Seward.

Corbridge was low-key in a conversation with the Daily News, saying he hopes to restore voter trust in elected officials. "The fact that there's high-level scrutiny of what's gone on in the past can't help but add focus on doing the public process right," he said.

Corbridge now works as an administrator for the Aleutians East Borough. He moved to Seward in 2005 to take the city manager's job, and pushed for more oversight of the Sealife Center.

Majaor Alaska politicians, led by "Uncle Ted" and Cong. Don Young, have found themselves under investigation as a bribery and corruption scandal has swept through the state's ruling elite.

Possibly alluding to backdoor deals, Corbridge ran under the slogan: "The Right Thing to Do."