Do you think the city should limit cruise ship tourism? Why or why not? If so, how?

Jeff Jones

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

That’s a tricky one, because that’s some of our biggest revenue in the summertime, and I’d really hate to tell any of my friends or residents of Juneau that you can’t conduct your business because we’re cutting down the number of people that come into town – we’re going to limit your income. I don’t think that’s fair on them. 

Another problem I do have is the number of shops downtown that are not locally-owned. The Huna Totem project is a great deal because it’s only going to allow Alaska residents to be in the shops and the shops have to be open year-round. It makes a big difference. I hate going downtown in the wintertime and seeing all the closed up shops, knowing that all the money that came into Juneau left town with them.

Nano Brooks

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think that there should be a limit, because you can’t have the influx of tourists impacting the city infrastructure and services so much to where the local residents of the community can’t have access to them. So a big one right now is the buses, and we have local members of the community not being able to access those buses, and some of their lives depend on it for getting to work. So it’s something that needs to be addressed. If a limit could alleviate the burden on the community for the time being, that might be the appropriate decision to take, but it would really fall down to what the people really would like to see.

Ella Adkison

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think that we’ve seen a huge bounce back of cruise ship tourism since COVID, and there is definitely, I think, room for improvement. The city made a great first step when they negotiated the five-ship limit, and I think we need to continue that process and continue that relationship, whether that looks like spreading out some of the tourism impacts, whether that’s certain times of day, only certain ships can dock. Maybe that is establishing a carrying capacity, so that we only have a certain amount of people in per day. But as we negotiate that, we also really need to be mindful of local businesses here in Juneau who really do rely on that tourism, and make sure that we’re not hurting our local businesses by limiting cruise ship tourism. So I think there’s a balance we can strike, but we do need to move forward on that for sure.

JoAnn Wallace

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think the current limit we have of six ships per day is a good number, and I also think that we do a really good job of managing tourism through the organizations we already have set up. Is it perfect? No. But I think Juneau is so lucky that we have tourism.

Paul Kelly

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think what we need to do is we need to diversify our tourism industry. We have capacity in the off season to bring more independent travelers here, to bring more cultural tourism to Juneau and attract people for those reasons. When it comes to limiting cruise ships, this year we have five cruise ships at a time, next year we have five cruise ships a day. I think what might be a popular idea is to have one day a month, like a first Friday, where it’s more of a locals’ day, where locals can come and they can interact with the vendors downtown. We don’t have sufficient infrastructure here for the tourists that are coming here. I think we can also better manage when we send people to places like the glacier. Maybe there’s some sort of agreement we can come to to limit the times so that people who live here year round also get a chance to enjoy the beauty around us.

Emily Mesch

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

We definitely need to control tourism in some way, manage it in some way, because we don’t want these large, multinational organizations to come in and control our city. The Assembly instituted a five-ship cruise limit that will take effect next year. I strongly support that. I want to see what happens. We might have to adjust it going down the line or it might not be a good idea, but it’s a worthy experiment because we need to keep our city. We need to find some balance between the benefits that cruise ship tourism provides us and the needs of our residents just to live a normal life. Finding that balance is very important.

Laura Martinson McDonnell

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think the five-ship limit that’s going to take effect in 2024 is a huge step that we should be celebrating. It’s the first move of its kind where the industry and a municipality have come together, listened to the needs of the community and actually made a change on this magnitude. I think before we step in and start limiting things from a legislative standpoint, we should see what this five-ship limit looks like in 2024. Also, we need to let our infrastructure catch up a little bit. We haven’t really enacted a lot of the recommendations from the Visitor Industry Task Force, so I’d like to see what this first step looks like. It’s going to have to be fluid. The ship sizes are changing. It’s a really dynamic market. But this five-ship limit that’s already coming into effect should have a big impact and I’d like to see what that looks like first. 

Ivan Nance

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think it should be limited, and I think there are proposals in the works right now* to limit the number of ships.* That’s a good idea, because people I talk to are stressed by the amount of tourists. I know someone who was on one of the trails a few weeks ago and almost got run over by a tourist on a bike. So it just needs to be more well-managed. We’ve got the big attraction here. The cruise ship industry has to be making money or they wouldn’t be doing it, so let’s make it good for the people who live here and the tourism industry.

*Editor’s note: The city and cruise industry agreed this spring on a limit of no more than five large ships in port per day starting next year.

Michele Stuart-Morgan

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think tourism is a great thing for Juneau. Cruise ship tourism and tourism can be split up into different scenarios. I know that in 2024 we do have a cap coming that’s five ships a day. I think that’s a good idea. I think our infrastructure is busting already. I would like to see our tourism push for more individual tourism. Maybe we can educate them on the other things that we have here in Juneau – Sealaska Heritage being downtown, the Soboleff Building, our beautiful scenery, the things to do – so we can educate those people before they come up so they would want to see more than just our glacier or our downtown. Our entire area is gorgeous, and that’s something you can’t build. It’s nature. I think that would be something I’d like to see.

Dorene Lorenz

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I don’t think it’s fair for us to try and limit tourism. If people want to visit Juneau, we need to greet them with open arms. But when it comes to where the cruise ships actually dock and what services we give them so that they have the lowest impact, not only on our environment but also on the everyday flow of traffic and congestion and people enjoying Juneau who live in Juneau, those are things that we can regulate by making strong choices in how we’re going to direct that kind of traffic. 

There’s also an underlying problem of we need more excursions, but we can’t have more excursions unless we have people to work to make those excursions go. Once we get over that hurdle, I think that things are going to be a lot smoother, and we’re not going to be so cranky that we have all these people coming to visit us.

David Morris

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

I think it comes down to the quality of life of the people that live here year round. The ships are going – but there’s only five ships. I say, yeah, but the ships that are coming in now, it’s the people that get off, it’s the amount of people that get off the boats, because they’re twice as large as the ones that used to come here. So you’re looking at probably 30,000 people in town where it used to be 15,000*, and that’s a big impact. So I believe in tourism, but I believe there’s a point when that’s enough. And I think it ought to be put out in a vote to the people, because it’s their city, it’s their decision, and the Assembly works for the people.

*Editor’s note: Based on Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska’s 2023 schedule and cruise lines’ ship capacities reported by the Juneau Empire, the maximum number of cruise ship passengers in town during a week ranges from roughly 6,000 to nearly 17,500 per day.

Christine Woll

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

I think this summer has really shown us that we need to be doing more to proactively manage tourism in Juneau. When I hear that residents aren’t able to ride our city buses because they’re overfilled with cruise ship passengers, that makes me feel like we are over capacity. So I think we definitely need to work to slow the growth of the number of people coming into our community, as well as beefing up our infrastructure to support the people who are here. The Assembly passed a five-ship limit, which I think is a great place to start. That will definitely slow that growth. But I think we need to take more control over scheduling ships so that we have the right ship at the right dock at the right time to spread out our passengers and take control over scheduling at our own docks as well.

Alicia Hughes-Skandijs

Candidate for District 1 Assembly

I would say making sure that cruise ship tourism is working for our year-round residents as well as it is for our economy and for our businesses that depend on it is one of the top three reasons that I’m running. I’m really excited by the five-ship limit. We don’t have that in place right now, so it can feel like, well, we did this thing and yet we know we’re having a really big-feeling season. 

So I think it’s important that we follow the principles of, things we can do by collaboration with the industry rather than legislation are generally neater and more long-lasting and better for all involved. But we should let things come into place and then go by that temperature. Once we make that change, does it feel like we need to make more changes? Then let’s do it.

Joe Geldhof

Candidate for District 1 Assembly

I have spent years working around and against, frankly, the cruise ship industry and have a decent handle. I’ve been doing that since 1999. There are limits that this community and any community faces with inundation of large industrial tourism, whether it comes by cruise ships or any other method. 

Frankly, the City and Borough talks a lot about mitigating the damages, but it doesn’t do as much as they should. One of the things we need to do is spend the passenger ship fees more effectively, both to enhance the safe and efficient movement of these large numbers of people and to mitigate. There’s too much talk down at city hall about the problem and not enough direct application. They also waste a lot of passenger fees on administrative overhead* that, frankly, is not calculated to help either the citizens here or the passengers who arrive here.

*Editor’s note: Tourism Manager Alexandra Pierce’s marine passenger fee proposal includes $21,598,000 for direct costs and $132,700 for overhead.