Sitka’s mayor says that cruise industry leaders are worried about the effects of an upcoming ballot initiative, which would limit how many of their visitors can come to Sitka. Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz attended the Pacific Northwest Symposium in Vancouver, BC in January. During his report at the Sitka Assembly meeting on February 11, he said his meetings with cruise executives were marked by both positivity and angst.
The positives? The industry is working on fuel alternatives– Eisenbeisz said the cruise industry has reduced its fuel use and is trying to shift to alternative energy for ships.
“I think there is a commitment amongst the industry, and it was a very common theme, that they understand that the lands that they come to enjoy, is something that they need to protect, or else it’s not going to be there.”
Eisenbeisz said he also connected with Sitka’s local cruise dock owner, who is developing a bussing app that he hopes will reduce the number of buses needed to transport passengers from the dock to downtown Sitka.
At the conference, Eisenbeisz learned that Alaska is the fifth most popular cruise destination in the world. That’s good news for Sitka’s tourism industry, but not necessarily for folks who are concerned about too many visitors at once. Sitka has experienced unprecedented growth in cruise tourism over the last few years, with passenger counts at more than double pre-pandemic levels. In response, a group of Sitkans filed an initiative last year that would limit cruise traffic to 300,000 annual visitors and require permits for ships to visit Sitka.
Eisenbeisz said the permitting timeline is what’s giving cruise industry leaders pause, as they wait to see if the ballot initiative makes it before Sitka’s voters. And boats are bigger, making it hard for cruise lines to stay under the daily cap proposed in the initiative.
“It wasn’t necessarily the ballot initiative itself and whether the town was going to vote up or down, but they were worried about the permitting cycle. The permitting cycle, unfortunately, will not work for how the industry books cruises. The 18 months is not conducive to their schedule, so it’s going to be difficult for a lot of the cruise lines to actually make port calls,” Eisenbeisz said. “There’s one cruise line that in [20]26 will only have one boat that’s under the 4500 cap. So those boats would all not to be able to to visit Sitka as well.”
Eisenbeisz said those limitations would make 300,000 an “impossible number to reach.”
A group of Sitkans, Small Town SOUL, filed the cruise limit petition in December, and is currently gathering signatures in order to take the petition to a special election this spring. It’s the group’s fourth attempt to take a cruise limit question to voters. In response – a new group, Safeguard Sitka’s Future, is advocating against the initiative.
