How is the city doing? Municipal Administrator John Leach addressed the Sitka Chamber of Commerce on January 24 with his answers in his annual ‘State of the City’ presentation.
“Typically, in city government, as you saw in a very long assembly meeting last night, we get up there and we hear about problems and what we’re going to do to address those problems,” Leach said. “But this is an opportunity where we get to say, these are the great things we’ve done over the last year for the community.”
Leach shared a long list of the goals city staff met in 2023, from the grants they applied for and won, to the new programs they’ve expanded, like Parks and Rec.
View Leach’s full presentation here.
Leach also shared some figures for the audience to mull over, like around $18 million in sales tax the city collected in 2023 (calendar year). Leach said the city brought in over $5 million more than the city remitted in 2019, the last pre-pandemic cruise season.
“It’s clear that our community is becoming a more sought after destination for travelers,” Leach said. “And with this popularity, comes the ability to better fund and maintain our critical infrastructure.”
Leach shared another figure that illustrated one example of the increased demand tourism growth has placed on the city’s infrastructure and staff. Of the calls received for emergency services during the summer tour season, a sizable chunk came from tourists.
“Notably during the tourist season 38% of those calls were non-residents placing a significant additional burden on our services,” Leach said. “128 for cruise ship passengers and 53 were non-cruise passengers or non-cruise travelers totaling 181 extra patients. These calls are notably more time consuming,” he said and added, “These figures underscore the immense pressure responsibility shouldered by our first responders.”
Leach also noted that there’s a saturation point for the sales tax benefits – if Sitka is so crowded that visitors are waiting in long lines to eat a meal or buy an item, the sales tax benefits for the city start to level out. However, Leach said because of the steady increase in sales taxes over the last several years, they’d been able to put over $12 million in the public infrastructure sinking fund and chip away at some long standing capital projects.
“As far as the future of the fund and what we’re going to do this year, it’s too early to tell what the balance is going to look like. I can say though, that the visitor industry, love it or hate it, it’s creating a lot of revenue for us to tackle some of these capital leads.”
