After a year of work, Sitka’s tourism task force unveiled its recommendations for the assembly– 32 of them to be exact. The Sitka Assembly accepted the recommendations at a special meeting on Thursday (5-16-24).

Among the directives, the commission asks that the city pursue an agreement with the cruise industry through a “Memorandum of Understanding,” or MOU, advocate to reduce peak days, and establish a permanent tourism commission. 

The list did not include an annual limit for cruise traffic– an issue hotly debated in Sitka over the last couple of years. In that time the city has seen its cruise passenger numbers triple, but limiting cruise ships is both controversial and legally complicated since Sitka’s cruise dock is privately owned.

Task force Chair Jim Michener said the task force was divided on the issue, but ultimately homed in on what’s within the city’s control.  

“Under this directive, we weren’t able to say, ‘Here’s the number we should go for.’ It just was really too much to hammer down. The one thing I can say, going through this process, was that an annual limit is kind of just a non-starter. There’s a bunch of reasons why that’s problematic,” Michener said. “And if we do look towards making some sort of numerical limit on large ship travel and large ship visitors, daily seems to be the best way to go about it. We have more control over it, and it avoids a lot of pitfalls that come up with an annual limit that could be problematic.” 

The task force instead recommends that the city advocate to keep the daily limit between 5,000 and 7,000 passengers, and limit the large neopanamax ships to one per day. It also recommends the city implement a lightering policy to limit ships using the city’s lightering facility on days with 5,000 or more passengers. 

City Administrator John Leach said that it may be challenging to get every cruise line to sign off on one agreement, and suggested another avenue. 

“Given our circumstance here, it may be a consideration to develop our MOU with the private dock owner who has the ability to do his own scheduling at at his facility, and then use of our own facility, our lightering facility, I think can be controlled without an MOU since, again, we do have control of that of that,” Leach said. “So perhaps just a negotiated agreement with the dock owner might be the path of least resistance.”

Larry Edwards, who has organized two ballot initiatives to limit cruise passenger numbers, asked the assembly to remove the recommendations on the level of cruise traffic from the list before approving it. While he said he appreciated the commission’s work on the other issues, he said they hadn’t devoted enough time to this section and was backing it up with unreliable data. 

“Because of all the problems, they they were not well-considered, not well-deliberated, and for the most part, lack a foundation of reliable data. Put simply, the dog ate the task force directive one homework,” Edwards said. “The body should have admitted that it should not have included directive one in his report to you. To express these facts saddens me greatly.”

The assembly had little criticism of the document, however. Tim Pike thanked the task force for work he said was fairly comprehensive. 

“Shining through this report really is a desire on the part of everyone in Sitka to come to an answer on this., and it doesn’t have to look like anybody else’s model. It’s our model, and I like to see that,” Pike said. “I don’t see any desire to shift to not not try and deal with the problems in front of us, and try to come up with some real solutions that fit us as a community.” 

The assembly unanimously approved the tourism task force’s recommendations and directed the administrator to develop an action plan based on them. That plan will be presented to the assembly at the June 25 meeting.

View the full list of recommendations here

Editor’s Note: KCAW General Manager Rich McClear is a member of the tourism task force.