The city may have finally secured an operator to run its visitor services program, Visit Sitka. But when the Sitka Assembly met on Tuesday (12-16-25), the group approved an initial round of funding to pay the contractor, but spent over two hours hashing out details over the contract.
For years, the city has paid the Greater Sitka Chamber of Commerce to run Visit Sitka. But this past January, the Chamber announced it would not be pursuing a new contract because of “structural differences that were not aligned with the Chamber’s management of Visit Sitka.”
Their contract expired in June, but in light of the city’s unsuccessful efforts to secure another long-term contractor, the Chamber agreed to stay on through the end of the calendar year, and be available for a handoff in January, to give the city more time to find a permanent replacement.
After months of searching, the city got a bite this fall. At Tuesday’s Sitka Assembly meeting, Planning Director Amy Ainslie said the city received a joint submission from Element Agency and Agnew::Beck Consulting for the contract.
“Element Agency has been a subcontractor to the Chamber for the Visit Sitka contract for several years,” Ainslie said. “They are very familiar with Sitka, and they do have some staff in Sitka, but they also have staff state-wide. Again, very familiar with Visit Sitka in providing primarily a lot of the promotional and marketing support, and they were very intimately involved in the development of the recently-adopted three-year strategic marketing plan.”
At the meeting, the assembly greenlit just over $300,000 in funding for the first six months of service. But when it came to approving the actual contract itself, there were reservations. City staff only had a partial draft contract ready for the meeting, and many assembly members weren’t comfortable giving Municipal Administrator John Leach authority to move forward without seeing the final document.
“It’s not about trust, it’s about responsibility,” said Assembly Member Tim Pike. “It’s not that I don’t trust John if we voted to have him execute it that he’d bring back the contract we’re after. But that’s not my responsibility. My responsibility as an assembly member is to vote on contracts, and I’m not going to vote for one that I haven’t seen.”
Some assembly members worried that delaying a vote on the contract wouldn’t allow sufficient transition time to hand over the Visit Sitka service from the Chamber to the new operators.
Assembly Member Kevin Mosher said getting visitors to Sitka takes a lot of work.
“And we have a really good thing going on,” he said. “I don’t want to interrupt the services. I want continuity of service, because I think it’s really really important. Tourism is basically our biggest industry now, and we have to continue doing that. And people are counting on the revenue from the tourism industry to help fund important things that they care about.”
But ultimately, after much deliberation, including multiple amendments to the original motion, assembly members voted unanimously to postpone a final vote on the contract until their Jan. 13 meeting.
Several assembly members said they support the meat of the contract, and only want to see changes to the “legalese” — things like outlining duties upon termination or length of contract.
Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz said he intends to move forward with the contract once it’s updated.
“I intend to go forward with this,” he said. “I intend to make this work. I’m excited to see a contractor who has already done this work for many many years step up to the plate.”
Under the proposed five-year contract, after the first six months, the city would pay the contractor $587,000 a year, with incremental increases over time.
