Sitka’s busy tourism season is about to begin. The first cruise ship — the Volendam — arrives in town this Saturday with an estimated 1,432 passengers. The city estimates 326 ports of call between April 26 and Sept. 30, with 13 days that have no ships in town. According to lower berth counts, this year’s expected cruise passengers total 594,355.
KCAW’s Hope McKenney sat down with the city’s new tourism manager, Judson Rusk, to talk about the upcoming season, his vision for tourism in Sitka, and how his first three months on the job have been.
TRANSCRIPT:
RUSK: I grew up there in Sitka. I moved there when I was a kid, and all my formative years were there, and I started working in tourism, kind of like a lot of local Sitka kids do, like, started giving tours as a summer job when I was in high school. I went to college in Bellingham, and when I would come back, I would go back to working in tourism to make money, and it wasn’t what I studied in school, but it turns out, it’s always available. So, like, I loved what I did, and I kept doing it more and more, and eventually it became the career. So I’ve been working in tourism in some capacity for over 20 years now, and [I’m] absolutely thrilled to be coming home to take on this sort of role, to be back in the field that I know, in the field that I love, in my hometown, working for meaningful change and progress in a community that means so much to me. So I’m thrilled about it.
KCAW: Okay, so you’ve had a few months on the job. How’s it going so far?
RUSK: I love it so far, like very legitimately. Even though I haven’t been in town for about 10 years, I visit frequently, lots of friends, lots of family, and just because I’ve just always been generally interested, I’ve always kind of kept an eye on the tourism industry in Sitka, because it’s just a topic that interests me. The fact that this position is new and myself and even, you know, my peers and supervisors at the city, we’re kind of building it as we go along, there’s a lot to it that is sort of taking temperature of the industry right now and then kind of figuring out what we’re going to do and what I’m going to do specifically. But that’s a lot of fun for me, kind of building a position that is beneficial to the community.
KCAW: So it sounds like this position is still a little bit in development. But what is your vision for your role and just your vision of tourism here in Sitka?
RUSK: If I were to give you the politicians answer, I would say that the goal is to take the state of the industry, and we as a community need to maximize the benefits of the tourism industry while also minimizing the impacts of it. Right? It’s an integral part of our economy. It’s an integral part of our little hometown flare. But that doesn’t change the fact that, you know, everyone needs to live here, including myself, right? So the industry has to work for us. And again, that’s the 10,000 foot scope view of that. And then sort of the playing the puzzle of my job is trying to figure out how we do that, right? So, what are the benefits? What are the benefits that are the most impactful? What can we achieve short term, long term? And then, you know, there’s always an equal and opposite reaction, right? So, what are the things that aren’t worth the cost? What are the things that are? And then also just kind of down to, like, daily details too. Like, one of the very first things I did when I started within my first few weeks was, had to have the conversation about Lincoln Street and if we’re going to be closing it this season, right? So, even down kind of daily operation things.
KCAW: So in this role, how do you decide, I guess, what or who is a priority?
RUSK: It is a lot of taking stock of the state of the industry, which I don’t need to explain to you or anybody else, has undergone a rather dramatic change in the last three years compared to any other year we’ve ever had. So the priority is a holistic one, right? What are the things in our control right now? What are the things in our control next season, five years from now, right? And then how can we build a project or like initiatives of any kind to shape that industry into what we need it to be? I kind of view it as a blank canvas right now, because of such a boom recently. Now we have, effectively, it’s a familiar industry and in a whole new way, right? So what are we going to do with it? So it’s kind of like, to focus back on your question again, what’s a priority is taking community feedback, industry feedback, kind of any feedback I can get, and finding commonalities about what people in Sitka want, and then just working towards that, right? Because ultimately, I work for everybody, and I’m trying to find level ground for for everyone to benefit here.
KCAW: And so you talk about this feedback. Tourism is a really complicated, contentious issue here in Sitka, it seems. What are you hearing from stakeholders?
RUSK: First of all, there’s a lot of push on the infrastructure, and not necessarily that’s not meaning physical city infrastructure. I mean that again, kind of in like a holistic sense of even tour operators, right? There’s so many more visitors than there were pre-COVID, that even operators are feeling like we wish we could sell more. There’s people who are trying, there’s guests who are trying to go on excursions, [but] things are sold out. And then, you know, it’s pushing on people. Like, do I buy more vans or more busses, or do I start another branch of my company? Do I offer more excursions? Well, that’s more insurance, more staff, right? So it creates a lot of opportunity, but also puts a lot of cost on that. And that’s, again, one of those balancing points. And then, of course, there’s just general community members. It’s a tough five months if you don’t work in the industry. There’s a lot of people in town, and there’s more traffic, and there’s just things to consider. So part of my role is trying to build just information tools, even if it’s just as easy as a dashboard, so people can check and see like, “Oh, what’s the status of town today? Maybe I should do my grocery shopping later in the day, or do my errands tomorrow,” or something along those lines. Just get information out there. But again, I’m kind of off on a tangent here. Hope I’m sorry. What I’m hearing the most is [that] we need to be cognizant of how many people are where at a certain time, and then also that we, like the city and me, specifically, needs to be more communicative about the state of the industry and how that affects everyone in town.
KCAW: Is there anything else I should have asked you or you’d like to share about this role, or about this upcoming season?
RUSK: Once I’m in town and settled and kind of in my role, I understand that tourism is a very important topic for a lot of people. So you can expect me to have public office hours available moving forward, because I want to be that sort of liaison between the tourism industry and anyone in Sitka who wants to talk about it. So I’m going to have that set up, and it’ll be on a weekly basis, and just anyone can put time on my calendar and come talk to me about anything they want. So that’s something that I’m going to work towards, is kind of keeping an open line of communication with anybody. And then, once again, once I’m a little bit more settled here in the role, I do have some, what I think are good ideas about sort of focusing on regenerative and off-season tourism. Because another sort of misconception that I kind of want to get ahead of, is that my role is strictly cruise tourism. And it’s not. It’s tourism in general. And I think Sitka could benefit from sort of smaller scale, more consistent off-season tourism. So I’ve got a lot of plans on how to sort of work on that and build some slow season visitor interest.
