Nearly 630,000 cruise passengers are set to visit Sitka in 2027, making next summer the biggest in the community’s history. The record-breaking season will be the latest of several in recent years, and follows ongoing community debate on the level of cruise traffic Sitkans want.

Voters rejected an initiative to cap cruise traffic in 2025, shortly after the Sitka Assembly narrowly approved a “Memorandum of Understanding” between the city and the cruise dock to set some parameters. In contrast to the cap initiative, the MOU was presented as a way for the city and the industry to agree on guidelines to follow, without hard, legally binding limits.

At a Sitka Tourism Commission meeting on September 10, some community members said the news of next year’s numbers means it’s time to revisit the document.

Klaudia Leccese is with Small Town SOUL, the advocacy group that filed the cruise cap initiative and continues to push for a regulatory approach. She said Sitka needs to “get a grip” on the situation, and it’s critical to start now since the industry schedules ships years in advance. 

“Increases, like what is scheduled for now for 2027, tell us that the MOU doesn’t have any teeth and isn’t working. So we’re really concerned about the MOU. It doesn’t seem like it’s a strong enough thing to make sure that we don’t have increases, or you know a creep upward,” Leccese said. “We really need to kind of come together and have something that we can all count on as being solid information, so we can really know what the community does want.”

There are roughly 22 days with more than 7000 passengers in next year’s cruise calendar. SOUL organizers pointed to data from previous community survey from 2023– in that survey a majority of respondents preferred 6000 passengers a day or less. Leccese said 630,000 visitors is too many for the small town to accommodate. But Sitka Dock Company owner Chris McGraw pushed back. 

“The numbers are not out of control. They’re not continuing to go up exponentially. We have a bump in 2027 of the days over 7000, and that 7000 number was not a cap. It was never intended to be a cap in the MOU,” McGraw said.

McGraw noted that the schedule is set to drop back down in 2028 with just over 600,000 visitors. But he said next year Sitka is ready to accommodate the increase with more infrastructure and new tour businesses to disperse passengers and ease congestion downtown. He used his own tour company, Adventure Sitka, as an example. 

“And on a busy 7,000 passenger day, we’ll have over 500 people on tour in Adventure Sitka, and that’s either on boats or kayaks, and we’ll put over 800 people through our theater. So that’s 1,300 people that in 2023 and 2024 would have just been dropped off downtown,” McGraw said. “And we’re not the only company that has added that. You see more vans, you see more boats, and the people have been dispersed. So it’s difficult to compare apples to apples from 2023 to 2026.”

Following presentations from McGraw and SOUL, the commission opened the floor up to a handful of Sitkans in attendance. Teal West is a downtown business owner and member of Safeguard Sitka’s Future, an advocacy group that campaigned against cruise limits. She said the MOU is working.

“I think it matters that we continue to talk about the data, and not the emotions. The data is that it’s working, so let’s keep doing what we’re doing,” West said. “We can’t continue to move this goalpost every time we see numbers come up. We have to listen, and we have to see, and we have to listen to the experiences that everybody is having in the community, not just a certain group of people.” 

But Phyllis Hackett, a former tourism task force member, said the commission should acknowledge the continuing effects of the industry’s rapid growth.

“The effect is positive for some and negative for some, but overall, it is dramatic. It is very dramatic, and growing pains, yes, but it’s a dramatic effect, and it does deserve some attention,” Hackett said. “And I think that you need to make a recommendation to the assembly to acknowledge that, and to work towards finding something with with the stakeholders, finding something that is going to be able to spread the effect out, so that people can see all sides of it.” 

The commission’s vice chair, Bethany Lowrance, is a local tour operator. Lowrance said while new businesses may have helped disperse high traffic away from downtown, they’ve also begun to create congestion in other areas, like Sitka’s trail system.

“I’m excited that we have so many new businesses that are getting out and getting to show off our beautiful hometown, but at the same time, at what cost? Not only to us, but to our visitors as well, giving them the experience that we want to give them,” Lowrance said. “So I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. I love what we’re doing, but I feel like we’re at a point where we we need to look, because we’re in the biggest city in the world, or in the United States, but we’re very little as to where we can take [people].” 

Lowrance said she doesn’t know what the commission’s next steps should be without more community input, but she said there should be next steps.

Member Devon Calvin said the group should move toward revisiting the MOU and replacing it with a new agreement. But Chair Jeremy Plank and member Sherri Blankenship said they felt the collaboration between the city and the industry had improved the situation year-over-year, and takes time to work. Still, they felt one missing piece in the MOU needed to be addressed. That’s the addition of cruise line associations, Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) and Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska (CLAA). Without them at the table, Plank said the scheduling process stays outside of the city’s purview.

“If you look at the MOU over in Juneau, they are part of that. I think that they should be at the table during this discussion, and if there’s a mechanism that we can kind of tighten to try to bring them into that conversation earlier, it’s maybe bringing them [in]” Plank said. “It’s really hard to have a discussion about what’s going on with the schedule if we have one party that’s clearly missing at the table.”

The commission recommended the city’s tourism manager investigate bringing CLIA and CLAA to the table on a 5-1 vote with Calvin opposed.