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The city of Sitka has brokered a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the local cruise dock. And while some assembly members were on board with approving the agreement as-is, they postponed a vote until the next meeting after a number of community members said they needed more time to review the document. 

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The “Memorandum of Understanding” between the Sitka Dock Company and the city focuses on what the city can do to limit high cruise traffic, rather than imposing restrictions on the cruise dock. If approved, the MOU would establish Saturday as a “quiet” day with fewer than 1,250 passengers, and a ceiling of 7,000 on other days. But in order to keep those numbers at bay, the city would agree to prevent ships from landing passengers at city-owned docks on days with high traffic at the privately owned dock. 

Larry Edwards is a member of Small Town Soul, a local advocacy group that wants to limit cruise tourism. Edwards said he felt the MOU was not only unenforceable, but also misleading since it focuses on lower berth capacity – that’s the standard double occupancy, but not the “maximum capacity” of a given ship.  

“In the hot cruise market, many ships are running at or near their maximum capacity. A day’s ships totaling 12360 lower birth capacity just mentioned, could actually have 14,000 to 15,000 passengers aboard,” Edwards said.  

Sitkan Emily Scott urged the assembly to hold off on voting on the item until the newly-appointed tourism commission could review it. 

“We just elected a Tourism Commission to review things like this, and make these decisions, and influence this and represent us,” Scott said. “This is kind of the whole point of a very lengthy process from the Tourism Task Force recommendations, and this feels very fast compared to the rest of that process.” 

Assembly member Thor Christianson said he felt the MOU was unenforceable and more of a “feel good” document that the city would follow but wouldn’t bind private industry. He agreed that they should at least wait until the next meeting to give Sitkans more time to digest it.  

“I just have issues with the city being the ones to do this, to make the sacrifices to our bottom line, when we didn’t create the issue,” Christianson said.

When asked why the city is “taking the hit” Municipal Administrator John Leach said that was “the elephant in the room.” 

At the end of the day, it is a private business using their facility as they see is their right,” Leach said. “If the community desire is to try to cap the number somewhere, the area where the most flexibility lives is on our side.” 

In spite of its limitations, assembly member Kevin Mosher said he felt the MOU was an important step in the city’s collaboration with the cruise dock. 

“To get a cruise industry to agree to a voluntary MOU is not super common, and the cruise industry, to be honest, they can bring as many cruise ships as they’re able to carry,” Mosher said. “And so there’s a strategy in engaging this in this way. It allows us to proactively come up with a number… an arrangement that is maybe not perfect, but much better than it could be.”

Mosher said he hoped they wouldn’t kick the can down the road and would approve the MOU soon. Deputy Mayor Tim Pike said they could move forward both ways- they could approve the MOU, and still have the tourism commission review it down the road and make changes.

“And I think we should take, at face value and in good intent, the good faith behind this agreement that has been engendered,” Pike said “This was a something the assembly asked the administrator to enter into, and the process took quite a while. I mean, it wasn’t an instantaneous decision…Is it a perfect document? I’ve yet to read a perfect document, or a perfect MOA or a perfect contract. There isn’t one, but it’s a good starting point for where we might want to go.”

Pike also said he’d support holding off on the vote so more Sitkans could take a look at the agreement, and he and other assembly members asked Leach if the dock owner would be amenable to reducing the timeframe of the MOU from 5 years to two or three. 

The assembly voted unanimously to postpone a vote on the MOU until the next meeting. 

Assembly appoints commission

Sitka has a new Tourism Commission. When the Sitka Assembly met last night/on Tuesday, it appointed seven Sitkans to the commission from a group of ten applicants.

The commission replaces the Tourism Task Force that disbanded last year, but their goals are slightly different. The task force was always temporary, and was meant to help guide the city’s immediate response to rapid cruise tourism growth. The commission will be permanent, focused largely on the annual review cycle for the city’s tourism operations.

There was little discussion of the commission candidates and their qualifications, with one exception-whether or not to appoint Sitka Dock Company owner Chris McGraw to the commission. Assembly member Thor Christianson said while he had no doubt that McGraw would be dedicated to the role, putting him on the commission as a voting member wouldn’t be appropriate:

“It’s already going to have a lot of people who are either directly or indirectly involved in the tourism industry, but to have the owner of the dock is, I think, not a good look,” Christianson said.

Assembly member Kevin Mosher said McGraw could be a valuable addition to the commission, but understood the concerns.  

“I understand how it could look having Chris McGraw on there, but I think he would offer a tremendous amount of insight into the industry, and I think that is very invaluable, and I don’t see the powers of the commission to try to increase tourism. It’s more managing what we have,” Mosher said.

Ultimately McGraw didn’t garner enough votes to snag a seat on the tourism commission. The seven commission seats went to Devon Calvin, Martha Moses, Carol Bryant Martin, Ian Dempster, Vaughn Hazel, Bethany Lowrance and Jeremy Plank. Municipal Clerk Sara Peterson said she’d be in touch with the new commissioners soon to schedule an organizational meeting. 

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