A citizen initiative to limit cruise ships advances in Juneau, while another stalls in Sitka

A sign from Protect Juneau's Future, urging residents not to sign a petition that would limit cruise ships is seen on July 3, 2024. The petition gained enough signatures and was approved on Monday. A citizen with a permanent marker apparently fact-checked the poster. (Photo by Claire Stremple/Alaska Beacon)

Unless Juneau’s city Assembly makes the change first, a proposal to forbid cruise ships on Saturdays will be on the municipal ballot in October, but a Sitka push to put cruise ship passenger limits on the ballot was denied late Tuesday.

The news marks the latest steps in a broader reckoning in some Southeast communities about the effects of increased traffic from cruise ship tourism on small, coastal towns.

Cruise ship passengers are a mainstay in the regional economy. But local opponents like Karla Hart in Juneau say increased passenger numbers come at a cost to quality of life.

“I know what Juneau used to be, and I know what it could be and it isn’t now, and so I’m fighting to bring some of that back,” she said. “Ship-free Saturdays is a way to just give everybody in Juneau one day a week without the blanket of impacts on our lives. And to me, I believe that if we all have that one day a week without all of the chaos that comes with the cruise industry, that we’ll all be happier and healthier.”

A counter-campaign asked residents not to sign the petition through signs, radio advertisements and an online presence.

Juneau recently adopted a voluntary limit on cruise ships that would cap passengers at 16,000 a day starting in 2026. Hart said that doesn’t provide any relief for residents.

“Most days of the week, we don’t have 16,000 cruise passengers in Juneau, but we’re still overwhelmed with impacts,” she said.

Hart’s initiative garnered 2,359 signatures from Juneau residents that supported the idea. The Juneau City Clerk certified the signatures and presented the certification to the Assembly at its regular meeting on Monday. The Assembly will have until August 15 to adopt the measure or allow the question of whether Juneau should adopt ship-free Saturdays to appear on the October 1, 2024, regular municipal election ballot.

In Sitka, the city attorney decided the ballot initiative did not pass legal muster, according to Klaudia Leccese, who led the effort for the cruise ship advocacy non-profit Small Town SOUL. It was residents’ third attempt to limit cruise ship passengers this year.

“We are of course disappointed by the decision,” she said via text on Wednesday. “We are assessing the advice the city attorney gave to the city clerk, and will address his concerns in a fourth initiative application sometime soon.”

The proposal would have limited Sitka to cruise ship passengers to 300,000 per year, with no more than 4,500 per day, and ships would have been allowed only between May 1 and September 30 each year. This year, the city expects roughly 600,000 cruise ship passengers.

City attorneys denied the proposed ballot measure’s certification because they found it has “misleading, confusing and incomplete terms” and that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s Tonnage Clause .

Juneau and Sitka are not the only communities to formally question the cost benefit analysis that underlies the cruise ship economy. In 2021, the Skagway mayor floated the idea of a cap on cruise ship passengers — the town of fewer than 1,000 residents welcomes as many as 12,000 passengers a day — but the idea never made it to a municipal ballot.

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