2020 Juneau Municipal Elections
2021 Cruise Season
How should the city prepare for the 2021 cruise ship season?
How should the city prepare for the 2021 cruise ship season?
District 2 Assembly
Derek Dzinich
Candidate for District 2 Assembly
If you would ask me this question eight months ago, many people in Juneau, myself included, would have made this conversation more focused on ‘how can we respond to saturation of tourism rates?’ I think that question is now somewhat outdated. I think that obviously we knew that we were somewhat dependent on cruise ship passenger revenues. Now that is more apparent than ever. And I think that’s something we need to take into account. I think that going forward, we don’t need to dial down our a relationship with cruise ship passengers. I think that we need to definitely focus on bolstering or returning it to as normal as can be, but I think that we need to learn the lesson here, which is that we need to diversify our economy, we need to help keep Juneauites in Juneau — both young and old — and we need to take tangible steps toward improving opportunities for affordable housing and other metrics which will help improve our economic resilience, which has been sorely demonstrated to be lacking in efficiency.
Lacey Derr
Candidate for District 2 Assembly
You know, at this point, I think tourism as a whole is going to look different and we are really going to have to communicate with these large tour industries and kind of get a sense of not only what are passengers looking for, but what are the cruise industries going to be needing from the port in which they’re coming to? Juneau has world class facilities to be able to accommodate these ships. Health, safety, mitigation — all of these things are going to be at the forefront of tourism. It is going to take all of us working together to boost and increase that sense of safety that we are working for the best interest of everyone, because we want you to visit our city, and we want everyone to be healthy and we want to be able to remain such a beautiful place and share that with others. But we also have to continue watching the tourism, we don’t want to get bigger than we were. As we were — it kind of felt like we were getting out of control.
Robert Shoemake
Candidate for District 2 Assembly
From what I’ve heard, there may not be a 2021 cruise ship season. We should plan business as normal and try to figure out as soon as possible if that’s not going to happen. If it does happen, then great. Business as normal — we know how to do that. So we should plan for it not happening, because we usually — that’s that’s the abnormal thing. If it doesn’t happen, we should focus on infrastructure projects that we normally couldn’t do when the weather’s warm. Doing that hopefully will help alleviate the fact that we don’t have all the tourism jobs here in town. And so keeping people working is always a priority. So we should plan for no season. If we have a season, then we’ve planned ahead.
Christine Woll
Candidate for District 2 Assembly
I think this moment offers us an opportunity to get in the driver’s seat. I think we’ve seen this summer that people still want to come to Alaska. We know we still have a world class cruise ship destination, but we also need to be thinking harder about how to bring in people who are going to want to stay longer, spend locally and come back because they’ve had an authentic experience. We want to make sure that we are supporting more local businesses and more local hires. And personally, I want a downtown where I want to go and be even in the summer and I’ve been working on the downtown area plan and I’ve talked to people from — people who live downtown and then people (who) live out the road too and they all feel like that as well.
District 1 Assembly
Alicia Hughes-Skandijs
Candidate for District 1 Assembly
I think having time to prepare will be super beneficial. The best thing the city can do right now is to ramp up our testing capacity, which will prepare us for the possibility that the virus will still be around next summer. To work with the industry to sort of plan ahead for how different does a socially distanced cruise ship season look? And how do we address a part of our economy that’s vital while looking through a public health lens? So, we should use this time to be planning ahead.
Kenny Solomon-Gross
Candidate for District 1 Assembly
We have to be ready. Our economic base in general is based on tourism, mining, fishing and government. So, we have to make sure that our economy is ready, that our businesses are ready and they’ll be able to welcome tourists and travelers back into Juneau to help grow and make our economy. That’s going to involve cleaning up downtown, making sure our streets are ready, our businesses are up and going and our town is ready for our visitors to return.
Areawide Assembly
Maria Gladziszewski
Candidate for Areawide Assembly
Well, we know the 2021 cruise ship season won’t be anything like the 2019 cruise season, which is the last we had. One thing we are working on is getting testing capacity just in case we’re still in the middle of (the) pandemic and need testing. We’re trying to get some more capacity for the hospital. But the last summer’s –– not 2020, but last summer’s numbers – caused many in the community to question whether we were finally bumping up against a capacity limit, and could we handle and did we want to accommodate those visitors? So, (we) established a visitor industry task force and they provided, you know, 10 pages of recommendations. We will obviously see a very different ‘21 season and we’ll be very happy to welcome visitors back to our community, and eventually we’ll continue to have that conversation about how we want the cruise industry to be in our community.