Advocates of restricting cruise ship traffic to Juneau have started gathering petition signatures to put three questions on the municipal election ballot Oct. 5.
The initiatives would make the ballot if supporters can gather signatures of nearly 3,000 registered voters in the town of about 30,000 residents. They started collecting signatures May 3, and face a June 2 deadline to turn in their petition books at city hall.
One of the amendments to the city charter would ban cruise ships in town between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., though it would apply only to ships with capacity for more than 250 passengers. Another amendment would ban ships of the same size on Saturdays.
A third measure would ban all cruise ships over 100,000 gross tonnage, beginning in 2026. That would apply to almost all of the large cruise ships that come to Alaska.
Juneau set a record in 2019 with more than 1.2 million cruise ship passengers coming to town.
The lead sponsor of the effort, Karla Hart, is a co-founder of the Global Cruise Activist Network, and has been outspoken about what she calls negative impacts of tourism and said she is concerned about overcrowding caused by the cruise ship industry.
An opposition group, Protect Juneau’s Future, already has organized to campaign against the initiatives, estimating the limits could cut the number of cruise passengers in town by about 75%, costing jobs and tax revenues.
“Their job is to make the sky fall, or to make it appear that the sky will fall,” Hart said of the opposition group. “I don’t believe that it will.”
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