The Alaska Marine Highway System has been hoping since last August to bring back the Columbia to service this year after an almost three-year absence, but with the start of the summer schedule only weeks away the state has not announced a decision on the ship.
The Columbia’s summer return is contingent on hiring enough crew to replace staff that were laid off, retired, quit or moved to other ships since the state’s largest ferry was pulled out of service in the fall of 2019.
“We’re pouring a lot of effort into recruitment, but headway has been slow,” Sam Dapcevich, Department of Transportation spokesman, said last Friday.
The ferry system had hoped to add the Columbia to the heavy summer travel schedule for mid-May through mid-September, but coastal legislators said that is looking increasingly doubtful as even if the state can find crew, it takes time for new hires to obtain their U.S. Coast Guard certification for maritime work.
Transportation Department officials as far back as August have acknowledged the hiring challenges of restoring the Columbia to weekly runs between Bellingham, Washington, and Southeast Alaska. Ferry system management and Department of Transportation officials have briefed legislators several times this year on slow recruitment efforts.
Bringing the ship back to work would add one stop a week northbound and also southbound in Wrangell, almost doubling the level of service to the community.
The Alaska Marine Highway System has managed to hire about 50 new crew in the past four or five months, John Falvey, general manager, told members of the Alaska Marine Highway Operations Board last Friday. That represents only about 20% of the new hires needed for minimal summer staffing of the full fleet, including the Columbia.
An additional 100 job applicants are working on their certification documents, but that could take two or three months and the ferry system figures it will lose half of the potential new hires in that time, Falvey said. The system’s biggest shortage is passenger services workers, he said.
An Anchorage-based recruitment firm, working under a $250,000 state contract, has brought in several new hires, Falvey said. And the ferry system is offering $5,000 hire bonuses for some job categories.
“We’ve lost a lot of people,” he told the ferry system advisory board of dwindling employee numbers in recent years. The ferry system over the past three years has lost 155 more employees than it has hired, the department told legislators last month.
Alaska is not alone, Falvey said, noting that Washington state, British Columbia and New York’s Staten Island ferries “are all hurting really bad.”
The Columbia is still in the shipyard, undergoing its annual overhaul, which includes an additional million dollars in steel work to the half-century-old ship, Falvey said. The 500-passenger ferry should be ready mechanically by the end of May, he said.
Regardless of crew shortages, the marine highway system is on schedule to resume service to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, the third week of June, Falvey said. The Matanuska will run between Ketchikan and Rupert one week a month during the summer, the first service to the Canadian highway connection port in almost three years.
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