The Haines Borough Assembly expressed support for a Rainbow Glacier Adventures tour permit application that will increase the company’s passenger limit.

Ordonez requested his tour permit be increased from 14 guests per trip to 42 per trip in order to provide rafting opportunities for a small cruise ship company’s guests. Uncruise will dock an 84-passenger ship in Haines twice a week and wants to offer their guests morning and afternoon rafting trips with Rainbow Glacier Adventures.

The assembly met as a committee of the whole Tuesday to discuss owner Joe Ordonez’s permit application after several community members opposed the passenger increase. Gabe Thomas and Ted Hart worried more traffic would cause bank degradation and disturb salmon at a pond next to a pullout at 14 Mile.

In a letter to the borough Alaska Department of Fish and Game Habitat Division Biologist Jackie Timothy said salmon don’t successfully reproduce in the pond.

“The animals rest in the pond before moving upstream to spawn in clean gravel beds,” Timothy said.

She also said sediment entering the pond from visitor trampling “is insignificant compared to the natural aquatic sediment transport regime. The input from additional visitors trampling the area, as Ordonez proposes, will still be insignificant.”

Ordonez told the assembly at Tuesday’s meeting he would use a pull out at the other end of the parking lot from the pond. Thomas said his concerns were alleviated in the short-term, but said the borough should look forward and talk with the Alaska Department of Transportation about building a “world class rafting” infrastructure along the river.

The assembly supported Ordonez’s permit and will vote on it at next week’s regular meeting.

The discussion also turned to regulating capacity on the Chilkat River along with identifying better raft pullout locations.

Assembly member Tom Morphet said the assembly should consult the industry on where they want to see those pullouts.

“We should ask industry where they want their pullouts and go to the state with that,” Morphet said. “Capacity is a legitimate question. At some point when you put a crowd out there you’re diminishing people’s experience.”

Assembly member Heather Lende said she didn’t want to see the Chilkat become overcrowded like the Chilkoot area has become. She wanted local advisory committees to explore the issue.

Borough manager Debra Schnabel warned the assembly not to rely on the rafting industry to determine river capacity.

“The issue need not be determined by the permittees,” Schnabel said. “For the permittees to announce that the river is at capacity is not something we want to encourage,” Schnabel said. “We have to look at that ourselves.”

At a previous meeting, Jake Eckhardt asked the assembly to deny Ordonez’s request because he said the river capacity and the pullouts used by private companies and the public is already crowded. Eckhardt works for Chilkat Guides, a company that’s allowed to give tours to up to 500 people a day. They began operation before the borough’s permitting requirements were established.

Haines Rafting Co. owner Andy Hedden said the state may be more liberal when determining river capacity than the community is comfortable.