Most every town in Southeast faces a similar summer problem: boatloads of visitors and not enough public toilets.
Some communities have built additional public restrooms, and Sitka this summer is paying downtown businesses willing to open their facilities to the public.
Under a new grant program, Sitka has succeeded in opening six business restrooms to the public this summer, relieving a strain on the limited public facilities downtown. The incentive program is part of the town’s effort to handle a record-setting cruise ship season.
“We were maxed out in terms of infrastructure before we were looking at record numbers,” Sitka planning director Amy Ainslie said.
Following completion of a new, privately-owned cruise ship dock, Sitka could receive as many as 400,000 passengers this summer, 100,000 more than the previous record. The town could see as many as 8,000 visitors in a single day, roughly equal to its population.
The idea for the grant arose from the observation that a number of organizations and businesses were already opening their facilities to the public during tourism season, Ainslie said.
“We thought it would be nice to be compensated for that because what they’re doing is not free. … But also, if we can get others to do the same, it’s a great use of existing facilities,” she said.
In exchange for keeping bathroom facilities clean and open to the public during business hours between May 1 and Sept. 30, participating businesses and organizations receive a minimum grant of $1,000.
Funding for the program comes from Sitka’s share of the state’s commercial passenger vessel excise tax, a fee levied on cruise ship companies based on passenger numbers. The law requires revenue to go toward infrastructure and services used by passengers.
So far, Sitka’s program has been getting a positive response, Ainslie said. “Between businesses opening their doors and having new temporary restrooms as well, we seem to be meeting demand.”
The challenge of bulking up infrastructure to meet a seasonal visitor influx is one that many Southeast communities have faced over the years.
Haines Borough manager Annette Kreitzer said she hasn’t heard complaints about the number of public bathrooms in Haines but there is some question about how clean they should be kept.
“The cleanliness of ours is our issue, not so much the number,” Kreitzer said. She said borough staff is working with the contractor that cleans the bathrooms to determine how best to keep the facilities sanitary.
“In Haines, it took us over a decade to figure out the restrooms by Port Chilkoot Dock,” said Southeast Conference executive director and former Haines Borough manager Robert Venables. Figuring out who was going to use the facility and who should be responsible for the cost of building and maintaining the facility took a long time, he said.
At the high end of visitor traffic are Skagway and Juneau, each with several large ships on the same day for much of the summer.
Skagway recently completed construction of a $2 million public restroom using a mix of cruise ship passenger tax and sales tax revenue.
The new bathroom took eight months to build, Skagway Mayor Andrew Cremata said.
“In Juneau, (a restroom shortage) is definitely something that we’ve experienced in the past,” said Alexandra Pierce, the borough’s tourism manager. “We’ve put a lot of effort into using (cruise ship passenger tax revenue) to build additional restrooms,” she said, noting that this year Juneau’s restroom facilities appear to be meeting demand.
“Cruise ship infrastructure planning is a weird crystal ball exercise,” she said. “It’s hard to know what you need until something feels a little overwhelming, and then you have to move the dial and create new infrastructure.”
Even with a fraction of Sitka’s cruise ship traffic — fewer than 20,000 passengers this summer — Wrangell also gets a significant number of independent travelers walking through downtown in need of a rest stop.
There are two public restroom facilities in downtown Wrangell — at the Nolan Center and the small borough-owned and maintained structure behind the Elks Lodge. The borough contracted for porta-potties over the Fourth of July and is looking at other, more longer-term options, borough manager Jeff Good said last week.
Expanding the facilities behind the Elks Lodge could cost several hundred thousand dollars, he said, but the borough has researched the possibility of bringing in portable toilets in trailers, something a little nicer than porta-potties. Connecting any restrooms to the borough’s sewage system, rather than using a holding tank that needs to be pumped out, would add to the cost, Good said.
It can take years to secure funding for a new restroom, and then bid and build it.
Sitka is uncertain whether it will continue the $1,000 business grant program next year. “The way that we wrote our plan is that we’re heavily focused on the 2022 season. We will reassess in the fall what worked and what elements we need to change,” Ainslie said.
Sentinel writer Larry Persily and Chilkat Valley News writer Max Graham contributed to this report.