Borough staff and advisory committees hope to negotiate a deal with American Cruise Lines to help fund Letnikof Dock reconstruction and open up the dock to cruise ship business.
The facility has been mostly out of commission after it broke last winter at the end of its projected lifespan. In the last year, the borough has found a replacement design for a new dock, but not the funding to build it.
The design for the rebuild is projected to come with a roughly $9 million price tag. At the moment, the borough has a state grant to fund half of the project. But how it will cover the other $4.5 million remains unknown — especially given its current budget deficit.
Enter American Cruise Lines, which operates over 20 cruise ships nationally, including two in Alaska, with a third coming this summer.
After company staff visited Haines in September, American Cruise Lines submitted a proposal to the borough that offered one possible — though only a partial — solution to funding the dock.
According to the company’s letter of interest, it would contribute $2 million toward the dock project. Each boat would also likely pay docking fees, estimated by harbormaster Henry Pollan at about $1,000 per docking.
In return, the company asks for “priority docking” at the facility for 20 years, with the option to double the length of the contract in two 10-year increments with no additional payment.
Priority docking would entail the company submitting a cruise ship schedule at the beginning of the season, and then the borough reserving space for those ships.
The cruise line did not respond to questions for this story, including whether they had funded any other municipal infrastructure projects in the state.
Likely up to five different American Cruise Lines ships could be coming into Letnikof under the deal, all of them around or under 270 feet in length, carrying 130-200 passengers each, Pollan said.
The company already sends boats to Haines’ Port Chilkoot Dock, but is looking to “expand in Southeast,” Pollan told the Ports and Harbors Advisory Committee.
The company’s Alaska fleet consists of smaller boats, under 270 feet in length, that have challenges when docking downtown. The Port Chilkoot Dock, also known as the cruise ship dock, is not a floating dock. At certain tides, the American Cruise Line ships cannot use a gangway, and instead have to get passengers to shore by skiff, Pollan said.
Letnikof would solve that problem, but also present challenges of its own. The company’s offer asks that the borough provide “coach and delivery truck access” to the dock.
The existing design for the facility also would require some modification to incorporate the cruise ships.
Pollan said there is a verbal agreement between the borough, the cruise line, and the dock designers that if those modifications happen, the cruise line will reimburse the borough for any of the costs. Then, the engineers at engineering firm Moffatt & Nichol would develop the final design along two tracks — one with the cruise-ship modifications and one without. Both would be presented to the public together, Pollan said, at a 95% design review, which has yet to be scheduled.
Any official agreement to do the extra design work, and determine the extra costs the cruise line would be paying, will only occur after review by the borough’s deliberative bodies, Pollan said. So far, that has included just the Ports and Harbors Advisory Committee, which voted in November to recommend negotiating with American Cruise Lines on a potential deal. The Tourism Advisory Board and Planning Commission are also set to weigh in on the topic at their meetings this month.
The cruise line’s offer has faced some early pushback from residents, including subsistence users who worry the cruise ships could crowd out locals.
“I’d rather drag my skiff through rocks, mussels and barnacles than sell out to a corporation that will not prioritize you or me,” wrote dock user Tom Faverty in an early October letter to the editor in the Chilkat Valley News.
Pollan, however, said that isn’t likely to be the case, with cruise ships docking at the dock front facing the cannery and along the northern edge of the float. The bulk of that dock footage, Pollan said, would only be usable for docking because of the new design — “unused or underutilized” on the old dock.
Still, he said, borough staff “are not going to invest a lot of time and energy into a project that doesn’t have strong community buy-in.”
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story said that American Cruise Lines has asked the borough to provide busing for cruise passengers in a potential deal to fund Letnikof Dock construction. The cruise line has only asked the borough to provide coach “access” to the dock.