On the heels of the Haines Borough’s negotiations with American Cruise Lines falling through, the Chilkoot Indian Association is finalizing a similar deal with the company at the tribe’s Portage Cove dock.
The company, in an effort to expand its small cruise-ship operations in Southeast Alaska, has been pursuing docking deals with nearby governments, including one recently-finalized agreement in Wrangell to build and operate a municipal dock.
American Cruise Lines already operates in Haines, but only at the downtown cruise ship dock, where their smaller ships have to tender passengers to and from shore. Negotiations with the borough about the company landing at Letnikof Cove — in exchange for $4 million in funding for dock reconstruction — would’ve given the company a smaller dock for passengers to walk onto, and exclusive moorage space. Before negotiations fell through, the company had proposed two landings per week at Letnikof, harbormaster Henry Pollan said last week.
Now, after abruptly withdrawing its offer to the Haines Borough, the cruise line looks to be moving toward operating from the Chilkoot Indian Association’s dock in Portage Cove.
Haines Borough assembly member Gabe Thomas announced the tribe’s potential deal last month at an assembly meeting. Thomas is also the director of the Chilkoot Indian Association’s transportation department, and said he would not be participating in any of the negotiations with the cruise line.
Thomas said this week that the cruise line had approached the tribe about the possibility of docking at the CIA dock, and had docked a ship this summer to test the feasibility. But he said he could not comment further about the details of the deal and tribal administrator Harriet Brouillette did not respond to requests for more information.
The CIA dock has been at the center of some of the tribe’s new tourism efforts, including a restaurant, tour operation, and gear shop under the “Discover Deishú” umbrella.
As for Letnikof, it’s not clear how much interest the cruise line still has. At a town hall last week, borough manager Alekka Fullerton said the company had told her they would “love to have two docks, one at (the Chilkoot Indian Association dock) and one at Letnikof.” But at the same time, Fullerton said the company’s initial offer to partially finance Letnikof repairs was — seemingly indefinitely — off the table.
As for the Chilkoot Indian Association’s negotiations, Fullerton said she told American Cruise Lines she “didn’t want to be in competition” with the tribe.
No one from American Cruise Lines has responded to several weeks of phone and email requests for more information, and there has been no official explanation for why it withdrew less than a week after submitting its expanded offer of $4 million to the borough.
If American Cruise Lines does express an interest in returning to Letnikof, it could renew debate on how best to share the facility and the waterway.
At the town hall, a number of local gillnetters said they were concerned that cruise ships in Chilkat Inlet could hamper commercial fishing.
“We used to be able to fish the canal on both sides, now we’ve got deep-draft standard traffic lanes that the cruise ships demand,” said Karl Johnson.
“Put any small cruise ship in there and we have to pick up nets to let them go by,” said Bill Thomas. “Are you going to have a relief fund if they run over your gear? It’s pretty tight there.”
But others say figuring out some compromise is a necessity at a time when the flow of federal and state funding for infrastructure has slowed.
“We are not going to become more self-sufficient by taxing our population,” Fullerton said at the town hall. “We have to figure out other ways of doing that, and it might be a public-private partnership.
We need to change the way we think about things a little bit, and be open to possibilities different from how we’ve done things in the past.”
Cruise ship policy as a whole is a question in front of the community, and one that may have a generational divide, according to a survey of residents commissioned by the borough last year.
In the survey, 52% of “young” survey participants said they believed they could economically benefit from more cruise ships landing in Haines. That share was 49% for “middle” age participants, but only 33% for “old” participants. Overall, a majority of respondents said they were in favor of maintaining the current volume of ships, or a slight increase.