Sitka hosted more than 13,000 cruise-ship visitors in one day last week. That’s nearly one and a half times the roughly 8,300 people that live in the community, based on the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Sitkans understood that there would be days like this: Visitors shoulder-to-shoulder along the roughly five blocks of Lincoln Street that were closed to vehicle traffic for the occasion.
Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz owns a retail store in the heart of this area. At Tuesday’s assembly meeting, he wondered aloud whether June 21 was a bonanza — or a lesson in overcrowding.
“The general consensus that I got was, if you had a storefront, you said it was too many people. If you had a food truck, or you were out on the street like that, you generally liked it because you sold out early and you got to go home,” Eisenbeisz said. “The feeling even from the merchants who stand to profit from that was that 10,000 people in one day was far too many. And I say that not because it was one or two, but it was everybody.”
Sitka administrator John Leach said he took a walk downtown to visit with business owners. Leach told the assembly that it wasn’t just Sitka’s main street that was overcrowded.
“Trying to do work at City Hall, our bandwidth was gone,” Leach said. “And our computers slowed to a crawl, and our phones weren’t working. So I know other communities have had these issues before. I know Juneau had these issues when they had their cruise boom. And I reminded some of the folks that I talked to in the cruise industry of some of the early discussions we had about over commitment of Sitka’s resources. And where is that balance?”
Off of main street, other organizations were also feeling the pinch. The Sitka Sound Science Center announcing that they were reducing their hours and closing at 3 p.m. Center director Lisa Busch says her organization values the opportunity to educate people about science, salmon, and the ocean, but this was just too many people.
“We are just realizing what our carrying capacity is for that, for our staff and for our building,” Busch told KCAW in a phone interview. “We just can’t take all the people that want to come all at once.”
Busch says closing earlier will give her staff a chance to prepare for the next day and fulfill other functions at the center, which is a year-round scientific research facility.
The high volume of cruise passengers in Sitka on June 21 was caused by the simultaneous visits of the Ruby Princess, the Eurodam and the Quantum of the Seas. Those same three ships are scheduled to be back in port on July 19.
