KCAW - Sitka

As a record-breaking cruise season in Sitka comes to a close with the promise of another equally busy summer on the horizon in 2024, some are wondering how Sitka can sustain its tourist boom. Now a group of Sitkans is calling for a cap on the number of cruise passengers next year. They want to put that question out to the voters in a special election this winter.

Sitkan Larry Edwards has drafted a ballot initiative before. In 1995, the former pulp mill employee organized an effort to limit clear cutting.

“It was to establish a zone within 35 miles of downtown that would be clear-cut free,” Edwards says. “It lost by four votes.”

He hopes his newest initiative doesn’t meet the same fate. When asked whether cruise tourism is more or less extractive than logging, he smiles and says he’ll have to think about that. Either way, he thinks it too should be limited.

“It’s just absolute chaos. I feel that the cruise industry thinks it’s the planning director of the city and that we have to march to its orders,” Edwards says. “I think we need to take control back.”

This summer, cruise ships brought around 560,000 people to Sitka. That broke last year’s new record, and more than doubled any year before that in Sitka’s history. Edwards thinks it’s time to ask Sitkans where the bar should be.

“There have been a number of surveys done that have shown that about two-thirds of people in town think it’s way over the top, and has been for quite a while. It’s been controversial since the 1990s,” Edwards says. “And nobody’s really ever asked…the people of the city of Sitka what they want, and asked them to vote on some number. This is the first, and someone had to stick their neck out to do it.”

For the last few months, Edwards has been quietly drafting an ordinance that would ask voters to decide whether Sitka should establish a “port district” on its road system and limit cruise visitation to 240,000 people next year.

He’s using Bar Harbor Maine as a template. Like Sitka, Bar Harbor’s cruise ship dock is privately owned. Last November, voters approved an initiative to cap cruise traffic, which could take effect next summer, pending litigation.

“The initiative set a flat limit of 1000 persons per day, crew plus passengers, that would be allowed to get off of any number of cruise ships that came to town. That past two-to-one,” Edwards says. “It’s very stringent. And what I have in this initiative is much more relaxed than that, and rather than just having a flat number, there’s some logic to the numbers that are in it.”

Edwards took the last 20 pre-pandemic years of cruise traffic with passenger counts over 200,000, and made the average the cap. The ordinance also includes a weekly cap of just over 13,000 as well as daily limits. It also would require the cruise companies to secure permits with the city and provide the city with daily updated data on passenger and crew counts.

Edwards turned the ordinance into city hall on Friday morning (9-15-23) with the signatures of 44 other sponsors. As of press time, Municipal Administrator John Leach hadn’t seen the initiative, so he couldn’t comment on its specifics, but he’d anticipated that a ballot proposition was coming down the pike. On Friday, Leach published a letter addressing the city’s response to tourism, warning that a ballot initiative to limit tourism comes with economic, constitutional and legal concerns.

“My hope was that…we as the city, we would get more of an opportunity to continue working with the stakeholders,” Leach says. “We had hoped that our tourism taskforce and the great work that we’re doing there would have an opportunity to take hold and produce something. Because I think an agreement with stakeholders that’s not so restrictive is the better path forward.”

“So knowing that that conversation was taking place, I felt like this was the appropriate time to get the information out there and kind of let everybody know what the risks are, and what the concerns are with with more restrictive measures.”

He worries that any ballot initiative to limit cruise traffic could lead to litigation. That’s been the case in Bar Harbor where local business owners sued the city. A federal judge is expected to issue a ruling in the case soon.

“There is a big litigation risk, and the way we’re going to have to pay for that litigation, when and if it comes this way, is right out of our general fund. And our general fund is what pays for our public schools, it pays for our infrastructure, and it pays for our public safety,” Leach says. “So the litigation costs are going to have to come from somewhere…if we get to a place where stakeholders decide to pursue this in a legal matter.”

Leach feels that the city is doing what it can to respond to the influx. In addition to the work of the tourism task force the assembly established last year, he’s collaborating with other Southeast communities with plans to develop an agreement with the cruise industry, similar to the recent “memorandum of understanding” Juneau struck.

But Edwards thinks Sitka needs to respond faster. He believes the ordinance is pro-tourism, pro-Sitka, just trying to find the right size for it. And it’s meant to be a stopgap.

“So the idea is to give Sitka the relief it needs for 2024 and then, win or lose, it’s going to get some good discussion going. If it wins, it’ll be in place for a year,” Edwards says. “In the interim, we can be working as a community towards what we want to do more longer term for 2025 and beyond.”

Whether Edwards’ initiative will make it on the ballot yet remains unclear. First, he has to collect just over 800 signatures- a third of the voters in the last municipal election. He has three months to do that, but he hopes to knock it out in three weeks. Then the ballot prop must be vetted by the city. If it gets the green light, Sitkans could be voting on cruise limits in a special election by early December.

As Sitka heads toward a record cruise season, with over half-a-million visitors, some obvious things are up — like sales tax revenue and traffic.

But some less obvious metrics are on the rise, too. Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium health educator Amanda Roberts saw one change in particular coming as far back as 2018, when Alaska passed its smoke-free workplace law.

“I went and engaged with these businesses that were going to be going smoke-free, and talked to concerns: What were some worries that were coming down the line with this change, which was going to be a big change for the community?” said Roberts. “And one of the things that was expressed was concerns of increased cigarette butt litter.”

Roberts decided to be proactive over concerns about cigarette butts, and organized a monthly cleanup focused on downtown Sitka. Since 2018, what started as a community service has become a legitimate scientific study.

Roberts says the record cruise season correlates to a staggering increase in cigarette litter.

“And it’s prevalent, I just want to say,” Roberts said. “We can have, within an hour-and-a-half to two-hour span,1 over 2,000 cigarette butts. We count every single cigarette butt. We track this data.”

Roberts is a former smoker, about to celebrate her fourteenth anniversary since quitting. And while she’s professionally motivated to help others quit for the sake of their good health, Roberts is continuing the butt cleanup for the sake of everyone else.

“Cigarette butts are the number-one littered item in the world,” Roberts said. “And they are not biodegradable. They are extremely toxic for the environment and anything that picks them up or touches them. So we definitely don’t use our hands. But there are concerns about having these things littered on the ground, and in the waterways in the environment.”

The transect Robert’s team follows on its cleanup begins at Sitka’s community playground, follows the Seawalk along the Crescent Harbor park strip, and then moves into downtown which, on busy days, is made into a traffic-free pedestrian mall. Roberts hopes that one day Sitka would consider a policy to make the park and playground areas tobacco-free. She believes it would significantly help the effort to keep kids from taking up smoking.

“One thing we’re super-focused on in the work that I do is reducing youth initiation to these products,” she said, “and I think the more we create those environments, the more we’re creating the kind of that norm where tobacco use is not even visible.”

And fewer smokers, Roberts believes, is the key to reducing cigarette litter. Roberts says any Alaskan resident is eligible to enroll in a free cessation program, the Alaska Quit Line, which is still available at its phone number 1-800-QUIT-NOW, or online at alaskaquitline.com.

Earlier this spring, one of the most influential producers in music passed away. Chris Strachwitz was born in Germany at the end of World War II and emigrated with his family to the United States, where he grew to love the distinctive jazz and blues of his new home. His label, Arhoolie Records, put artists like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi Fred McDowell on the map, and fostered the careers of big names like Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder.

For Sitkan Suzanne Portello, the passing of Chris Strachwitz was an invitation for a pilgrimage back to the Bay Area, and to Down Home Music, the record store where Arhoolie was formerly housed.

KCAW’s Robert Woolsey suggested that Portello make an audio postcard of her journey.

Listen:

Transcript:

Music – “Amari Szi Amari” by Cskólom.

Portello: “Hi, Robert. I’m sending you the song that started my journey down the Arhoolie wormhole. This is Suzanne Portello.”

KCAW: This the Hungarian Gypsy band Cskólom, performing “Amari Szi Amari.” It’s good background for a road trip, or in this case, a pilgrimage.

Portello (on a bus): I’m here in Half Moon Bay, starting on my journey by way of a series of buses and trains to get to Down Home Music in El Cerrito.

KCAW: The final leg of this journey, as with all pilgrimages, is on foot.

Portello (walking down San Pablo Ave.): So I’m passing by the Good Stuff Thrift Shop on my way to Down Home Music on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito, and it’s been quite a journey.

Portello (entering Down Home Music): “In the background you’ll hear music playing pretty much all the time here. And I’m back looking at the selection of LPs that were produced by Arhoolie back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and it encompasses Cajun, Zydeco, Country, Folk, Norteño, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, and World.”

KCAW: Down Home is a kind of music heaven for Portello – for anyone, really. Her father played the accordion, and amassed an impressive collection of 78’s – a vinyl record which spun at 78 revolutions per minute, which preceded the 45 rpm singles of the rock ‘n roll era, and the LPs – or long-play albums that followed those.

And who do you suppose sits behind the counter in Music Heaven?

J.C.: “J.C.”

Portello: “J.C., right.”

J.C.: “Anything phonetically close I will respond to. Not to be confused with the other J.C.”

Portello: “But no pretensions to divinity?”

J.C.: “No. Not at all. If anything I’m the complete opposite.”

KCAW: J.C. has worked at Down Home for the last 20 years, much of that time as co-manager.

Portello: “So the storefront opened in ‘76, and Chris started the company in ‘60?”

J.C.: “Yeah, that’s right. The record company.”

KCAW: Arhoolie may have long since disappeared, an obscure record label promoting obscure artists, but for Country Joe and the Fish. That may sound like a jug band, but Country Joe and the Fish was a psychedelic rock group fronted by Joe MacDonald and Barry “The Fish” Melton. Portello was there.

Portello: “I never personally knew Joe, but I did know ‘The Fish.’ When Barry Melton lived in San Francisco, I lived in the same building as he did in the Mission, and we were neighbors.”

KCAW: As Country Joe’s label, Arhoolie owned the publishing rights to his songs. While no one would have considered this a gold mine, as luck would have it, Joe was invited to Woodstock – yes, that Woodstock in 1969 – where he performed “Rock & Soul Music.”

KCAW: “Rock & Soul Music” made it into the Woodstock movie, onto the movie soundtrack, and into the money. That’s why Suzanne Portello can pick up an Arhoolie release of American classics like Elizabeth Cotten or Earl Hooker – or the Hungarian Gypsy band Cskólom – 63 years after the label was founded by the recently departed Chris Strachwitz.

Portello: “Doesn’t it ever smack you in the face, this history that you know about, and are a part of with this store?”

J.C.: “I guess it’s been so long…”

Portello: “It’s really neat, really neat. I appreciate your talking to me and letting me look around. I’m going to turn this (recorder) off.”

Alaska has no shortage of marine predators – from orcas to Steller sea lions to salmon sharks. Over the past few years, researchers have identified a new, lesser-known predator that may play a key role in keeping Alaska’s kelp forests healthy.

Third-year graduate student Nikita Sridhar reaches deep into a tank in the basement lab of the Sitka Sound Science Center looking for what she calls an “underappreciated predator.” These creatures are such effective hunters that when they enter an area, it’s like you can hear the screams underwater,” Sridhar says. “Everyone’s just trying to flee the scene.”

Sridhar wrestles the creature out of the tank and holds it up to the light — a dinner-plate-sized purple sea star.

Sunflower stars are the focus of Sridhar’s research this summer through her work with Professor Kristy Kroeker at University of California, Santa Cruz. Sridhar hopes to build on previous research to learn more about how sunflower stars could help protect coastal kelp forests.

Sea stars may not intimidate us humans, but to a population of sea urchins, they’re a formidable predator.

“They basically throw their stomachs out, they lift up their arms, and then part of their stomach from the underside is thrown out,” Sridhar said. “And then they engulf the urchin.”

The sea star in her hands shows recent evidence of such grisly events — its stomach protrudes out of its body, and crushed urchin spines dot its many arms.

While unfortunate for the urchin, this kind of predation is good for the ecosystem. Urchins eat kelp, and too many urchins can decimate kelp forests that sequester carbon, which mitigates the effects of climate change, and provide homes to many critters.

“They’re like skyscrapers that create homes for all these different animals,” Sridhar said.

Keeping kelp forests healthy requires a balance of kelp-eating ‘grazers’, like urchins and abalone, and predators – like sea stars – who eat the grazers.

“If you lose one part of this puzzle – for example, you lose an important predator – then you might have too many grazers,” Sridhar said.

That’s happened before – a decline in the population of sea otters, a well-known predator of urchins and other kelp-eating critters, led to the spread of “urchin barrens” along the Pacific coast, where urchins have mowed down entire kelp forests.

Now, researchers are trying to figure out if, and how, other predators such as sunflower stars could play a complementary role in protecting the kelp forests.

Sunflower stars eat urchins, but Sridhar suspects that they may also affect urchin behavior in other ways. In her work this summer, she is trying to figure out if the mere presence of a sea star can cause urchins to eat less kelp.

“Just sensing this predator might lead to the urchins being scared into eating less kelp,” Sridhar said. “They might be investing their energy into running away from the predator or hiding in little crevices rather than just roaming on the seafloor, eating kelp as they please.”

In one experiment, Sridhar situates a caged sunflower star in the center of a tank full of urchins. She wants to see if the urchins move away from the cage, or eat less kelp, when they sense that a sea star is nearby. Out in Sitka Sound, her team is running similar experiments, tracking the path of a sunflower star and seeing how long it takes for urchins and abalone to return to those spots, or “whether that slime trail of a sea star is so strong that they’re too scared to come back, basically.”

If sunflower stars serve as vigilante kelp guardians, that’s exciting news for the kelp forests, especially if the sea star population rebounds. Sea star wasting disease has plagued the West Coast over the past decade, dissolving huge swathes of sea stars. Sunflower stars were hit especially hard by the epidemic.

Sridhar said they’ve seen more mature sunflower stars around Sitka Sound this summer than expected. That is, at least tentatively, cause for celebration.

“It’s exciting that we are seeing them this summer, and hopefully these populations persist through time,” Sridhar said. “We’ll see.”

Sridhar doesn’t have results back yet, but she’s excited to see how these sunflower stars might help protect kelp forests by creating what she cheerfully calls a “landscape of fear” for urchin populations.

The Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium is closing its home health department in Sitka at the end of September. While the organization maintains that the closure is largely an administrative move, and that outpatient services – and in-home care – should be unaffected, some Sitkans are concerned that both the expense and quality of end-of-life care will change dramatically.

Sitkan Cindy Litman’s home smells like warm flour and butter. She’s just pulled a few trays of cookies out of the oven. Her three cats lounge in a living room filled with books and art and photographs. This is the home she and her late husband Tony shared in his final years.

Tony was diagnosed with Atypical Parkinson’s Disease in 2014. At the time, they were living in a two-story home in Sitka.

“He got to the point where he couldn’t navigate the stairs in our house, and our bedrooms and full bath were upstairs,” Litman says. “It was a pretty small lot, and we weren’t really able to make the changes we would need to make the house accessible.”

They decided to move to Olympia, Washington, to be near family and easier access to the specialized care Tony needed. And while they had better access to neurologists and cardiologists, Litman says the experience taught her how fragmented healthcare in America is.

“What was striking to me was that there was no coordination of care between those different doctors, so he would see one person and they would have no idea what the other health providers were doing,” Litman says. “And even though the health care was, I’m sure, considered good, it felt very alienating.”

And they missed Sitka, the community that had been their home for over a decade. Nine months later, friends back home were selling a house that would accommodate Tony’s changing mobility. Even though they worried that there were no practitioners specializing in Parkinson’s in Sitka, they jumped on the opportunity and moved back.

That’s when they learned about what was then Sitka Community Hospital’s home health program.

“It was my first experience, really, with coordinated care. They were much more in tune to his situation than his primary care physician,” Litman says. “If it seemed like his medicine needed tweaking, or if he needed another kind of therapy or a swallowing test, they were right on top of it. These changes happened very frequently as his situation changed.”

Tony passed away on Valentine’s Day in 2019. Two months later, Sitka Community Hospital was acquired by the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC.

“The point of home health and post acute care, community based care, is we bring a comprehensive team to you,” says Emily Rivas. She was the first clinical manager for SEARHC’s home health department, which was created in 2018, a year before the SCH acquisition.

“From an allocation of resources standpoint, there’s not a lot of duplication, because there’s one plan of care, and everybody works together on that,” Rivas says. “The communication is pretty tight, we’re supposed to meet and discuss the patients as a whole, looking at their long term plan, chronic disease processes, build relationships, encourage better health habits.”

“We will sit down and do your medication box, but then also take a look at your medications and see, ‘Well 27 medications is just too gosh darn much. Let me call your cardiologist, diabetes doctor, and your primary and see if we can’t get rid of some of this and make it a little bit easier.’”

Like its predecessor at Sitka Community Hospital, SEARHC’s Home Health department provided everything from physical and occupational therapy to skilled nursing and end-of-life care in a home setting for anywhere from a dozen to 25 patients at a time. But this summer, SEARHC announced it would be closing the office.

“It’s an administrative structure that creates some possibilities in terms of care, but also limits some possibilities in terms of care,” says SEARHC’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Elliot Bruh. He says it’s the home health “structure” they’re getting rid of, but not the service.

“There’s some types of care that people need in a home environment that don’t qualify under that type of program. And then there’s other kinds of care that we’ve been providing,” Bruhl says. “There’s been a lot of issues that we’ve been struggling with, and we’ve decided that we’re going to close that entity, that structure, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop caring for patients, or that we somehow can’t provide care to patients.”

Bruhl says SEARHC is closing the office mainly due to federal regulations that make operating it challenging and inefficient. He says the regulations are directed at larger cities and larger hospitals with more resources that can more easily sustain full home health programs with separate medical staffs.

“I would kind of describe it like building an international airport in a location where what you really need is an airstrip,” Bruhl says.

Bruhl says SEARHC will continue to provide service referrals in the home environment through both its Mountainside Urgent Care Clinic and the hospital’s outpatient clinic. And although it’s never had a formal hospice program,the home health department has been providing some end-of-life services. Bruhl says they’ll still be able to do that. Right now they’re working through the logistics.

“We also provide really intensive types of end of life care in the hospital,” Bruhl says. “And I think we’re anticipating that we may, at times, project that care also into our long-term care facility when we need to. So our intention is not to abandon that care, abandon patients or leave patients who need that type of care without access to those services, it’s just we’re not going to provide it through this department.”

Litman says the care her husband received through home health ensured the best quality of life possible, even as his health declined.

“When I think about even the last few years, when his mobility was so restricted, he lived a rich life. We had company, we had Christmas with all the grandchildren and their children,” Litman says. “The idea that he would be in a skilled nursing home for that time, to me, just seems cruel and horrifying.”

And expensive. Litman says Tony’s home health costs were far less than had he lived in a skilled nursing facility – and Medicare covered the bills. She is skeptical that the same level of care will be provided outside of the home health umbrella, and she feels that the decision is primarily driven by finances.

“If you think about someone like Tony, if they had been in skilled nursing for two years, it would have been a million dollars. I mean, I can’t even imagine how much money that would have cost instead,” she says. “Medicare pays for home health because home health has been shown to be so effective in keeping people out of the hospital, that even part A, which is the hospitalization part of of Medicare, will pay for home health services. So it it concerns me that this is driven by by money, rather than by medical needs of people.”

Rivas, who left SEARHC in 2020 and now works as a hospice nurse in Oregon, says home health helps create better continuity of care, and doesn’t think the outcomes for patients can be replicated through outpatient services. She’s disappointed that the program she helped establish is going away.

“In a town of 9000, what we put together was much better than nothing, and it would just be really unfortunate to have that integrated,” Rivas says. “It takes time for people to build trust, especially in a community like Sitka, and to have that now, and then have it go away, it’s gonna be really hard to change yet again, in such a short period of time.”

SEARHC’S Home Health has eight staff, both medical and administrative, who were notified about the closure in July. Bruhl says all will be offered jobs in other departments beginning in October.

During the regular legislative session this spring, there was concern over the Permanent Fund earnings reserve — which is the portion of the fund available to both pay for government services and pay dividends to residents. But with so many other bills and hearings in play, it didn’t get much notice.

Then in July, at the quarterly meeting of the Alaska Permanent Fund board of trustees, CEO Deven Mitchell reported that – even with relatively favorable investment returns – the spendable portion of the fund would be exhausted by the summer of 2027.

“Most people didn’t want to hear it,” said Sen. Bert Stedman. “But the people in the financial arena recognized the fire alarm is starting to ring.”

Stedman has served in the Legislature for 20 years. A private capital manager before entering state politics, Stedman was appointed by then-Gov. Frank Murkowski because of his financial acumen. He is an ardent conservative, in the original sense of that word: He is not going to spend down the Permanent Fund — the state’s $80 billion oil-wealth nest egg — to resolve short-term budget problems, or to placate the constituencies of newer members who’ve been promised unrealistically large dividends.

But he’s only one legislator among 60. Not everyone in the capitol – or in the governor’s office –  is on the same page.

“If the Legislature goes haywire and does all these overdraws, and starts pulling out, you know, $2.8 billion for dividends, the house will be on financial fire and won’t be easy to put out,” Stedman said. “So that was one of the big driving factors why the Senate refused to overdraw the Permanent Fund, and refused to do a large dividend. It wasn’t because we don’t want to pay out things that are popular and the people want. Sometimes there’s just financial necessity you have to deal with, just like your personal checkbook. Sometimes you just got to do what you got to do.”

That means limiting the size of permanent fund dividends. For the last half-dozen years, the Legislature has put 5-percent of the Permanent Fund’s market value into the earnings reserve, where it can be spent. The governor has argued for a 50-50 split of the earnings reserve between dividends and state government.

The Senate disagreed, and passed a dividend calculated on just a quarter of the earnings reserve, which would still come to about $1,300 for every Alaska resident. The House hasn’t accepted the new split yet, so other measures were enacted to keep the earnings reserve afloat, such as cutting corners on inflation-proofing the Permanent Fund itself. Any other year, the Legislature would have returned over $4 billion to the fund’s main account. This year, that didn’t happen.

“I think we put in a little over a billion,” said Stedman. “Holding back some liquidity, we can do the same thing next year. In their (Alaska Permanent Fund Corp.) calculations, they look at fully funding the inflation-proofing. We could skip it for a year or two if we had to, or reduce it, like we did this year to keep the dividend stream going, and then pick it up when the markets become more robust. But what you can’t do is start over-drawing the Permanent Fund.”

There is another strategy that’s gaining momentum in the Legislature, which would end the fight over the earnings reserve, and that’s ending the earnings reserve itself. Instead of two accounts, just have the main Permanent Fund account, and set a hard cap – in the constitution – on withdrawals, which would prevent future legislatures from spending it all away.

Stedman is a fan.

“Yes, no doubt about it,” he said. “And that would protect a Permanent Fund, except if there’s a super need where you had to go to the public and then have to vote to take it out – which people would if we had a big earthquake or some really nasty disaster. But other than that, I don’t think they would. And that would force the Legislature and the administration and the entire state to live with a 5-percent range. But it takes a constitutional amendment.”

Stedman considers the Alaska Permanent Fund — on scale — to be one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. Norway and Saudi Arabia have more money, but they have far more people. He’d rather have the Permanent Fund last in perpetuity and not be exhausted in a generation or two — even if that means a lower dividend check. As co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and in charge of the state’s operating budget, he’s got a lot of leverage to help other legislators see things his way. But he’s also got two decades in the Senate under his belt, and he understands the price of looking the other way when the alarm bell rings.

“I guess it comes with the territory and experience, some people can see a collision coming and some people can’t,” he said.