Juneau Stays Firm on Visitor Limits Despite Dock Proposal

A planned cruise dock expansion in Juneau could create additional berthing space, but city officials say there is no intention to raise the number of cruise visitors allowed to arrive.

In a conversation with Cruise Industry News, Alexandra Pierce, Tourism Director for the City and Borough of Juneau (CBJ), emphasized that Juneau remains committed to managing tourism sustainably and noted that the proposed project has not yet been approved.

“We’re one of the communities in the world that has negotiated cruise ship limits, and we don’t have any plans to change those limits,” she said.

Juneau currently observes a voluntary cap of five ships per day, which keeps daily passenger volume stable.

“We’re proud of having these negotiated agreements with the cruise industry,” she said, mentioning that the agreements “were pretty hard fought.”

Pierce explained that Goldbelt’s proposal to add more cruise berths is still awaiting approval from local officials.

“They had some preliminary meetings with the city regarding their plans. However, there are very extensive permitting and reviewing processes pending, not just by us, but also by other government agencies that would be impacted,” she said.

Pierce added that while a new dock could technically allow more ships to tie up, the number of visitors the city can host depends on far more than berth availability.

“These limits that we have in place allow us to manage for the volume that we have today,” she said.

Increasing visitor numbers, she noted, would affect transportation systems, emergency services and other public infrastructure.

“All of that needs to be taken into consideration before adding an additional 500,000 people to a port that already sees 1.7 million visitors a year,” she said.

“In order to raise those limits, we would need to see some pretty significant infrastructure improvements, which is what our city council is kind of grappling with right now.”

Juneau will soon assemble a visitor industry task force to review these issues as well.

“One of the things that we’re asking them is under what conditions can Juneau grow? What are our infrastructure needs? What are our criteria for being able to welcome more passengers?”

She noted that infrastructure upgrades are underway, but these efforts are designed to better accommodate the current volume.

“While infrastructure is a great destination management tool, it’s also a very slow destination management tool and very expensive,” she said.

“We want to make sure that we fully recognize and understand the burden on our public facilities of any sort of growth and how we can mitigate that burden going into the future,” she added.