When fresh-faced tourists arrive on the shores of Ketchikan, they are often greeted on the docks by vendors in wooden booths. In recent years, the city and independent vendors have proposed changes to the dock vendor program. Not everyone is happy about it. The big questions facing the program were discussed on November 1 at a listening session with Ketchikan’s new tourism manager.
“Does the city have an obligation to provide vending space on the port of Ketchikan for private tour providers? Anyone want to start tackling that one?”
Those were the kinds of questions being asked by Laurie Booyse to a room full of Ketchikan residents on that cold Wednesday night. Many are business owners, some city council members –all here to discuss the city’s dock vendor program.
Booyse is the city’s newly appointed tourism manager. She has inherited an ongoing debate about the program. The debate materialized at the beginning of this year, when a proposed shakeup to the waterfront business model slid across the desks of city officials. The proposal was to change the system for securing the coveted wooden booths from a sealed-bid system to a lottery. They said the current system unfairly favored the same big vendors. The city council rejected the change. That was the beginning of January.
The recent listening session picked the conversation back up following a year when the docks were flooded with a record number of cruise ship tourists.
Mason Hightower of Sourdough Tours agreed that it is important to bring smaller companies into the program, but maybe not right now.
“If the city starts making these strides to bring a smaller company into the dock vendor program, and then at the end of the next three year period, we decide as a community that the traffic has reached a point where it’s just not viable to have us on the dock anymore, you’ve essentially just doomed this company, this brand new company to the mountain of debt that comes with the volume that we all face on a daily basis,” said Hightower. “I mean, you’re setting someone up for failure, if you’re bringing them in while we’re in the state of flux for this program right now.”
The docks’ inaccessibility for newer, smaller vendors was still on the docket but the tone of the conversation is different now, almost existential. The number of cruise ship passengers this summer posed new questions about volume and infrastructure, and what the independent vendors’ role is on the crowded dock.
Vendors are worried that the city is trying to force them off the dock. Dan Berg, the port and harbors director, bristled a bit at the suggestion. He said he is not against the dock vendor system, but he has to file reports with the U.S. Coast Guard with options for how to move forward. And one of those options has to be the nuclear one.
“I have to consider security and safety first. Well above the needs of five or six business owners. So that’s where I’m coming from. When I was asked for options of what to do with the booths, a very viable option was to get rid of them off the port. That has to be a viable option to consider at this point,” Berg said.
Berg agreed with both the city council and vendors that it isn’t the best option. The dock vendor program has existed for over 30 years. But the problems aren’t in the past, they are happening right now.
“But you guys also have – when you talk about “historically”, the city has done this historically, historically, historically. You have to look at what we’re up against now versus 25 or 30 years ago. This has changed the whole landscape of the port and what our concerns are. Because if we can’t run the port securely and safely, the ships can’t tie up. If the ships can’t tie up, you’re not going to sell tours, you’re not going to sell tours, you’re not going to sell tours,” Berg said pointing to different vendors around the room, “because there’s going to be no one to sell them to.”
Berg was warning that there is a more nuclear possibility because of the precarious nature of Ketchikan’s port. It is one of the only ports in the world that is completely open to the general public, he said. At virtually any moment, the Coast Guard could tell the city to put a fence around it. And as Berg repeated, as if a mantra, “We don’t want that.”
Over the phone the next day, Booyse said that what she and city officials were asking was this: in light of these looming infrastructure issues, what has the dock vendor program grown into and where is it headed?
Specifically, does the city owe vendors dock space?
Steve McDonald of Dolly’s House Museum was the first to answer: “When I first got into the business, people laughed at me when they found out what I was doing. Because the cruise ships were so small, there was only one over 1050. And so, does the city have an obligation? Legally? Probably not. But now that we’ve been doing it for 30 years, and we have proven track records, I think it would be one heck of an interesting legal battle.”
Many of the vendors explain the importance of the program. It gets our kids off their iPads and teaches them about work and connection, someone says. The program creates jobs, someone else adds, local jobs. Not cruise ship jobs.
Hightower says that as bigger, fuller cruise ships come to Ketchikan, tour vendors operating on the docks also serve a critical and sometimes overlooked clientele. The independent traveler.
“I mean, I don’t know if you guys have looked at the prices of cruises recently or the excursions or onboard those ships, but you’re talking $300-$400-$500 excursions that a lot of people just can’t afford, we offer an option for our guests who maybe aren’t in the best position financially to be doing $10,000-a-person cruises, because that’s just not a realistic vacation for most of the people that are coming here.”
As these big questions are being discussed, the PowerPoint slide above attendees’ heads asks, “Is the dock vendor program still relevant?”
Mason Hightower again: “I can say that it definitely is. You can tell that that program is still beneficial not just to our company, but to the community and to the people who are visiting our community. I mean, we have legitimate metrics that are in the spreadsheet that we’ve been studying prepping for next year. That says yes, is still a huge deal.”
Booyse said the information from the listening session and the responses to the city’s survey on the dock vendor program will be put into a report for Ketchikan City Council. She said this conversation is just beginning – she hopes to have more listening sessions in the future.
