The Ketchikan Gateway Borough is considering a proposal to raise airport parking rates.
The parking rate increase is part of a larger rate and fee proposal for the Ketchikan International Airport. According to the proposal, which the Borough Assembly considered last week, the airport is working towards expansion and increasing rates and fees would help them pay for it.
The price of airport parking on the Ketchikan side is currently $2 dollars a day, and double that across the Tongass Narrows on the airport side. Both rates would see an increase of $1.50. Those may sound like small numbers, but as Assistant Mayor Glen Thompson pointed out, they add up.
“That’s a huge jump. It’s called hitting a wall, in my opinion,” Thompson said at the meeting.
The assistant mayor also called the situation a product of lack of foresight. He said the Borough should have been making incremental rate increases.
“This is the type of thing that happens when we don’t raise the fees on a regular basis, on an annual or more often basis, because in some cases, we’re looking at 40% increases in the rates of these,” he said. On the Ketchikan side, the $1.50 raise is actually a 75% increase.
The Ketchikan airport manager Alex Peura took the podium after Thompson spoke to say that Ketchikan has the lowest airport fees in the region. He said that even with the increase, Petersburg’s parking rate is twice as much and Juneau’s is more than triple.
He said that parking serves as a subsidy to the ferry. But currently, rates are so cheap that people are storing their cars there long-term, and not ever using the ferry.
The proposal doesn’t include a rate change for the ferry itself.
The assembly set the public hearing on the rate change for their meeting on April 1.
