It’s time for Haines to break it off with large cruise ships.
Twenty-six years after building a downtown dock to lure them here, it’s clear they’re not coming. And we should be glad for that. With COVID-19, the mega-ships have proved themselves virtual germ baths, as if that wasn’t already clear during norovirus and other ship-board outbreaks. Moreover, projections about the post-pandemic tour industry point to resurgence in independent visitors, including RVers, a market that Haines once owned and could easily recapture.
In the early 1990s, the town boasted four, downtown RV parks. Small ships, independent visitors and bus tours filled the Halsingland Hotel and supported a Fort Seward salmon bake, a local melodrama and shows by the Chilkat Dancers. State campgrounds were full to capacity.
Now we should go back there, to return to building the tourism industry we want, not one that was foisted on us by the few, opportunistic locals who became millionaires from the big ships but whose houses mostly stand empty in winter.
Large ships operate on the corporate model: A few at the top make bank while everyone else gets peanuts. We should have gotten wise to this when Walt Disney came to Haines in 1991 to film “White Fang” and refused to pay local carpenters $15 an hour, their going rate.
Instead, Disney imported $7.50-an-hour carpenters from Texas.
This should have been a sign of what was to come, including Walt Disney cruise ships.
Large cruise companies are a gang of cutthroats. Buckwheat Donohue, longtime tourism director in Skagway, expressed this to me on several occasions before his death in 2019.
This became crystal clear when a cruise line subsidiary in February eliminated the jobs of 27 long-term employees on Skagway’s White Pass and Yukon Route railroad.
Although limp media coverage made it sound that the cuts were COVID-related and limited to janitorial staff – people who clean train cars in summer – many, in fact, were the jobs of crew who maintain the tracks and do other jobs critical to keeping the railroad safe and operational.
As importantly, they were senior, union positions that paid middle-class salaries and helped sustain Skagway’s year-round economy. The corporate model is to eliminate middle-class jobs. We know that from 40 years of Reaganomics. The corporate model doesn’t give a damn even about towns like Skagway that helped make cruise corporations rich.
In Haines, we remember that for four years in the late 1990s, large cruise ships docking here routinely dumped dry-cleaning and photo-processing chemicals into Lynn Canal. We remember the disclosures that ships engaged in “pay-to-play” selling tactics, shaking down local businesses for payola in exchange for favorable mentions and referrals aboard the ships.
We remember that some of the local businesses contracting with large ships ran similarly sleazy operations, including one reckless outfit that killed a cruise passenger at Glacier Point just months after assuring the Haines Borough at a permit hearing that its operations practiced professional safety guidelines, despite contrary testimony from more than a dozen former employees.
Enough, already.
What Haines learned last year is that while the loss of large ships put a dent in annual sales tax receipts, that loss was bearable. Haines learned earlier this summer that many independent visitors wanted to come here specifically this year because the town wouldn’t be crazy crowded with cruise passengers.
Haines learned in the past few years that pound-for-pound, special events like weddings can provide a bigger boost to local cash registers than can the docking of a large ship.
Now imagine the bonus Haines could reap if the borough used the lion’s share of the $650,000 it raises annually from its 1 percent tax to advertise the town to the world.
If the town went further and rejected dockings by large ships, it might even be able to market that fact the way Mary’s Bed and Breakfast in Skagway successfully promoted its standard for quality by its advertising its disdain for plastic jelly packets: “Mary’s Bed and Breakfast – Serving No Grape Jelly.”
Now that that giant cruise ships are into nearly all the ports of Southeast Alaska, that bragging point could serve as a big draw.
It’s time for us to break with the large cruise ships. The marriage was one-sided, unhealthy and borderline abusive. Let’s divorce this bum.