By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
The need for meaningful reform, long-term planning, and possible service cuts in the Alaska Marine Highway Services came to the forefront during a public presentation by the Marine Highway Reshaping Work Group on Tuesday.
The full report on the group’s findings will be made public and sent to the governor’s office in coming days.
Chairman of the reshaping committee, former Coast Guard Admiral Thomas Barrett, highlighted the need for stability and long-term funding within AMHS in Tuesday’s online virtual presentation.
“We’ve had a lot of changes in policy direction,” Barrett said. “All the issues over the history of the system have really driven some long-term systemic problems. The lack of long-term objectives… there is no board of directors as a business would provide.”
Narrating a slideshow, Barrett stressed that forward-funding of the ferry system would allow it to have greater stability.
“The ability to schedule ferry travel well in advance is important to the Alaskan businesses, communities, tourists, seasonal workers,” he said. “As a consequence of the budget cycle, AMHS is unable to confidently forward a plan and schedule summer ferry sailings more than a few months in advance. This hinders marketing and the sale of bookings, misses revenue capture opportunity, and imposes greater administrative burdens.”
The state ferry Matanuska is pictured in December 2019 at the Sitka Ferry Terminal. (Sentinel file Photo)
Barrett recommended funding AMHS two years in advance.
“The funding buckets are set up to allow forward-funding of the Alaska Marine Highway System. You could forward-fund it for two years or more,” he said.
State Rep. Louise Stutes of Kodiak, a member of the House Standing Committee on Transportation, agreed, arguing that the current reshaping plan is a good start.
“I’m pretty pleased,” Stutes said. “I think it’s a grounding, a level, a place to start. Like (Barrett) said, have a plan, even if we can’t implement it immediately; if we can come up with a long-term plan it’s a whole lot easier to sell to everybody.”
Sen. Bert Stedman, whose district includes Sitka and a number of other Southeast communities, said he hopes the Department of Transportation can come up with 3- to 5-year plans for running AMHS as a way to free the ferry system from the annual budget cycle.
Stedman said after the meeting that while he supports forward-funding, the ferry system has needs that are more pressing.
“Forward-funding is a good concept, but the more immediate need is that we make payroll,” Stedman said.
He also stressed the needs of smaller communities.
“We’ve got to watch our smaller communities to make sure they have some service levels,” he said.
One of Barrett’s slides emphasized the importance of reliable service: “Lack of ferry service reliability is a key concern of virtually every group we interacted with. Some (communities) offered they were willing to accept less frequent ferry service if it was more predictable and more reliable.”
While members of the reshaping committee and the state legislators present agreed that reliability, predictability, and stability are sound starting points, disagreements arose over service cutbacks.
“If the answer is to not eliminate anything, then you’ve got this fleet and I don’t think it’s going to be sustainable,” Barrett said.
Proposed cost reductions included the wide-scale use of dayboats, scrapping AMHS vessels mothballed in Ketchikan, and service cutbacks to some communities.
“If the budget hammer keeps going down, the only way you can achieve that is by taking out some larger vessels,” Barrett said.
One proposed cost cutting measure in the presentation was eliminating the ferry run down the Aleutian chain.
“Longer term, this run may need to be eliminated to achieve system funding objectives,” the slideshow said.
“We’re going to make a bunch of people mad no matter what we do – it’s one of those balance things,” Barrett said.
Tony Johansen, another member of the reshaping work group, said ferry service to Southwest Alaska is not sustainable.
“You can’t expect to maintain the system that we have, it’s just not going to happen… I do not believe that we should be serving Southwest Alaska,” Johansen said.
“You have a hundred smaller communities in this state that don’t have the ferry system and don’t have roads,” he said.
Rep. Stutes took issue with this position.
“My blood is boiling here, because to just arbitrarily tell a good portion of coastal Alaska, ‘Sorry folks, you’re done,’ just rubs me the wrong way. It’s treating Alaskans poorly,” she said.
Stutes specified that she was willing to look into cutting some communities from ferry service, but not an entire region such as the Aleutians.
Regarding the future of ferry service on the Aleutian chain, Stedman said after the meeting that the Tustumina, the boat that serves the area, “needs to be replaced ASAP.”
The reason for the replacement, he said, is simple.
“Age, and the Gulf of Alaska is hard on ships,” Stedman said.
Among the cost-cutting measures suggested were service cuts during the winter, and subsidizing local groups to run regional ferry operations, such as the Ketchikan-Hollis ferry.
Stedman suggested taking this as a model.
“We should point to the (state) Inter-Island Ferry support,” he said. “For a few years we (paid) $500,000 to them, now we’re down to $250,000 for the last several years. And that’s frankly not enough, they’re going to end up getting behind on some capital items. But with that $250,000 the Marine Highway supports other services, shoreside, docks and all that. It’s an example of a different service feeding into how we model.”
He later advocated for increasing funding for the Ketchikan-Hollis ferry to keep it running smoothly. The Inter Island ferry recently experienced a breakdown that caused a significant gap in service which has yet to be resolved.
Looking forward to the upcoming legislative session, Stedman told the Sentinel that he plans to advocate for more AMHS funding.
“We’re going to have a substantial supplemental request to get (AMHS) through June,” he said, citing a figure between $10 million and $40 million. He noted that the ferry system required supplemental funds this summer, only a single month into the fiscal year.
While also advocating for roads and airports to connect Southeast communities, Stedman said the ferry system is a special case and he worries about it.
“We’ve got to be careful so we don’t end up getting up one day and we don’t have a Marine Highway,” he said.
