Big scissors be damned. Instead of cutting a ribbon, city officials decided to celebrate the completion of the new Panamax cruise ship dock by hosting an infrastructure-appreciation party in the Assembly Chambers.
“The importance of infrastructure is something that we just don’t think about,” Port Director Carl Uchytil said, kicking off the event.
During the hour-long homage to infrastructure, several government officials and people affiliated with the cruise-berth project spoke about how crucial roads, bridges, utility lines and, of course, docks are.
Craig Dahl, the executive director of the Juneau Chamber of Commerce, recalled what the city’s tourism industry was like when he moved to town in 1963. Back then, only two cruise ships docked in Juneau: The S.S. Princess Patricia and the S.S. Prince George.
“Between the two of them, they brought a whopping 3,000 visitors to Juneau,” Dahl said. Now, “in one visit — in one ship — they bring more passengers than we saw all season 50 years ago.”
Thanks to the new cruise ship dock, the first of two that will allow the city to accommodate vessels longer than 1,000 feet, the number of passengers Juneau can support will continue to increase, according to Dahl and Uchytil. This is important because, “there’s nobody here that’s immune to the benefits of tourism,” Dahl added. Juneau is poised to host more than a million cruise passengers for the first time this year.
At $54 million, the new cruise-berth project is the most expensive the city has ever taken on, Uchytil said, explaining that infrastructure projects are often as expensive as they are necessary. And as the state stares down its $4 billion budget gap, Rep. Sam Kito III, D-Juneau, warned that money for infrastructure development and maintenance might be drying up.
Though Alaska is a relatively young state with young infrastructure to boot, Kito said that “a tremendously stripped down” capital budget could cause the state to fall behind in maintenance.
“If we go too much further like this, we’re going to start seeing the crumbling of our own infrastructure even though it is relatively new,” he said.
A small group of people walked out of City Hall and across the street to the new dock for a tour after the event ended.
Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or at sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
