A sharp drop in optimism among businesses due largely to uncertainties created by Trump administration policies is among the key findings of an annual “Southeast Alaska Business Climate Report” report released Tuesday.
“Last year we had one with the second-highest levels of positivity and now we have one with the second-lowest levels of positivity,” Meilani Schijvens, owner of Rain Coast Data, said in an interview Wednesday about the report she has published on behalf of Southeast Conference every year since 2010.
Nearly half of businesses surveyed — 47% — stated they anticipate negative impacts from tariffs, mass cuts to federal employees and programs, and other policies being implemented by President Donald Trump since he began his second term in January. Many reported they are already experiencing disruptions.
At the same time — and proof numbers can often be used to argue differing viewpoints — “most businesses remain generally optimistic,” Schijvens’ report notes.
“In 2025, 63% of businesses hold a positive economic outlook, while 37% have a negative outlook,” the report states.
However, those figures represent a 16% drop from two years ago when 79% of respondents were positive about the business outlook for their organization, according to Schijvens. The study includes 285 comments from business owners and managers, with a high percentage citing the turmoil associated with Trump’s return to office as the cause of their concerns.
“That’s one thing that we’re really seeing very strongly in the study is that there is just so much uncertainty,” she said. “We’ve seen a just dramatic shift to the economy of Southeast Alaska just in the last several months, or at least how our business leaders are thinking about the direction the economy’s headed.”
Also, while more businesses are feeling positive than negative looking ahead, there are indicators of a downturn ahead, Schijvens said.
“One thing that I found was absolutely fascinating is that there’s more businesses that are planning on downsizing and reducing jobs than businesses that are planning to add jobs,” she said. “And that’s a question that we only started asking in 2019 so we don’t have a lot of data on it, but the only other year that happened in that seven-year period was 2020” at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A total of 422 Southeast Alaska business owners and top managers, representing a combined staff of about 11,600 workers, responded to this year’s survey conducted in April 2025.
Among the comments highlighted in the study from respondents in some of the communities surveyed:
• Juneau: “Biggest concern is more initiatives to restrict or ban cruise ships. Generally Juneau is not perceived as friendly to the cruise industry and this is having a subtle impact on ship scheduling. Next year for the first time ever, Juneau will NOT be the number one cruise destination in Alaska.”
• Skagway: “Our Canadian visitors are already down around 80% of normal. We are also concerned about the cruise ship passengers spending less per visit due to economic uncertainty. We postponed a large employee housing complex addition and an expansion of one of our restaurants due to the uncertainty.”
• Ketchikan: “I am very concerned about tariffs raising the cost of construction materials. Construction is already extremely expensive in our area and a lack of contractor confidence in pricing stability is going to raise bid pricing. Uncertainty is bad for business.”
• Prince of Wales: “Federal jobs are being cut at a dangerous rate. Federal grants will be disappearing for both the profit and non-profit sectors, including education and tribal governments.”
Mining at top, timber at bottom among Southeast industries
Among Trump’s most notorious actions on his first day back in office — besides changing the name of Denali back to Mount McKinley — was his “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” executive order to eliminate federal rules preventing maximum utilization of the state’s natural resources.
But while top officials with the region’s mining and timber industries were optimistic about their future prospects then, there’s a wide chasm among people in those industries now.
Mining and Alaska Native organizations were the most optimistic about “the overall business climate now” in Schijvens’ study, with 100% of respondents in each stating they feel good about their situations. At the bottom of 20 industry groups was timber with 20% answering good, 40% poor and 40% very poor.
High metal prices are helping fuel optimism in mining, Schijvens said. But timber — already in a decades-long downturn — appears to be struggling because tariffs are adding unpredictability to finding buyers for logs.
“If there’s going to be these sky-high tariffs (and) there’s so much uncertainty around what the tariffs are going to be that’s another industry that really relies on trade to be successful,” she said.
Coming second-to-last is energy, another industry highly touted by Trump supporters, with loss of federal funds among the factors stalling some planned projects. One notch above energy is the seafood industry — at 37% good, 50% poor and 5% very poor — which Schijvens said reflects something of a rebound compared to last year.
“We’ve really seen a shift there in terms of it being extraordinarily pessimistic to just negative,” she said.
Moods and shifts among communities
Sitka, which scored high in recent years, topped this year’s results among respondents in 12 Southeast communities with 5% calling the business climate very good, 80% good, 9% poor and 5% very poor. Schijvens said health care, tourism and a rebounding seafood industry appear to be factors in the high ranking, but she is still analyzing to determine why the mood there is more optimistic than other communities with similar makeups.
Second on the list was Yakutat for reasons that also aren’t entirely clear yet, she said.
“It’s just like there’s a lot of positive people in Yakutat,” she said.
More clarity exists for the community with the gloomiest outlook — Gustavus — where only 18% of respondents describing the current business climate as good, far behind the 38% in Wrangell offering the same answer.
“That’s a community that their economy is very tied in with the (National) Park Service, and so seeing some of those jobs go away and just the uncertainty about the federal impacts, that’s (a factor) in that community,” Schijvens said.
In addition to the layoffs are the concerns about people whose livelihoods depend largely on tourism, she said.
“A lot of those comments from Gustavus business owners were like ‘We run an Airbnb or lodging, and the international visitors and the Canadian visitors and the independent visitors, we see those bookings as being way down,’” she said.
Juneau ranked eighth among the communities. Among the comments by respondents in Schijvens report:
• “Staffing at the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Site is vital to the entire tourism industry in Juneau.”
• “It looks like Juneau is going to hemorrhage more state and federal jobs due to federal spending cuts, which will drag down the rest of the winter economy. Word on the street is tourism spending will decline a little this year but might go down a lot next year. Inflation is a major concern.”
• “If the cuts continue we will lose vital programs that support families and children — including Head Start, ILP, and home visiting programs. These losses will drive families from Juneau.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
