Announcer: This program was made possible in part by: The Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center, University of Alaska, Southeast, George Washington University, National Science Foundation Grant #2022-699.

For a complete list of funders, go to www.cruiseboomfilm.com.

[Waves lapping] ♪ Man: OK, everyone.

Right now, everyone knows the drill.

Get your tickets out and step in.

Woman: Thank you.

Man: Good morning.

Woman: Good morning.

Are you Best of Sitka?

Woman two: No.

Taste.

Woman: Or Taste of Sitka.

I'm sorry.

Into our building, please, here, and to the right, there's benches and seats, and we're gonna get you some stickers, and we'll get you loaded up into your buses shortly.

All right.

Thanks.

Hi there.

Taste of Sitka?

♪ ♪ ♪ Radio announcer: You are listening to Raven Radio KCAW, Sitka.

Around 480,000 cruise passengers are expected to travel to Sitka this summer following the recent expansion of the private Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal... more growth than any other port in the state.

♪ On the biggest days of the cruise season, this summer, Sitka could double in size.

According to planning director Amy Ainslie, 480,000 passengers is more than double Sitka's typical cruise year.

Globally, the cruise industry is booming, and in 2017, the Panama Canal completed an expansion that allowed for even bigger ships to move through, and with that staggering increase come a lot of questions.

♪ Man: Are we gonna be ready?

Are we going to be prepared?

I guess I'm scared of business as usual because business as usual doesn't work.

Woman: As someone who was born and raised here... All right, Eli!

I feel like I'm witnessing my community change right in front of me.

Back, back, back, back!

Different woman: The community voted down a public cruise ship dock, and then a private businessperson opens a dock on his private land.

How does our community handle the numbers of people coming to town, and how can visitors have a good experience in Sitka, and how can Sitkans still feel like this is Sitka?

Man: At what point do we lose a lot of our spirit in being able to grow our economy or showcase our lovely town?

This is what it's all about, folks.

We want to send every bird that comes into our care back into the wild.

I wanted to introduce Wendy.

I think all of you have met her.

She's with Royal Caribbean Group, and Royal Caribbean has been extremely supportive of the Raptor Center over the past couple of years.

The loud and noisy parking lot project that's going on right now is actually sponsored by them, but that's us preparing for the cruise boom that our community is about to face, so we want to make sure that we offer a safe and meaningful experience to our guests, and one of the ways we're gonna do that is make sure that any bus traffic in and out is well-organized and safe, and thanks to Royal Caribbean Group for doing that for us.

All right.

So we're counting down from 3.

Goodbye, Steve.

Have a good flight.

Heh heh heh.

Ready?

3... All: 2, 1!

Woman: Bye, Steve!

Bye, Steve!

Have a good flight.

♪ [Indistinct chatter] Man: All right.

The assembly wish to hear more public input on our short-term tourism plan.

Yes, thank you Jim Michener, here.

I would really encourage the assembly to go forward with the ideas of closing Lincoln Street to be for vehicle traffic, be a pedestrian area.

We get an F grade with how much sidewalk space we have available if there's more than I think-- believe 1,000 people in town.

Man: I had a lot to say, but I'm gonna pare this down.

Basically, I don't like the idea of shutting down Lincoln Street.

I think it's a really poor idea.

I think exchanging downtown Sitka for 3-month-a-year theme park, it's not the kind of trade I want to make, and if 480,000 people is too many to handle without destroying what attracts them in the first place, maybe downtown isn't too congested.

Maybe we're trying to put too many people in it.

I think it really needs to be said over and over again we don't have any control over how many tourists come because we don't own the dock, we don't own the straight roads.

Somebody earlier said, "Well, we shouldn't have asked those many people."

We didn't ask, so the only real question is do we want to get ready for it or just let the flood come?

Man: These kinds of numbers, I just don't know how we're supposed to deal with it.

I see it as Sitka heading down a road of this weird hybrid of sort of having a year-round culture here and moving oddly towards what Skagway and downtown Ketchikan look like in the off seasons.

♪ Man: Life in Skagway is different depending on the time of year.

We are the 18th most visited cruise port in the world, so it's a very busy place in the summer, very different than the winter.

Our economy is predominantly tourism-related, and that's how our businessowners and our residents are able to thrive.

♪ Some of the downsides are as Broadway, which is our main district core, became, you know, more saturated with tourists, we saw more commercial-type global business entities come into the downtown core, and, you know, it's a free market, but when they came into town, it did undermine some of the integrity of what we had to offer, it pushed local businessowners out, so tourism, you know, can undermine the fabric of your community if you're not careful.

Some of the things that drive the character of Sitka, you know, the charming stores with the local products and the Alaska-made products, that could change overnight if you're not careful because once the lease rates get too high because now you have larger entities coming in there, corporate entities, then you've changed the real character of the town.

♪ There's a point where you're gonna reach saturation, and the only way we figure out where that point is is by having the conversation... Woman: The Bliss is one of their bigger ships, earning a C. Cremata: and eventually if you stifle that conversation long enough, you reach a boiling point, and you're gonna end up with what you had in Juneau.

♪ ♪ So we're gonna continue those conversations hopefully in the future.

I don't think it's something we should ever be afraid of.

♪ [Ship horn blowing] Man: Decisions at the private level are made in a matter of days.

Decisions at a public level are made in a matter of years.

I'm either fifth or sixth generation Sitkan, and in order for myself, my family, friends to continue to be able to live here, there has to be an economic means for us to work and make money.

Sitka had proposed docks a couple of different times and went to public votes, and they got turned down, and I think that likely affected the perception of the cruise industry, and, you know, Sitka might not have been seen as the most friendly cruise ship port.

It almost came to me, like, well, we had a private piece of property here, and it had the existing boatyard and travel lift.

Let's build a cruise ship dock for big ships, and maybe we can grow the industry a little bit.

The number of ships increased, the boatyard space continued to get smaller.

The boatyard operation annually lost money, so it was a simple business decision to move forward with the boat-- with a cruise ship only and close the boatyard.

I don't want people to view the cruise ship passengers as a negative.

Any way that we can bring outside money in that benefits us being able to pay for our local services, our roads, our schools, I think that's positive.

♪ Man: I don't want us to be a destination.

I value our community because we're a community.

You know, we take care of the environment around Sitka because it's a big reason why we live here, and a lot of us use and depend on the fisheries, the forests, the resources that it provides us, and we're proud of showing it off to people.

[Indistinct chatter] You know, the pulp mill sustained the community for years but had its excesses in how much it logged and how fast it logged and the environmental impact.

Cruise ships is similar thing.

There's a level that is a responsible amount of tourism, and then there's a level where it's traffic jams of buses and people who are frustrated and impatient with the tourists and neither the residents nor the tourists having a good experience because we've gone too far, and I want to see something that is not just covering the costs but actually making a profit in our community and creating businesses and services that we can depend on year-round.

♪ Woman: Ha ha ha!

♪ Man: In Southeast Alaska, it's a coastal rainforest, and that's hard on wooden boats.

Heh heh.

I put about a month and a half a year into working on this old boat.

It's really important that we have a working shipyard, so I'm working here on the tide flats because about a year ago our shipyard got turned into a cruise ship terminal.

We have the largest fleet in Alaska here, and we haven't been able to haul our boats out.

♪ We don't have a yard to service them.

♪ [Indistinct chatter] ♪ I really feel like Sitka needs to make a decision so that one industry doesn't trample another because we-- this is the capital of hook-and-line seafood in the world.

We catch more fish here by hook-and-line than anywhere else.

Man: but you can't keep people from coming.

Woman: Well, I can-- Man: They want to come here.

Woman: But they want to come to Sitka.

They don't want to come to Disneyland... Yep.

and if we continue to erode what makes Sitka Sitka, if Lincoln Street looks like the Mall of America, they're not gonna want to come.

Like, we're gonna sell balloons and cotton candy.

That's not what we do.

It's not our town.

Woman: I also think that's an assumption, right, and that's the issue with all of these things is we're operating off from our best guesses of what we're gonna see, what's gonna happen, and how it's gonna play out.

It feels to me like as I've been watching people talk, there's this, like, doomsday scenario playing out in people's minds... Woman two: Right.

That's my point.

where it's like, "Oh, this is gonna happen."

I mean, thank goodness, not unlike our tsunami warnings thus far, right, where it's can be--like, seem being scary, and you're not sure what's gonna happen.

I also realize that all these businesses, you know, on Main Street benefit.

They pay taxes, you know.

It does bring money into this town and jobs.

You know, high schoolers get jobs.

I mean, I'm just thinking about the positives here.

Pfeiffer: Thank you.

Yeah.

I'd like to think more about those, too.

I mean, my son is gonna to work at--you know, out at the cruise ship dock, working at the crab place, you know.

I mean, he's gonna get his first job at 15 years old.

You know, so off the top of my head-- Has your son gone to commercial fishing yet?

No, he has not.

[Laughter] Woman: He's like, "Let's convert him."

Pfeiffer: I need crew.

Ha ha ha!

♪ Cruise tourism dates back all the way to the 1800s, and it's been an important part of the economy ever since... ♪ especially when the pulp mill closed because that was one of Sitka's major employers.

It boomed right after the mill closure in the mid-1990s and then dramatically dropped again.

There were efforts to encourage cruise tourism to come back, including proposing a deep-water dock downtown, but anytime it was put on the ballot, it was voted down.

Then we saw a peak again in the 2000s, but the Great Recession put a huge brake on that growth, but during this time, the McGraw family started building a private dock, so here we are again with Sitka experiencing another upswing, and there is no doubt that cruising has been a very important part of Sitka's economy, but it's also been a contentious and volatile one.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Woman: We're going from the really significant impacts of the pandemic to a recovery.

The things that are still uncertain is we don't know what our cruise season is gonna look like next year.

It's--not having a crystal ball and having things so in flux makes projecting our FY23 sales tax a challenge.

Himschoot, voice-over: With cruise tourism, we've seen sort of up-and-down cycles, and then of course with COVID a complete stop, but the volatility of the-- of the funding that comes with a full cruise ship schedule can become a crisis if we're not careful, if we become really dependent on those sales tax revenues, and so you can't just embrace all of this without being really mindful about what could be and what are the downsides we don't want and how do we avoid those.

Haley: Our deferred maintenance has been increasing much more rapid-- it was increasing before the pandemic, and with the pause on capital funding, um, it's increased even faster.

Haley, voice-over: The overarching biggest challenge for Sitka is when the city was building a lot of its infrastructure, a lot of it was funded by the state.

It was when the state was oil rich and had had plenty of money to give out.

We're now faced with a situation where there is very little state funding and all of the infrastructure that the state funded, you know, back in the eighties needs to be replaced, and we're going to have to find a way to pay for that.

We don't have a path right now.

♪ [Indistinct chatter] In terms of the increase in cruise tourism benefiting Sitka and how much that helps, I don't think we know yet.

♪ ♪ It's taken me a bit of time to get to where I am with my business... but I'm just happy to be able to take people out.

♪ What a nice day.

Like, I've been here my whole life, and I just want to be able to share a beautiful place with people.

Like, I'm in the field every day with all these wild things, and you're just getting to learn more and more about it.

I've learned so much, and I'm still so passionate about it.

[Whale spouts water] Holy Toledo!

I like the independent traveler just because they're here for consecutive days.

You know, you really get to know a place better when you have a little bit more time.

I feel like a cruise ship is kind of a taste of Alaska.

The whole thing for me is being able to share it and people being able to have positive things to say about Sitka, not like, "Oh, that was place was overrun," or, you know, "Too crowded."

♪ [Shouts indistinctly] Can we figure out a way to do it that's positive?

I would like to think so.

♪ Woman: Although I wish they could see the inside of these, too.

Woman two: Well, they're going to move them down... ♪ Man: Conventional tourism is really focused on economic impact and catering to the visitor.

What does the visitor want to do?

What is the visitor looking for?

How can we create that here?

That can have benefits, but over time, it can overwhelm communities, it can overwhelm environments, and it can become a degrading impact, and so that economic benefit comes with a high cost.

Regenerative tourism is about what does the community need, and how can we create tourism systems that support the community's needs?

Woman: A lot of the homes that are going up for sale will be bought by non-locals, nonresidents that then want to turn them into short-term rentals, and that's obviously then putting a strain on the market, housing prices are going up, and then there's less housing available, so, you know, none of that issue is lost on anyone, but it's a really good example of how the visitor industry isn't working for our community.

Woman two: And just to kind of speak to that, getting in the forefront of it, right?

Like, and especially in some of our rural communities where tourism hasn't happened yet, getting in front of tourism, setting up those policies, setting up the infrastructure, defining what you want, making your voice out there, right?

Like, tourism doesn't just have to happen to you.

You can shape it, you can help shape it.

Woman: The Tlingit name is Shís'gi Noow... Mm-hmm.

and they believe, which was the site of the Battle of 1804, and one of the things I let people know, too, is that, that that the Tlingit people did not surrender.

Everybody says, "Oh, they surrendered."

No, they did not surrender.

I actually talked to my Uncle Jimmy and my grandmother and said, "What happened?"

and they said, "It was best to leave this place "than to live with the uncertainty of how we will live," and that had to be clarified because we didn't surrender.

That was why we started tribal tours, to be honest with you, is because of those stories that were told about who we are.

It was very difficult when I first started because, you know, I had to get on the Convention and Visitors Bureau Board so that I can change-- help change the marketing.

I had to get on a national tourism board so I can gain understanding of what other indigenous people are doing nationally and how we can play the game.

Cultural tourism is a growing trend, and we're gonna have to manage it well and be able to make sure it's not commercialized.

It's not just economic development.

It has more deeper meaning.

It's to perpetuate our culture.

It's to keep it alive.

It's to give pride in our people sharing who we are.

[Gulls crying] ♪ [Indistinct chatter] ♪ Yes!

Oh!

Woman: Our mission at the Sitka Sound Science Center is science research and science education in coastal Alaska.

One big way that we do informal science education is we entertain and host visitors here in the summer.

We talk to them about the relationship between healthy oceans and healthy fish.

We talk to them about how commercial fisheries work here, how subsistence fishing works.

This summer, we are getting more than two times the visitors that we've ever had.

It's daunting.

What we're thinking if we could build other support systems, we could offer a authentic, positive experience for all these people that are coming, so, volunteers.

"Do you take American money?"

[Laughter] Woman: Now I would hope that they would ask me "What keeps you here?

"Why do you choose to stay in a, you know, small, remote "cold, dark sometimes"-- ha ha--"little community?"

"Gas must be super cheap here, huh, since the oil is right here."

[Laughter] Woman two: These questions, which are really very frequently asked by people, are examples and everyone here could have fielded those in a second, right?

Woman 3: The visitors will look at you like little kids look at adults.

They'll think that you know everything, and so they'll ask you questions you might not know, and we've learned it's totally OK to say, you know, "I don't know, but I'll find that out."

♪ Woman: I think, though, we need one right here in the front.

Man: No, no.

We have another one.

Woman, voice-over: We had a store on Lincoln Street.

I'm the third one in our family to have the store.

We carried shoes, we carried lingerie, different things.

Woman two: So Stephanie was 10 years old, and she would work in the store.

She had to dust the bottoms of the racks and do kind of-- And back in those days, we had a steamer.

I got to steam everything.

When all the clothes came in, I would be the one doing the steamer.

The economy was kind of changing a little bit, and Sitka wasn't seeing quite as many cruise ships at all.

You also were getting, like, the rise of the Internet, and so it was kind of like this perfect storm, so we decided that we were gonna close it and just try to work seasonally.

We love tourism-related retail, and so we're super excited to be back in Sitka and thankful for the opportunity to be out at the new Sitka Sound Cruise Ship Dock.

Visitors will be here for the day.

They come in in the morning, and they leave in the evening or the afternoon.

You can't ask for anything better than that.

So, you know, I think that that is um, you know, perfect, and I want my friends and I want my neighbors to do well.

The pie is big enough that everybody can have a slice of it, and I think that's where we all are.

We're all ready to start bringing in revenue.

Bring it on!

Ha ha ha!

♪ This is a general brochure, general information.

[Indistinct chatter] ♪ Woman: We are so very excited to be out here at the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal today.

McGraw: We purchased this property, and it was basically a big flat piece of property with a boatyard.

Shortly thereafter, we welcomed our first cruise ship.

It gave us the idea of if we can tie up a small cruise ship, why not a big one?

To this year, we're gonna welcome over 200 ships with over 112 port days.

[Cheering and applause] A lot of that growth is coming from the Royal Caribbean Group.

They partnered with us with the pier expansion and have brought a lot of capacity to Sitka, which I think is gonna help the community.

Man: Royal Caribbean as a minority investor in Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal, and our role is we provided some funding to upgrade the infrastructure that you see behind us, and in exchange for that, we bring passengers here, so it's a very simple and symbiotic relationship with the local family that owns the dock.

We're here today because the traditional ports of Juneau, Skagway, and Ketchikan were looking at record number cruise passengers, and so we sought out alternatives for great experiences for our guests, and we're in Sitka.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I'm Katherine Rose with Raven News.

After a lengthy planning process, the Sitka assembly approved the city's new short-term tourism plan and with it the decision to close about 5 blocks of Lincoln Street, closing one of the city's main thoroughfares on days with high cruise traffic.

♪ Ovation pilot, agent.

Pilot: Agent, pilot.

Top of the morning.

[Bell ringing] [Heavy click] ♪ Woman: OK.

So we have a change in schedule.

-OK. -This trip got canceled, and we moved Darren over to the hike, and Ashley is actually gonna help me in the studio because I have 15, 15, and 25.

Man: Make sure you take both shuttle signs today... Woman: Yep.

and only display the one of the ship that you're moving.

♪ 10 meters.

[Walkie talkie beeps] ♪ ♪ 5 meters.

Pilot: All right.

5.

♪ ♪ [Beep] 3 meters.

Pilot: 3 meters.

♪ [Beep] One meter forward.

Pilot: One meter.

♪ [Clatter] Gangway security.

♪ ♪ Woman: Here you are.

Driver: Best of Sitka.

-Good morning.

-Good morning.

How's the cruise so far?

Woman: Good.

Woman two: Wonderful.

Are we in the right place?

There should be two there.

Driver, voice-over: It's fun to get to tell people about the place and do research to try to learn about it.

See you guys went to Skagway already.

Man: Yeah.

Guide, voice-over: A lot of times, people are shocked when you're not from the area that you're working in, which to me is really funny because, like, a very small percentage of other seasonal workers I know are actually from the places that they're working in.

All right.

Welcome again to Sitka, everybody.

We are rolling now on our way to the Raptor Center.

We are on Baranof Island right now.

You are on an island.

Sitka's got a population of about 8,500 to 9,000.

The island here is 100 miles long and 30 miles wideish.

♪ Woman: No.

My kids have funny reactions to it.

They--yeah, they notice it.

It's a lot of people all at once to come in.

When, you know, we're here right now and there's not anyone in town today, it feels like home, and then all of a sudden, the next day, it could just shift because 1,000 people were just dropped off.

My gosh.

It can be shocking.

With tourism, it's, like, one of these industries that's fun and exciting, but then you see places that can be taken over by tourism.

And large industry will come and go.

You know, growing up here, our generation witnessed a boom-bust when the pulp mill closed, and so many people left town, and it just felt like-- I just remember thinking that we should be afraid for our future.

Since then, not just our town but the region's been, like, trying to recover from that, and then there's a lot of critiquing around the resource extraction that happened with that industry, and when we look at tourism, there's this whole argument that it doesn't extract any resources, so it's just, like, a clean industry, and then--but this is where--I mean, that's not entirely true.

There's a lot of impact especially the big cruise ships have in our waterways, and, you know, being responsible to the environment is an issue that we need to, you know, continue to put pressure on.

It definitely can provide some really good jobs, and I just wonder about the capacity because, like, if you're a small business, this is a great opportunity for you... -Yeah.

-until it isn't.

If you've reached your capacity and you can't grow, then what's to stop a company from coming in and swooping you-- Oh.

Like, a nonlocal company?

Yeah, and then that same thing with the jobs.

Companies are forced to go outside of here for their employees because there's not enough.

Like, being, you know, oil boom in Alaska, like, learning from these past mistakes or overdoing it.

I think it's just being able to look at it and go "OK, this is a different industry, but what can we learn from the past?"

♪ [Indistinct chatter] ♪ [Indistinct chatter] ♪ Man: So far we got off the boat around 9:30.

We're coming to explore and enjoy our life and spend money and understand the culture of Sitka.

Woman: Ha ha ha!

Man two: Oh, my God!

-That's nice shot.

-Yeah.

Very.

Woman: We will be going back to the cruise around 3:00.

Maybe next time we will come again by airplane, land for a while, not by the cruise.

Cruise is a little bit rushed.

Man 3: He's a tough one.

He's not easy to get in the truck, I'll tell you that.

[Laughter] All right.

[Bird crying] [Chopping] Wow!

Woman: We can have scraps of cedar?

Man: From the table right there.

Oh, bring more out.

Woman two: How many have you made?

Man two: I don't know.

I stopped counting a long time ago.

♪ Driver: Mainly inside on this one, yeah.

Woman: Thanks.

-Hi.

-Take care.

You're our driver on the way back?

You got it.

Yep.

Woman: Reminder, no climbing on the rails.

Those are live wild animals on the other side.

[Indistinct chatter] ♪ Go in?

♪ How busy are we up on the deck?

Are we--you guys got space to move?

Woman: Yeah, but it's still you know, pretty packed.

So we've got all of our tours written down.

We've got the numbers for each tour, so you can see we've got big numbers today.

On Monday, we had the Norwegian Bliss.

That was over 4,000 people, so whenever these ships start piling up, it turns into days like today when we've got over 6,000 people here, and we're seeing about 10% of the people that come off the ship at least.

Some days, it's more, some days it's less.

I know the other day we had over 1,000 people on site.

[Indistinct chatter] Woman: The basics are that we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit bear rescue and sanctuary.

So all of the bears that you'll see here today have been with us since they were orphaned by human behavior at a very young age.

So if you have a really good quality of care, good diet, good training, and good vet care, you can really extend that life expectancy.

If you came out not long ago on a big green bus and you are wearing an orange sticker, they are here to pick you up and take you to your next stop.

That's the big green ACT bus, and you might be wearing a bright orange sticker.

Boy: Where's my popcorn?

I want to eat.

♪ Driver: Awesome.

Come on in.

Heh heh.

Watch your head getting in now, especially with a hat on.

All right.

Radio reporter: Martha Honey is a researcher.

Her business is called Responsible Travel Consulting.

She's the founder and former director of the Center for Responsible Travel.

Honey: We've done a lot of work in the Caribbean looking at cruise tourism, and I had wanted for a long time to branch out and really look at Alaska.

Himschoot: Martha, I was so thrilled.

I heard a little radio spot here in Sitka that you were on, you know, our morning interview, I don't know, a year ago or whatever, and I--all kinds of light bulbs went on, and I thought, "Oh, my gosh.

Somebody has studied this."

We're trying to figure these things out, and we're not the first place to do it.

-and you have a whole... -Exactly.

body of knowledge in other places, so I guess I could use sort of a tutorial on what is the business model that these major lines use, and there used to be all of these independent lines, and now it seems like there's really only 3.

And these are Royal Caribbean, Norwegian Cruise Lines, and Carnival, and together, they control 90--over 90% of the North American market, so the cruise tourism is not only one of the fastest growing sectors of the tourism industry.

It is also the most profitable.

It had--I think the profits were 40 billion in 2019, and the 3 big conglomerates of the cruise industry are headquartered in Miami, but they are registered in places like Panama, Liberia, the Bahamas, and this is done specifically to allow these companies to avoid paying U.S. federal taxes and to avoid adhering to U.S. labor standards and environmental regulations.

Another piece of their business model is the arrangements that they make with local businesses in the ports of call, and most tours are sold on board the ships by the cruise line, and when the cruise line does that, they take a commission.

It's a split.

That markup, that difference that the cruise ship charges beyond the cost from the operator is not taxed, so we don't get anything from that.

And that is not taxed.

That's right.

This is a loss of taxation that should go to the municipalities, yes, at least that's my opinion.

Right.

Because that tour still operates on our roads and using our trails and, you know, whatever the tour is.

Exactly.

It's using the infrastructure, but I think that one of the things we've seen is that the cruise lines play hardball when they feel that their profits are being infringed upon, and one of the advantages that they have is that their main asset, the cruise ship, is movable, and destinations get very nervous.

They get nervous that they're gonna lose out on this cruise tourism, they'll be cut out, and there are examples to show that, yes, they can be.

So what should we be doing or looking at going forward?

It's not binary.

It's not no ships at all or, yes, we'll have ships.

There's a whole ecosystem in which we can operate together that might have some synergies that, you know, visitors can come here and experience this place that we all love so much, and we can continue to love this place... -Right.

-because it maintains itself, but that balance-- and it's a very delicate balance-- and that can so quickly tip.

And, you know, you're not alone.

Now more than ever, there are communities that are beginning to ask questions about what kind of tourism do you want, what kind of cruise tourism do you want, what kind of limits should be placed on it, and how do you ensure that the cruise industry pays its fair share?

We're gonna go to the Naa Kahidi dancers, and the Naa Kahidi Dancers really didn't have a place to perform when we started in 1994.

Well, they built the clan house, the Sheet'ka Kwaan Naa Kahidi, which translates to the house for the people of Sitka.

It has the open setting, and it has a fire pit in the center, and it really gave the dancers a sense of place in sharing our culture.

So cameras are more than welcome.

Flash photography.

Enjoy the dance show.

Woman: Thank you.

Man: Thank you.

You're welcome.

[Indistinct chatter] [Drumming] ♪ [Singing in Tlingit] ♪ ♪ [Singing and drumming fades] ♪ Man: The cruise is fantastic place.

Woman: It's like a floating resort, so you don't have to do anything, you know?

-It's easy, you know.

-Not worry about food.

So that's why like more to do cruise than go by going individual city.

You know, that's a main thing.

That's why we do cruise.

There's party on the ship too, so, yeah.

Today, we are planning to see some bald eagles and bear, but they were all full, so we found out that taxi can take you, so we are taking taxi now, and it's good they are full.

Trying to give a little business to the local businesses.

Some people like crowd, some don't like it, but for me, no problem.

♪ ♪ ♪ Driver: All right.

Let's do a little learning check.

Commercial fishing is our primary industry.

Due to our west-facing community, which is the only west-facing community in southeast Alaska, we have direct access to open water.

We fish year-round here in Sitka.

We run the largest commercial fishing fleet in Southeast.

Well, on behalf of myself, Alaska Coach Tours, the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal, Holland America, and the City and Borough of Sitka, thank you for the opportunity to be here with us today.

Man: We've been cruising-- this I think is our 30th cruise, and coming to Alaska, there's so much culture up here.

It's just trying to find what is it about this, you know, what is it about Alaska?

I'm looking for things that are part of that area of the world, you know.

Like right now-- you know, I'm always looking for native art that is designed or, you know, created here in this part of the world, but as many years as we've been coming, that's kind of the downfall.

When we go in these little towns, you're having less and less really cool, authentic... Woman: Authentic experience.

experiences, and I want to see resident-owned companies, resident-owned businesses.

[Men playing Irish music] ♪ Himschoot: How does any community figure out what's best for all of us?

How do we get Sitka to thrive, and then what role does cruise tourism play in a thriving community?

Even if we can figure that out, do we have the levers we need to shape that?

♪ [Bell rings] Haley: Sitka is doing quite a lot with minimal resources... and now there is not enough revenue to meet all of the future needs, particularly around infrastructure.

♪ I don't think the increase in tourism is going to fill all of the holes and needs that we have, particularly around capital.

♪ ♪ Man: Sitka Wildlife Tours has been operating for 22 years now in Sitka, and this is our first year with this many people coming to town, and it was quite an eye opener.

You know, summer was really busy, so half of me, the business side of me is thinking about, you know, what else can I add to try to give people something more to do... but I just don't want to see things get overwhelmed.

[Indistinct chatter] I'm fearing for what's coming next.

I think it's gonna get bigger.

I think there should be a limit or how many ships are allowed to come in.

Man: Both ships.

[Laughter] I need one photo ID between you.

Woman: We're together.

How many traveling?

Just two?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Woman: What is the tradeoff between economic increase versus impact to our community and environmental impact?

You know, I've worked in both tourism and in commercial fishing, and at that large of a scale, how is that gonna play into our fisheries management?

How is that gonna play into the effects of, like, climate change and ocean acidification and the long-term changes that we're seeing, shifts that we're seeing already within our ecosystem?

Woman: We would be naive to think that we don't have an impact, so how do we help manage that impact?

Encourage people to be involved and have their voices heard and figure out how we can work together to minimize the impacts.

♪ McGraw: We went from 200,000 to next year 500,000.

I mean, the industry in general, they're based on scale.

It's very easy for them to overwhelm a community very fast... ♪ and just one of the things we have to learn just for our operation is how to deal with that scale.

♪ There are some negatives that have to be addressed and figured out how-- dealt with, and there's also the positives.

♪ Everybody that I've talked to that's in the tourism industry this summer has had a good year, and you're gonna see sales tax revenues that will increase to the millions... ♪ and we get our community from October through April without any cruise ships.

♪ Celebrity Eclipse, all aboard!

Your ship is leaving!

♪ Thomas: Are they a good partner for us as a community?

One of the things that makes a lot of us skeptical of the cruise ships is just what bad neighbors they've been in other places in the world and what happens to communities that try to control the amount of cruise ship traffic tourists that they have.

♪ Goddard: If we're going to help shape tourism, we really have to be active and engaged stakeholders.

That means being involved in policymaking.

That means talking to the cruise ship lines.

It means asking the hard questions.

Um, it really means being innovative and being problem solvers.

♪ [Ship horn blowing] ♪ ♪ Busch: The story is unfolding right now, so we can't tell-- you can't tell the ending.

We can't even really tell the middle because it's happening right now.

We just know the beginning.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by: The Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center, University of Alaska, Southeast, George Washington University, National Science Foundation Grant #2022-699.

For a complete list of funders, go to www.cruiseboomfilm.com.