Juneau seeks new purpose for stalled $1 million tourism loan fund

Juneau's visitor industry director, Alexandra Pierce, is asking a city task force to help give a stalled $1 million tourism loan fund a new purpose. The Visitor Industry Task Force, which advises the Juneau Assembly, takes up the question Thursday at 5:30 pm.

The Assembly set aside the money, from Marine Passenger Fees paid by cruise visitors, in the fiscal year 2025 budget for low-interest loans to help tour operators buy cleaner vehicles, vessels and equipment. In an Oct. 12 memo to the task force, Pierce wrote that staff "struggled to stand the program up as described." They could not settle which technologies count as clean, how to make loans large enough for electric boats or buses without tying up the fund in one or two borrowers, or how to show that each loan meets the rules for passenger fee spending.

The memo offers three possible directions. One is flightseeing noise. Pierce wrote that public comment to the task force this year indicates float plane noise has returned as a concern as traffic has grown. A second is quieter or lower-emission propulsion for whale-watching boats; the task force is also weighing whether to license and cap whale-watching boats. A third is electric or lower-emission shuttles, or staging and loading improvements to ease downtown congestion.

The fund was pitched as a reimagining of a 2003 program. That year the Assembly put $1 million in passenger fees into a Floatplane Noise Abatement Program, which lent operators half the cost of converting piston-engine de Havilland Otters to turbine power, up to $250,000 per aircraft at 2% interest over 10 years. Wings Airways took the first loans, and a four-aircraft turbine Otter fleet was flying from the downtown waterfront by the 2005 season, according to the memo.

The memo asks the task force whether the new fund should target one impact, as the 2003 program did, or stay broad, and what community benefit each borrower should be expected to show.

The memo also says the task force will not take up a comparison of Juneau's tourism fees against global benchmarks, part of its charge. Because a global fees study "will not align with this Task Force in the way we had hoped," Pierce wrote, the fee discussion will go to the Assembly at a later date.