Seward: Planning & Zoning Work Session 10/20/2026

I'm going to call this Tuesday, October 20th, 2026 work session to order, and I am just going to punt this over to staff. All right, thank you, Chair Sullivan. Um, good evening, thanks for everyone for coming. Uh, we do have a doubleheader tonight, so it's been a while, we haven't had one this year, but we, uh, do get pizza for that, and so that's also for you guys and anyone kind of sitting in the audience, feel free to help yourself. But, um, I want to thank the chamber board for joining us tonight.

I'll take a few minutes just to provide some background on why we're here tonight, what we're hoping to accomplish with this kind of informal joint work session with the Chamber of Commerce board. As many of you know, we're in the final stretch of our comprehensive plan update, and one of the themes that frequently came up during our conversations of that process was balance. And so, like, specifically how we balance the importance of tourism to our local economy with the desire to kind of maintain and strengthen Seward as a year-round community. Obviously, tourism right now is our primary economic driver, and that can bring several positive benefits, but we've also heard consistently that they— that people want Seward to feel more like a year-round community with services, amenities, businesses, and opportunities that make it a great place to live throughout the year. And that doesn't necessarily mean trying to turn our winters into the same scale of what happens in the summer season, but maybe understanding better how we can leverage our economic benefits of our visitor season to support the community we want to be year-round.

And so I think you'll see a lot of that, um, concept reflected in the new draft language when that comes out for public review. It's something our department's been thinking about as we look to the future and what we're going to be doing after that big project's off our plates. Uh, part of our mission statement of community development is to provide support, infrastructure, and advocacy for a healthy community and economic growth. And historically, much of our department's focus has been on the planning, zoning, and development side of that mission. And when— those aren't going anywhere, but as we move beyond the comprehensive plan, we're looking at opportunities to more fully develop the economic development side of our department.

And so a big part of that is strengthening partnerships, especially with organizations already doing great work in this area, like the Seward Chamber of Commerce. And so we've already had some great opportunities to collaborate this past year. One example is the Destination Stewardship Committee, which is organized through the chamber and includes city representation from our departments. And that committee brings different community interest to discuss how we can manage tourism in a way that benefits both visitors and residents. And one of the projects that came out of that and those conversations is our new wayfinding signage project, which we had a work session here.

So I know the Commission's familiar with that, but we're working with a consultant to develop a coordinated signage system that will help visitors navigate the cruise terminal, harbor, downtown, while improving the overall pedestrian experience. Um, And I just want to take the opportunity to mention that our consultant will be here next week, and we're hosting a public open house Tuesday, the 27th, from 5 to 7 in the community library's community room. And so we'd love to see everyone there and get people's thoughts on that project, and we'll send that information out. But yeah, getting back to tonight's topic, another conversation we've had with the Chamber is the possibility of conducting some sort of tourism economic impact study for Seward. We know it's important to our economy, but having a better understanding of exactly how that economic activity moves through our community could be really valuable information to have.

And so we reached out to the chamber about having this joint conversation on this topic, and they were kind enough to coordinate tonight's guest presentation. So from our end, the goal tonight is mainly to learn more about these studies, what they can tell us, how other communities have learned them, and maybe have a conversation after presentation with the chamber on what information would be most valuable to Seward if we do decide to pursue something similar, so we know what to put out in an RFP process. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Stephanie from the board to introduce our guest presenter. I am the current president of the Chamber of Commerce, and I'm also the chair of the Destination Stewardship Community. Committee, and we have online right now Heather.

Heather, I don't want to mispronounce your last name, but Heather is with McKinley who does a lot of data sourcing for Alaska both at the state and community levels, and the best way to introduce her is actually to let her introduce herself.

Hey everyone! I can't see your lovely faces, I'm looking at a white screen. Is that supposed to be.

Yeah, the— yeah, the— sorry, the video doesn't show the rest of us, so sorry you don't get to look at us. No problem. Can you see me? You can hear me? Yes.

Yes. Okay, awesome. Well, nice to not see you all. Nice to talk with you all. Heather Holguin, Vice President of McKinley Research for I get weirdly excited about tourism studies and research.

Our firm has been at this since 1985. I joined in 1999, so 27 years of studying Alaska's tourism industry. I want to give a little background on how you can approach the economic impact of tourism in a community. We used to have a lot of good juicy primary data because the state of Alaska invested heavily in tourism research. Some of you may remember us out in hard hats on the highways or cruise ship docks, in airports, surveying visitors every few years about their experiences.

Our last round was 2016. In that one, I think we had about 1,100 people who had visited Seward, so we had a good juicy sample size to study how many people are coming and what are they spending while they're in town. So fast forward a little bit, we have to take a little bit different approach now. 10 Years later, different, um, inputs., right, different environment, probably more visitors than in 2016. So how we would approach this kind of study is I think definitely communicating with businesses, finding out what kind of people are coming to their business, how many employees they have, that sort of thing.

We definitely would have a long list of sources like from Department of Commerce, the Department of Labor, in terms of what kind of jobs are there and what industries. Sales tax data, if you've got that, we love juicy sales tax data to pick it apart. One thing I wanted to mention is that I think it's in your best interest to really gather Alaska resident visitation in addition to non-resident. In the past, we often would do an economic impact and just focus on the non-residents coming to the state because that's what we have the data on. That's kind of outside money coming into the state.

But you guys have outside money from Seward coming in from Alaska residents. We know a lot of folks are visiting friends and family, you know, they're coming down from Anchorage to recreate and that sort of thing. So I think it would be nice to be inclusive of the entire tourism industry in Seward. Again, it makes it a little trickier to track, but I know we can do it. We would, you know, estimate we'd get like all kinds of traffic data, as I said, sales tax, bed tax, that sort of thing.

The way we usually approach these kinds of projects is we give— we kind of tell the story of the industry. What kinds of visitors are coming? What kinds of activities do they do? And then we go into, you know, all the assets that you have for the tourism assets for people to visit, attractions, that sort of thing. From there, we sort of determine how much money is being spent spent in your local economy by visitors.

And we build it from there, how much are cruise lines spending to dock at your, you know, your municipal facilities. And then we would also, in addition, so we have this sort of like basic building block of how much outside dollars are going into your economy. Then we have an econometric analysis where we talk about indirect impact, that's when your tourism businesses spend money in the local economy making purchases, and then we have induced impact, and that's when employees of your local tourism businesses are making purchases of groceries and gas and that sort of thing. So we have direct, indirect, induced, and that equals total impact. We have number of jobs that are related to the visitor industry and number— and the amount of wages, and where we describe them in those three ways: direct, indirect, and induced, and then total.

So that's what it's sort of— that's the end result of this effort to And we also do the revenues to municipalities in the form of taxes and also direct cruise line payments to the municipality. I don't know Seward's tourism economy yet very, you know, like intimately, so I'm sure I would come up with more data sources, more approaches once I get to know it. But that's a kind of general overview of how we approach these kinds of studies. We want to give it— We want to give background on your visitor industry and the businesses and how people move through the town and any kind of traffic data we can get. We actually are very lucky to get very detailed cruise passenger data from cruise line agencies.

So that's a great resource. We also do surveys of cruise passengers to look at their spending. That doesn't apply to Seward, but it still gives us a basis for the kinds of things people people spend on when they're on a cruise ship in a turnaround port in addition to a transit port. Yeah, I think that is about it as far as like how we would approach or how we might approach your town as far as measuring economic impacts of tourism in your community. You mentioned lots of other efforts that maybe this aligns with, you know, tourism planning.

Maybe you need a survey of residents on what direction they want to do, you know, those sorts of things are not in the scope of what I'm talking about. Certainly we'd be happy to help you with those things too. But just strictly speaking, economic impact, we'd want to pick probably a calendar year to tackle, you know, depending on when you get funding, we could do 2026. We'd probably have to wait until halfway through 2027 just for all that data to come in, in terms of sales tax and employment wages, that sort of thing from Department of Labor and Bureau of Economic Analysis. I hope that's a good overview, and I really wanted this to be a quick Q&A session, so I'd love to answer any questions you have about our approach or anything like that.

Okay.

Yeah, we can open it up for questions.

I guess one question I can start is you kind of mentioned the differences between the types of ports, and Seward is more unique, and we are a destination port or turnaround port or different terminology for that. But have you worked with similar towns, and what does that analysis look like that would be different from the southeastern towns that cruise ship is going to pass through. You're going to have a really different pattern of people purchasing shore excursions, for example, in a turnaround situation. You're going to have a lot of those transportation expenses. And I think we will be able to get to that pretty well by interviewing businesses about volumes and spending.

I do want to note we are quite meticulous about chasing down every dollar but also not overcounting. We know very well how much cruise lines charge for shore excursion commissions and other kinds of commissions. So before we do that final analysis of how much is spent, we make sure we don't count any dollars that accrue to outside businesses, if that makes sense. But yeah, it's not knowing, you know, your specific patterns, like, very, very well. I think that will evolve as we get into it and as we analyze our budget more and our scope.

But off the top of my head, you know, yes, we have done these kinds of studies in turnparks. Seattle has economic impact. We survey their passengers actually every summer to find out how much they spend there. But Seattle's a really different animal than Seward, even though it's a turnpark. I think you have more in common with other transit ports in Seattle— in Alaska.

But I do think that getting a lot of information from businesses that serve the cruise industry will be really helpful.

I think last year what we had was, talking to the Premier folks and everything else like this that handled the baggage and the turns, and what they wound up doing is, I think there was like only 10 port of calls that were here, approximately, and so all the rest of them, there was over 100 ships that came through here, that, you know, they were just turn and burn. The people get off the ship, you know, bus down or on the, on the train, and they load them up and turn them around and get them out. They don't have a whole lot of time to spend in town to do stuff unless it's intentional for them. Also too, we've had, um, uh, Whittier, you know, people coming off the Whittier cruise ships coming here to Adventure 60 North and a variety of other places that are not associated with Princess or, you know, Norwegian or anything else like that. So that's going to have a completely different spin on your analysis, I believe.

So, um, yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is largely a turn—. The kinds of nuances we'll definitely explore. And we have great contacts at Premier and, and all of these businesses. So, um, I, I would really hope to get great cooperation from businesses and sharing their information.

That's my favorite. I got, um, I just did something for Kodiak, and their biggest hotel gave me really good juicy data on where their people where we're coming from. That kind of stuff is invaluable. So having buy-in from the business community, willingness to share, we keep everything confidential, 100%. But it does all feed into our analysis.

And we kind of triangulate. We can kind of build from the bottom up and build from the top down using those sources I mentioned on employment and earnings, sales tax, that sort of thing. So we have kind of a universe. Maybe your tax information will show people spent X number of dollars on lodging, for example, or on tours. So we have some good sources to work with.

I think that's—. Chair Claire—. That's Chair Sullivan, sorry. That's one of the questions is we know anecdotally that a lot of people get onto buses immediately or onto the train immediately, but we don't know how many people actually stay or show up a few days before their cruise because if you do cruise, people who cruise often, uh, you show up 2 days before your cruise because the ship's not going to wait for you. Um, and so are they staying in Seward and spending money, or are they staying in Anchorage, or what are they doing?

Um, as a person who owns a summer tourism-based business, we get a lot of people off of the ships that are embarking and disembarking that are staying in Seward for at least the day. And so that's a question I can answer anecdotally, but I feel like that's a a lot of what we hear and what we understand is all word of mouth and anecdotally and not fact. And that's where we start getting lost in the weeds at the chamber, is that we want to support, um, good tourism in Seward and a good year-round economy, but so much of it is just not very clear. And, and I think, um, we're not the only organization that could use that data. Um, I think that's community-wide, a lot of us could use it.

I could use it within my own business.

Yeah. Stephanie, you'll be our first interview.

Do you have any examples, or in like other towns like Kodiak or Sitka, where the community has leveraged these data reports for like some benefits to their community? Like what they have been using these data reports for to benefit their communities?

Certainly. We did economic impacts of cruise industry in Juneau. Is that handy? I can send that. As far as how it gets used, I'm just trying to think of examples.

So Kodiak is not quite finalized, but she is presenting to her city. Everyone there, the board and the staff at Discover Kodiak, are so excited to finally have some numbers that they can present present and say, look at how important our industry is, because they do feel overlooked, you know, by Coast Guard and by the fishing industry. So they were really excited to have it and to really lobby for their industry. As far as specific examples, I might have to get back to you on that as far as like what they are advocating for and what they are using the report for. I think just generally advocating, having visibility on their industry.

This is an industry that touches so many other industries, right? You can't just look at leisure and hospitality, right? You've got transportation, you know, you've got some, you've got retail. And so, it's, that's why it's so hard to measure, because it sort of bleeds into all these different industries. So, it's not an easy one that, for example, Department of Labor can just give you a report, right?

That's pretty easy to do for mining, you know, maybe for seafood, but not as easy to do with tourism, which, you know, just has all this overlap with other sectors. So I would say that's kind of the value of having this effort is pinpointing exactly how many jobs are associated. And then using that to educate your residents. I think so much of the time there's a lot of myths and maybe sometimes just the loudest voices get heard. And it's hard to sometimes argue when you don't have solid data to argue with.

I'm happy to provide economic impact example studies. I will say it might be a week or two before we have a finalized Kodiak study.

And we actually did an economic impact of tours of visitor industry on the Kenai Peninsula, and that was in 2018, so a bit older. Long ago, but it does have— and then as I mentioned, it's out-of-state visitors to the borough. I think it was based on 2,000 surveys, so we had really good juicy data on the kinds of visitors that were in there, but it didn't have a specific Seward sort of component to that report. It was for the Kenai Peninsula Borough Tour— wait, KPTMC, anyone remember that? Kenai Peninsula Marketing Tourism Council, something like that.

Heather, how do you work with communities to figure out, like, a scope for what information to collect? Is it, like, more— you working kind of individually with the specific community because each of them are so unique, or do you have, like, different tiers or packages that you kind of start with? And so just kind of thinking through the next steps if we go this route? Sure, sure. I would say it's definitely case by case, and I'll give you an example.

With Kodiak, we knew, as I said to you, it's like they've got a lot of residents, visitors, they've got, they've got professional, you know, they've got folks from Anchorage coming over for medical stuff. So we wanted, and they wanted, we want the whole tourism industry, we want Alaska, you know, and they have tons of hunters from Anchorage going over and hunting in Kodiak. So they really wanted that full picture. So that did bump up our scope and budget because that did require sort of extra analysis and, um, yeah, really looking at the traffic numbers. Uh, so I would say that it is a case-by-case basis.

Some communities are easier. Kodiak has an easy way of counting people because they're on the planes, right? For you guys, highway, That's going to be tricky. That's going to be a little trickier. I will say that I would guess that this effort would be in the $30,000 to $40,000 sort of realm.

If that is a barrier, we can talk about a smaller scope. But I do think that we could probably get in that realm, but I would have to sit down and do a lot of budgeting to get to it. But definitely, it's usually the same as far as scope, as far as like, here's This is what the outcome is going to be. You're going to have direct, indirect, induced, total impact in terms of employment, wages, total spending, and you're going to also get municipal benefits in terms of sales tax, bed tax, and direct payments from cruise lines if you guys have that. Sorry, I don't know off the top of my head.

Oh, you get CBD, you get the CBD tax, that sort of thing. So we include all that sort of benefit. So really the outcome or the end The product is usually pretty similar, but yeah, the way we get there may vary community to community. And as you know, they paid— included in their economic impact, they paid for 500 surveys of passengers on their docks, so we got really good intel on exactly how much people were spending. So that's really lucky.

It's great to have that. They did pay for that research out of their CPB fund. I'm not sure if that's a resource for you guys in terms of using CPB dollars, but generally The CLIA and cruise folks have never objected to using CDD dollars for research that highlights their industry.

Okay, thank you.

I have one for Heather. So it sounds like you focus a lot on tourism, but we're also, you know, looking for, you know, the cost of living research. And population and employment studies. And have you done like, uh, those kinds of things that weren't necessarily tied to tourism before? Absolutely, yes.

I will say that I'm not the gal that digs into the census data, but I'm one of 12 staff members and we have others that like really are good at that stuff. I like stay in my tourism lane and my maritime lane, but certainly that is something we can do. We've done cost of living studies, population, all those sorts of things.

And we have, I'm trying to think of who we have from Seward in our office. We were all just there for our staff retreat in April, and it was so lovely, we were at Salted Roots, so that was really special, and it was great to be able to visit Seward very recently so I could have fresh eyes on it.

To follow that up, you talked a lot about, you know, outside money coming in, but I think another thing that might be Alaska kind of unique is the impact of J-1s and kind of money leaving the economy. Have you done any analysis of that before?

That is a really good question because we do report wages paid, but we don't— I mean, in my memory, I cannot remember doing an extra analysis of how many of those dollars are leaving a town, you know, at the end of the season. It's certainly something that's an important issue. We could include it in our scope. I don't know that data very well, but I know Department of Labor tracks that, you know, those kinds of things pretty well. You can call it— a word for it, you know, sometimes people call it leakage when people are collecting their wages and then bringing, you know, spending them outside the economy.

That's a really good point. And as I say, I think if that's like a really important source of employment for you guys, I think there could be some extra analysis on whether those wages are like being spent, you know, that those induced induced impacts to the extent, you know, obviously your J-1 workers have to pay to live and eat, right? So you've got some of those induced impacts, but I see your point that wages are probably being sent home or brought home.

Yeah, to add to that, you know, there's also people that have investment properties that don't necessarily reside here, and that could be other dollars or people that have a charter company and they don't— they just come here for the summer to be able to run their charter business and then, you know, wherever they live outside of Seward. That's also a good point. You know, as I mentioned, we really do try to track down every dollar but not overcount. So I think that's a good, good thing to sort of incorporate into the surveys and as we gather information, for sure. Yeah, if people are living in Anchorage but making money from the tourism industry 3, those benefits are leaving the economy.

I think that sort of ties into a little bit of the cost of living, because the average Sewardite for the most part doesn't have a lot of the funds to purchase the homes and the cost of living here. And so what happens is we get all these people from wherever else they're from they come here, they have the Airbnbs, and a variety of different things like this, and that money winds up leaving, leaving the community. And that's problematic. Yeah. I was also curious about if you've done any studies of the impact on the infrastructure of a large tourist base coming in on a town.

I know Sitka has like some big problems with cruise ships overwhelming their infrastructure there. And I was wondering if you ever studied anything with that. So we've actually done studies now, we're underway in Haines, and we did Prince Rupert, Sitka, Skagway, oh, Kitkam. So we have done studies specifically to the cruise industry. What is the cruise industry costing the municipality?

And we interview staff at the municipality and say, how much of your time was spent on cruise ship related things? You know, how many garbage bags did you buy for those extra garbage cans. Like, we turn over every rock. So I can also provide those studies if you like. That's a whole other ball of wax from economic impact.

That is, what are the costs of an industry to the municipality, and specifically crews in these cases? And again, I think the CBB funds probably paid for some of that work. But yeah, that's an important point. If you wanted it, you know, if you wanted to expand the scope and look at that. It is quite time-consuming.

We have to examine city budgets and interview everyone involved who might spend time with tourists, dealing with tourists. Maybe they're issuing permits, maybe they are cleaning the— oh my God, the Skagway restaurant's cleaning out the drain or something. It was just gross. There's all kinds of work that, you know, local folks to serve the industry. And so, yeah, these municipalities really wanted to understand what's going on here.

And on the other side, we look at benefits as well. You know, what are they getting in sales tax? What are they getting in CBD and mortgage? You know, that's very important for some of these communities. But really the focus is, what is this costing?

Well, part of it too from this is because the Alaska Railroad owns the cruise ship dock, and so that's another factor to play into it as well because those funds go to the railroad. That's what I— I'm so sorry I forgot that when I was talking to NISTL because like these other places they get some money, right, from the dockings. You know, CBJ, Juneau has two docks and they get a lot of revenue from that. So do you guys not get CPB funds? I don't know.

We do. You do? We do. Yeah. Yeah.

You get that, but you're not getting like a per passenger fee or anything like that other than CBD. You know, like the cruise lines are paying for more and they're paying the railroad. That's what you're saying. I'm guessing. Yeah.

Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah, that is a different environment from a lot of other places. I think it's similar to kind of, I understand that Juno, the cruise ships own like businesses on land that people go and spend in. And I think, yeah, we were just kind of looking for calling that out.

I don't think we have that situation in Seward directly, but we have the railroad. Um, you know, I do have to speak out there because that is a common myth. Because these jewelry stores call themselves Princess sometimes, it actually and we know this because cruise lines gave us all of their purchasing data for an economic impact of tourism, and they've done that various times throughout the years. They do not own businesses that are like shops, like retail shops or anything like that. They— some of them are associated with buses and things like that, but generally that's not the case.

It is a common misconception. As far as I know, and I've studied a lot of this over the years, I've pored over all the cruise lines' budgets and what they're spending on, and they, as far as I understand, they do not own businesses like retail shops and things like that on the shore side in Alaska. I think the thing about it is they may have the contracted ones where they have people go through, because like, for example, Princess, you know, people have their, their little personal fob that, you know, you can go everywhere and charge everything on it that is on there. It's And then they have deals, they have deals, I think. But they're actually— these lines don't own those.

Yeah, they may not, but I'm just saying there's a contract of some sort with them because you can purchase, you know, the jewelry at the store there using your Princess fob, um, and, uh, which is pretty interesting. So that's— that maybe that's why people think that the Princess owns those things. I don't know, but that's it. It sort of was, uh, because I've been on a couple of those cruises And I'm like, wow, seems to be everybody owns this stuff. Yeah, it's really common.

I've been hearing it 20 years, you know, but I— again, as far as I understand, and I've been studying this a long time, that doesn't happen in a lot of towns.

Heather, I'm just curious, how specific can you get in kind of learning the value of a tourist based on kind of their mode of transportation. Obviously we get people off the trains, the cruise ships, the, the road system, but even more specific, like people coming in on like the smaller Expedition cruise ships or Vikings ships, like do they provide different economic value versus like the larger Quantum, maybe cheaper cruise ships that people are coming in on, um, in a way that might help Seward prioritize what type of tourists to market to? Like, I'm just curious how specific you can get. I can guarantee you they spend more. I can say that with a lot of certainty that when you have twice as much average income or whatever, yeah, those folks are going to be spending more in your local economy.

In this case, because we won't have the luxury of those intercept surveys, I can't imagine how much it would cost. It would be like, it would blow your budget out of the If water. We were to send surveyors to, you know, collect information on the ground, that would be the ideal scenario. I think it's like, I don't know if we can quantify that realistically. In the past, we've gotten some data from small cruise ships, like UnCruise, you know, like in Juneau we had a survey and we did understand kind of the difference.

I mean, we'll draw on whatever data we have. To help you guys out, and also there's going to be a limitation to how far we go down that path of like, well, exactly how much does a railroad person save, you know, spend versus this kind of person. As I said, in the past we would have that, like, based on all this rigorous primary research, but we don't have that as a tool this time, so we're going to have to come at it from a different angle. I think one thing we determined in Kodiak, we had, you know, here's how many people people came and we said, the hunters are spending this much total, the wildlife watchers, the fair viewers are spending this much, you've got your BFRs in business, that sort of thing, we can come to some big numbers on how much they're spending. But it is tough to get to an assumption of one person off a railroad, average spending for that person.

Never say never, you know, I don't know what data is available yet and how much we can get out of businesses. Okay, thanks. I have one question. It sounds— I don't know if any of all the studies that you've done over the years, have you shown anything for the negative impacts of the community of the tourism as tourism continues to grow? What is the negative impact to that?

Has there ever been an analysis in that regard?

You know, the folks that hire us generally We generally do not hire us to do that. In terms of quantity, like the negative impact in terms of cost, I guess you could say the cruise cost studies somewhat fall under that category. I will say that we do a lot of community surveys about tourism. Recently Fairbanks came, we do one every year for Juneau, and that really gets at how are people feeling the impact of tourism. We've done this one in Juneau since 1996, so you can imagine the difference in crew volume over those years and watching the impact, the negative impacts grow, watching the positive feelings go down incrementally, I will say, like not certainly not a 1-to-1 ratio with the increase in volume.

But we have a, we do a lot of those phone surveys. We're doing one in sikta this fall and we'll repeat the one in Juneau where we ask people, you know, how do you feel about tourism and how impacted do How do you feel in these certain areas of your life? You know, recreating, subsistence, you know, walking around downtown sidewalks, all kinds of— it depends on the community. But we do— that's like a really good source of really assessing the impact people are feeling. Negative impact in terms of like economic?

No. I'm not quite sure how we would go about that. Like maybe you're thinking because there's Seward and there's not a different industry or something like that, you know, you're losing something from tourism. I would have to think about that. But the best tool for, I think, measuring negative impacts felt by residents, it would be a survey.

And I will caution against— I think it's very tempting in this day and age to do an online survey that's like self-selected. I do caution against putting a lot of time and resources into that because As we've seen when we've done these surveys, we did a parallel one in Juneau, both online and phone, and you know, you get a lot of bias in the online surveys because people— you're only surveying the people that sort of saw the sign and clicked the QR code or wanted to take the survey. We do a phone survey that's randomized, so it's a representative sample of the population. We compare our results with the age of the actual population according to census, also by neighborhood. You really see a different outcome from a random survey as opposed to a self-selected online.

I don't mean to dog all online surveys, but when it's a hot-button topic, that's when you have to be really careful. That's when we see like, oh, it's gonna be really skewed. We had in the Juno survey, I don't know how many, 1,500 responses. We had to kick out people taking the survey from Florida. We had to kick out people trying to take the survey 5 times.

You know, those kinds of things are going to happen. So it's a tricky area. I did not mean to get on my soapbox about online surveys here. I was just cautioning against it. Call me before you do that.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, I guess because sometimes when, you know, when you— when a town goes so far into tourism, other aspects of the community may suffer at times. I just, you know, want to keep a balance. You know, you've seen, you know, being an East Coaster, I've seen that on the East Coast where, you know, yep, the town sort of dries up and blows away when the tourist season is over and the services for the regulars are significantly diminished.

And I just, you know, there's a point of diminishing returns, and I didn't know if any of your studies revealed any of that.

Yeah, just as I mentioned, the sort of talks with the municipality and resident surveys is a good tool for that. Right. Okay, thank you. Has anyone— I know you said you You did studies about how much cruise ships are costing the municipality, like you said, like trash cans or trash bags. Do they use that to leverage— do they use that study to leverage to the cruise ships or whatever to access more CPB funds for a broader scope of things, like buying trash cans or fixing sidewalks that cruise ship passengers walk downtown?

I don't know. I guess I was just curious. I was just wondering if that was ever—. I think they use it, yes, I do think they use it for CPB purposes so that they can show cruise lines or CLIA, you know, like, look, we're not breaking the rules by using your CPB funds for this. Yes, I think that does happen, but there's no lobbying for more CPB funds.

I don't think that is a result of these studies. In the Skyway study, we did show how much the value of their $37.50 has gone down since that passed, you know, that's less money now than it used to be. So, or, you know, on a community level, $5 per passenger, you know, maybe that's $3.50 or something now. So that legislation has some weaknesses because it was a straight dollar amount and we've had quite a bit of inflation. So that's an area where, you know, our client was interested in like, let's show that, and they probably are lobbying with that.

Heather, what— could you, for example, if there was a list put in front of you of how that data was going to be used. Would it help in creating a scope? That way you kind of cater the data? Okay. Oh, 100%.

I'd love that. I should start like that with all my clients.

You want to open it up to anyone? Yeah. Anybody else that would want to add anything in? And not just the folks in the front table here, but anybody in the back? I'm sure, Lori.

Hey. So would a study— if you did a study, would it be limited to inside the city limits, or would it say— you know, in Seward, anyone who stays or eats or anything outside of the city limits is not paying bed tax, is not paying sales tax. I've always been curious about the impact of that, or the loss of that possible revenue. Don't you have a borough? A borough tax as well for bed tax anyway?

Not for bed tax. And if we did, it wouldn't go to us. It would go to the borough. We have it for sales tax. Okay, well that's something to think about.

What is your census area? Do you know?

What it encompasses? That's like where I would want to ask. I can't really answer that. Just inside the city? You really need that data.

Specific to a community or borough. So yeah, that's definitely something I'd have to think about in our scoping, is how we consider the parameters. You know, generally it's a municipality or borough for us.

Because I think the census, if we have— I mean, they— I think the last census was 2023, or some sort of— they came back with 2,900 people, and that's just at the end of town. But there's so much overlap from out of town that they spend in town because there's nothing out really in the borough, you know, for shopping, the grocery stores, and getting gas and a variety of other things like this, or people are coming and going. So it's— it would be sort of— it's going to be very muddy, I think. Yeah, that would be— yeah, yeah, I—. I was going to say that, yeah, that would be an interesting data set to maybe find out too, is the economic impact of the residents who live outside of city limits and how they affect the economy within the city.

It's probably close to the same amount of people. More? I think Bear Creek is more. I wouldn't call that tourism or visitor industry personally if they are just nearby residents kind of coming in. So I think that would be a different study or a different scope.

But if they come in to fish or do the rest of the stuff, they're sort of I don't know if that's just local. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if we could kind of delineate it by where they're staying, you know, if they're staying outside of town, if their lodging is outside of city limits or within, and then extrapolate from there for some of it anyway.

Yeah. I would not want to write that design.

It sounds complicated. Yes, it does.

Anybody else in the back? Okay. One more thing. What about impacts on our medical system from the visitor industry? I couldn't hear that.

Medical system. What's the impact on the medical systems from the visitor industry? That's part of the indirect impacts. Those are part of the spending. I mean, yeah, I actually, you know, We've asked visitors a million times what they spend.

I don't think medical comes into the equation. It's quite rare that a visitor needs medical attention. As far as people in the industry needing medical or paying for medical services, that's going to be part of the induced impacts. Yeah, I think there has been worries about people who work on cruise ships or visitors, filling prescriptions here. I was thinking the impact on our medical staff on the influx of people.

Like I've heard when a cruise ship comes in, there's a huge impact on the hospital. They bring people into the hospital, seen from the cruise ship. I bet that's part of your role as a turnaround port too, because they've been waiting to get off the ship, you know, to visit the hospital. So that's an interesting aspect of it, it sort of leads over into that other kind of study, which is the cost of an industry to your municipality. Is your medical run by the municipality?

No, not really, no. Contracted to Providence from the city.

Hospital. The staff is Providence, it's out of here. The buildings themselves are Seward's, but that's, you know, I don't know how much goes into necessarily that aspect, but most of the funding, most of the profit I think would go up to Providence.

Right, is that an economic impact? I suppose it's an impact in terms of, you know, I especially think if it's an issue that you don't have enough services to meet the demand and that residents are having to give up a bed or, you know, an appointment. For the sake of the visitors, that's something that would be bothersome, that would be a problem. I haven't encountered that in our studies yet. It was an issue in Prince Rupert because they're really remote and they get, you know, they have to have ambulances come from hours away.

So that was an issue that we touched on there, but it wasn't something that we quantified.

Would it be possible to quantify it? I just, I wouldn't call it, I don't know if I would include it as economic impact of the visitor industry in Seward. It would be a side topic. There's just so many questions.

Boy, now this is turning into a much bigger project.

Lots and lots of fun things to analyze. But we're happy to— whatever you guys want as a scope, you know, we're flexible. Yeah, just let me know next steps, you know, whether it's— maybe you guys can prepare like a list of outcomes that you would be interested in and we can provide some scoping and budgeting language.

Okay. Anybody else have anything else for Heather?

Nope, I think we're good. Thank you.

Great, I don't have to stare at my face anymore.

Thanks, Heather. Thank you.

It sounds like you've got 3 or 4 different potential studies there. Yeah. We have a lack of data for multiple reasons.

But, and obviously we can work with the chamber to maybe start the conversation of what that scope looks like. But if you guys want to have a conversation now of just brainstorm some of that, we're happy to take notes so that we have something to start with or a foundation. I guess I'm— what I'd wonder is what the initial objective was to just find out what are the economic impacts of tourism and what we need to do to, you know, further either promote tourism or maintain what we have going? Is that sort of what it is, or are there areas that are lacking? Part of it's understanding if we have the right infrastructure and how people are moving through our community and spending money.

As the same thing that just happened here is what's been happening in all of our meetings, we just keep going with, well, what about this, what about this, what about this, which again just circles back to We don't have enough information and we need more. And so for the Destination Stewardship Committee, the easiest place for us to start is understanding how tourism is impacting the community. But there's a lot more that we could all use for information. And a lot of it's just word of mouth and good guesses. So that's kind of where we had— chatted about starting, but we wanted to keep the door open and collaborate with the city to understand what would be useful information for you.

So we're all in this together trying to do the same thing. We're all trying to have a stronger community with a year-round economy, and we keep falling down the same rabbit hole. Well, tourism obviously is a big financial aspect of that because that's bringing the lion's share of of, I guess, funds initially, you know, that, but you do have, you know, you have government, you know, obviously you have government, you have the prison, you have, you know, a variety of other things, you know, but that's just state government, feds paying people, but that's not a ton. I mean, it's salaries, but it's enough to keep people sustained year-round, but what does tourism do that will help the community year-round itself, maybe targeting that, because you guys are bringing a lot of money, clearly, people in the tourism industry. But, you know, do we need to do stuff like— is it more, you know, focusing on winter tourism to continue to bring that?

And, you know, unfortunately snow is unreliable here, you know, pretty much. So you— so what do you do on that? I don't know, is the objective to— okay, we're doing well on the summer side of the house, you know, the summer side of the house, so to speak, to speak, and just maybe tidying up with the professionals on that stuff, or do we want to, or does the committee want to expand the winter part of it? And, you know, or else you can't really have destinations for conferences. You don't have anything that's really big enough anymore.

I think years ago they were planning on that, but that didn't pan out. So that's sort of something you really won't be able to do. So I don't know, not being in the tourism industry myself, I just don't, you know, really know what what you want to, you know, start out as, okay, this is what we need to have. Maybe it's just a list of priorities or a list of wants and then narrow it down from there. Yeah, that's kind of what we're trying to gather is what the interests are, what kind of information people would feel is valuable and useful.

And then to also help clarify or clear up some of the misinformation that might be out there about how tourism does impact our community. I think there's—. There are positives and negatives, but, you know, to provide clear-cut information, um, winter tourism, year-round tourism's, uh, important. It will never be the same as, you know, anybody who worries about it becoming the same as summer, that's, I think, frankly impossible here. Um, but I do think there are opportunities for year-round businesses here that we are not tapping into.

And we know, we know we're about to be in a huge, you know, growth pattern here with the Coast Guard coming in and with the new housing developments and just all the things that are on our horizon. And it feels like a really good time to try and get in front of some of this information before it becomes even more difficult to scale and more, uh, more challenging to kind of corral, for a better word, lack of a better word. Yeah, yeah, I think for like winter tourism, I think the patterns of visitation of the winter tourism we do get would be helpful for small businesses in the sense of like marketing, like seeing where winter tourism is coming from. Like, do they come from California? Is it mostly in-state?

You know, that could help their Facebook targeted messaging, you know. Or are they coming for Restaurant Week, or are they coming to that fire type, you know, or that tire, bike, you know. And so that way they can help leverage that information to have more sustainable businesses throughout the year. And that would be good. Yeah, yeah, because people don't come down a lot of times now because so many businesses are closing in the wintertime.

Yeah, I remember back in the '90s it was, you know, everything stayed open, people stayed. I mean, there's so many snowbirders now, it's just crazy, you know. They, as soon as the season's over, they just roll up and they're gone for, you know, cruises or month, you know, for alternate homes elsewhere. And everybody who sticks around is— you only got about 3 restaurants to choose from, right? Well, and like, you know, like crafting is becoming a really big thing.

Like a lot of our staff travel for crafting. And so like, you know, like maybe if that is a big scene in Alaska, maybe leverage, you know, our crafting scene to the state to drive one or two, you know. So it's like seeing what the patterns are and what passions, what are bringing people to community, and that can help us put like stuff in our winter guide, you know, like what we can highlight to create our patterns. Okay, makes sense. And I think another aspect too was, um, Stephanie and I have been talking a lot about like the ripple effect of like, you know, like obviously tourism brings direct dollars into small businesses' pockets and tax, uh, but like what are the bigger effects, you know, like, um You know, we got the EPA grant, which would help our utility infrastructure via, like, cruise ship.

And then we had a bunch of examples the other day, but yeah. Yeah, we're just like, the new cruise ship terminal is now— we have like a bigger venue for wintertime activities for the community. Um, yeah, like what type of employment it brings in. So just like these like non-dollar qualifiers, how they benefit the community, or like how, what are the like wider impacts of tourism? You know, like a lot of the like Sports America has been growing over the years, you know, like programming-wise, and they've gotten bigger budgets.

Like how many of that can be contributed to tourism tax dollars, you know? So like, I guess just like seeing what, just besides direct dollar amounts, like how that is impacting. Well, just be able to highlight the fact that Seward's on the map. Because people, once the summer's over, it's out of sight, out of mind, because they roll up the sidewalks. And, you know, they come down for Polar Bear because that's a well-known thing, and so that's a given.

And then there's certain things they do, but I guess, I think from my perspective would be is by having more of these things, whether it's crafting or something like this, there's a lot of people that do come down. Like they use the military resort for, you know, some of their venues and things like this. Because there's nothing else open. And so it's great to be able to do that. So if you keep that on the forefront in other places, but you're also competing against Anchorage in a lot of ways.

Anchorage years ago, they used to be very conscious of what the small towns were doing because they wanted them to still thrive, but that's not so much anymore. I mean, I think even the Polar Bear had to shift a weekend because there's some beer fest going on every year at the same time in Anchorage, and so it wound up impacting that. So it's, yeah, but I think it is, it's keeping the presence, the psychological vision to people that, and sort of sanity break for people, totally, because all the people that come down that we know at the American Legion, they said, "We just got to get out of Anchorage." You know, there's a ton of that. I'm always so shocked on Valentine's Day weekend how many couples from Anchorage I run into like at Res Art, they're like, "Oh, we're here for Valentine's Day." Pretty nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ma'am, did you say—. Yeah, the chambers are working diligently to increase winter visitation through the winter weekends so that there'd be one weekend at least where people could come down. There's deals going on, there's things happening, but the weather in Seward in the winter also was a huge factor because even Polar Bear last year, the weather was crap, the road was closed part of the way, and it really it impacted that whole festival. So no matter how much planning and things you do to get people down in the winter, sometimes there are reasons why they can't make it, one. And as far as rolling up the sidewalks and having no restaurants open, as restaurant owners in town who've tried to stay open year-round, it's just not economically feasible.

My building is enormous. I cannot heat that thing for human occupancy through the winter and not drain my everything that I made over the summer. Sure. So it's just, it's not feasible. And yeah, shops can stay open because they have one guy come in, flip on the lights, sell a pair of gloves, put those gloves back on the shelf, turn off the lights and walk out.

I have product, I have multiple people. We don't have employees, we don't have people to cook the food. Everybody wants to serve it because that's where the money's at, but trying to get people to wash the dishes, prep the food, cook the food, clean the place, there's just not the workforce here in the wintertime to sustain what happens in the summertime. So it's apples and oranges. And if people went out once a week or twice a week to eat dinner, these restaurants would be able to stay open.

But they don't. They go out once or twice a winter because everybody's hunkered down. They're tired. It's been a long summer. And I don't go out to eat a lot in the wintertime because I'm tired and hunkered down too.

It's just frustrating also as a seasonal business, which is one of the reasons I got on the chamber board 8 years ago, was to try to de-villainize us as seasonal businesses because everybody looks at us like we're greedy and all we want to do is make money and head out of town, but I raised my daughter here, I own a home here, I've been here for 30 years, and I came up here to work at a seasonal business. I worked at Ray's for 18 years before we bought the brewery. Seasonal lifestyle has always been where I've been at, and a lot of people I know, but I'm not a villain for doing it. That's, that's—. It's frustrating when I was like, oh, there's no place to eat.

It's like, well, because these people need to make money and they can't make money when people don't come in consistently. Sure. I think this might be a cultural change too. People are changing because people years ago in the '90s stayed in town. A lot of people are leaving.

They're going out and to their second homes. They're going to a variety of different places or whatever. And so that's— they're just not here. Now I'm not trying to demonize it, I'm just stating the fact that the restaurants aren't open. And I totally understand that because it takes tons of people to make things go.

I mean, we don't pay— we don't pay anybody at the Legion. Yeah, and we're open all the time. We talk about this quite a bit, um, everyone's own personal experience and their stories. And I think that's what's led us towards wanting to gather this information. Because when we talk about tourism, even in this room as we went through it, you know, until recently we would talk about tourism as a blanket term.

Not in-state, not out-of-state, not summer, not winter, and the impacts that it has. One point that I've made repeatedly is that a high school football game is tourism. It brings in families from out of town and it can fill up a restaurant strong for a term. And so I think being able to measure this and being smart about the questions that we ask or want to have asked and having to— how we measure it and dedicating some resources towards measuring these things will help us talk a little less anecdotally and a little bit more about the actual economic drivers behind them. I've said also that I think whether or not we really want to believe or even label ourselves it, every business in this town is tourism-based in some aspect.

Safeway is tourism-based. The hospital, to some extent, is tourism-based.

Certainly seasonally as well. And the more numbers that we can put behind this, the more information that we can get behind it, I think the more, the more succinct our conversations will be, because we can start pulling on those levers that either bring positive outcomes or reduce negative ones.

That's true. We still have to just identify what we want to do to address those. And because we can have the discussions and have the conversations, we have to have actionable plan to do that. Yeah? Sir?

Danny, when will the comprehensive plan be finalized? We meet with— so we have the first draft done. We're meeting with a designer in a few weeks to help kind of put the layout together, and then I'm not sure how long— I forget how long that will take her, but, um, some point around the new year it'll hopefully go out for public review. So we'll do a work session with the commission, we'll let the city council weigh in plan on it. Uh, the general public will have 30 days, as I think most plans give 30 days.

So spring, sometime in the spring, I would guess it would be hopefully approved by City Council. Yeah, because you guys did a phenomenal job with that, and there is a lot of really great data there, um, as far as prioritizing, um, what to gather more data on. Like this, when you take a look at the comprehensive plan, you could, you could see like, oh, there's, there's something to improve here. Like, we need to know more. So that would be super useful to have to develop completely, maybe before asking for the digger, the deeper data dig.

Yeah, this was the— when we did the surveys, the one pretty evenly split question was like, how do you want to see tourism to evolve in the future? And there's really no one saying like, take it away. Like, at minimum, people want to like, let's keep it, stay put. But it was pretty even between that and moderately grow and, you know, rapidly grow even more. And so yeah, there's just a lot of different opinions out there.

So I think this kind of information would be helpful just to at least share and, and and provide input for those folks to learn more about how it's impacting them. And throughout the process, the drafting process, we've been kind of throwing out the whole balance of busy summer visitor season with wanting a year-round community to the point that we have to like define, well, what do we mean by year-round community? Because as I think Stephanie mentioned, like, no one, I don't think anyone's advocating that we want our winters to look like the summers. Right? But like having more amenities, you know, like things that have shut down, auto repair shops or, you know, SBS that left, you know, those kind of things I think people, or what people mean when they say year-round community, not that we just want craziness all year long.

So I think we kind of define that in our language as well.

Is that the kind of thinking about is, you know, we're talking about the restaurants, we're talking about different things like this, but yeah, just the day-to-day things that the conveniences that we need to have, the services that we need to have, because, you know, just to go get your tires changed or something like this, you're halfway up to Anchorage at a point because everybody's full. To get your oil changed, you have to go someplace else. You know, all things along those lines. To be able to have a community, you got to be able to do everything, nearly everything everything that you want to do in a community. And so if you have stuff that's going along, that is being able to sustain it year-round, then that makes it best for everybody, whether it's tourism or winter, summer, or any other time that any other businesses that are going on that will allow us to continue to have our community be ours.

And we don't have to drive to Anchorage for every last bit of thing or rely on Amazon for everything too. So Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's what kind of from our perspective, community development is like, would this information help us? You know, obviously there's benefits to this visitor economy.

But will this information help us, you know, as we're moving forward, do we want to put pedal to the metal and be like, let's take advantage of it, or let's coast for a while because we need to catch up or focus on these other things? Great. Yeah. Anybody have anything else to add?

No? We have a little time. Anybody else have anything? We got more pizza. Yeah, pizza.

If anybody wants anything. No? I've got one more thing. It's always nice to, you know, have like a mission statement, you know, whenever it just gives you kind of a pinpoint focus on where you're going with it. And I don't know how far along the destination committee is and how far along this is.

But I think initially, it would be nice to be able to have— this is what we are trying to accomplish. Are we trying to, you know, grow the economy? Are we trying to better the day-to-day lives of Seward residents? Like, what, what are we trying to do by gathering this information? So kind of identifying the main mission, and then, you know, working down through there, building the little pieces that, that will lead to that.

Oh yeah, sort of stay in your lane, or to put the parameters that will achieve your objective. Yeah, because there's survey—. Like, yeah, there's everything everywhere, rabbit holes, and they all, you know, well, you're spitballing and you're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. You want to be able to focus on what you're actually—. What.