The 10 February 09 online edition of the Anchorage Daily News --- http://www.adn.com/money/industries/tourism/story/685219.html --- reports that the Alaska cruise industry and its lobbyists are in the first stages a 'hard sell' campaign to persuade legislators to roll back the provisions of the strict water-pollution and head tax initiative easily passed by voters in 2006. (For those who don't recall, or who aren't acquainted with Alaskan politics, the measure passed in the face of a million-dollar advertisement campaign in opposition by the cruise industry, and did so in a state that tends toward the right wing on most fiscal and taxation issues. In short, insuring that cruise ships visiting Alaska's coastal waters don't dump raw sewage and fuel is popular with Alaskan voters.)
Alaska's constitution gives the legislature power to quickly repeal initiatives approved by Alaskan voters in plebiscite, but should it? We've before seen instances of legislative attempts, at the behest of powerful interest group lobbies, to undo the Alaskan people's will. Maybe it is time for a constitutional amendment that puts a limit on how soon the legislature can enact legislation to alter laws made by initiative, particularly in the light of a referendum enacted into law under the former Murkowski administration that greatly increases the difficulty of putting initiative measures on the ballot, by requiring signatures from at least one voter in each of 2/3 of Alaska's forty state house districts. (In other words, petitioners have to obtain signatures from at least 27 separate districts in a geographically vast and mostly rural state.)
Presently, the legislature doesn't yet appear ready to jump hop-frog at the demands of the cruise industry ("asking how high on the way up," as my father used to say). This might easily change if lobbyists are able to find an eager or hungry legislator-Champion willing to push for the rollback.
The cruise industry now claims that the strict measures in the 2006 law are no longer needed, because the industry has reformed itself. In the light of recent instances on the national stage, in which strict regulation was not seen as necessary to provide oversight to an industry that was deemed capable of watching itself, do the words, "sub-prime loans", "toxic assets", "financial melt-down" and "deep recession" ring a bell? How about the word "deregulation" standing for what started it all?
No, I have to disagree with the self-assessment of the cruise industry. There is a reason why we can count on the cruise industry to behave itself, and not to dump pollution into Alaskan coastal waters, anymore. That's because Alaskans passed the 2006 initiative, and only because the measures adopted in this law have held the cruise industry to strict standards of accountability and oversight. Further, if the industry has truly accepted the necessity for regulating its own actions so that it doesn't run afoul of basic demands for taking extra care of the coastal waters that are its bread and butter, then what is the need to change a law to which it has, by its own claim of good behavior, completely adapted?
The cruise industry doesn't want the law governing its actions in Alaska to set a higher water quality standard than other industries are required to meet. Why shouldn't the standards for cruise ships be higher?
First, the very waters through which these ships cruise are vital to not just the industry itself, but to the people living in Alaska's coastal communities. This is an instance where interests ought to coincide. The cruise industry is able both to advertise its extreme environmental sensitivity, and to maintain the highest standard of good will between itself and the people living in the homeland to which it is bringing its "guests". The people of coastal Alaska are able to be sure their waters aren't being polluted by dumping.
Second, by their very nature, cruise companies represent a transient and outside-Alaska-based industry. Cruise companies make their money visiting a land where they, along each season's receipts, do not remain. The economic benefits that come from selling the scenery and experience of being in Alaska mostly don't go to benefit the places that are forced to accommodate a large volume of visitors each and every season. (Without a corporate tax on the cruise industry, almost none of the revenue generated for the industry by local communities would return to the governments of those communities responsible for the infrastructure and services enjoyed by visitors.) Local impacts from a high volume of visiting cruise ships can be intense, with some communities experiencing the presence of three or four ships in port several times per week throughout a five-month tourist season. To dump even a little wastewater from cruise ships into our coastal zone, beyond that which is strictly and minimally permitted, demands that localities accept an additional price for the presence of the cruise industry without a single compensatory benefit. Coastal communities rely upon the purity of their nearshore waters. In instances where some communities have suffered from pre-existing pollution mixing zones, the additional impact of hundreds of cruise ship visits per season obtaining permission to dump would complicate already difficult remediation and recovery measures.
Third, the cruise industry is selling a product that depends upon, and is advertised to be, a pristine and wild setting. In doing this, it is not at all unfair for the cruise industry to be held to a higher standard of water quality than local sewage treatment and seafood processing plants, or mines. People are attracted to cruise vacations along Alaska's coasts for a chance to view marine wildlife, and enjoy an unpolluted natural setting as much as they are attracted to the glaciers and the mountains.
As to the industry objection that the per-passenger cruise ship 'head tax' will discourage visits to Alaska on the part of people willing to purchase expensive cruise ship tours, I offer the following little play to put the thing into perspective:
Scene: The living room of Mr. and Mrs. Peoria, somewhere in a midwestern small town... We see a comfortably well-off retired couple sitting in easy chairs. Mr. Peoria is looking at some sort of printed matter. Mrs. Peoria is knitting.
Mr. Peoria: The new flyer from the Cruise Ship company came in today, Ella.
Mrs. Peoria: Oh good! What does it say?
Mr. Peoria: It looks like the head tax on cruise passengers to Alaska is still on. It's going to cost $2848.00 for the cruise, in addition to the $1200.00 for airfare for both of us to go to Alaska this summer. With the $50.00 per passenger tax on our cruise, I just don't see how we can afford that extra hundred dollars the cruise company is passing along. I heard on the news that Alaskans voted for the tax to keep the cruise ships from dumping sewage and fuel like they used to do.
Mrs. Peoria: Oh, that's too bad! I did so want to see Alaska, and we planned for our trip for so long. If only it wasn't going to cost us two and a half percent more than we planned, to go to Alaska, perhaps we could. Those darn Alaskans and their worries!
Are we really expected to believe that a $50.00-per-passenger tax on cruises visiting our coastal Alaskan waters is going to stop people from coming? Oh, come on! Fifty dollars hardly gets a small family into and out of the movie theater, these days, after buying tickets and popcorn! Show a little sense, tourism industry, show a little sense.
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