A signature-gathering drive to ban cruise ships from Alaska’s capital city on Saturdays has fallen short of the needed signatures to get the question on the Oct. 1 Juneau municipal ballot.
Karla Hart, a well-known cruise ship critic, is leading the effort to get the issue before Juneau voters. She and her group are proposing “ship free Saturdays,” with no cruise ships that have more than 250 passengers allowed to stop in Juneau on Saturdays or on July 4.
The petition needed 2,359 signatures to be validated by the city clerk. Only 2,069 were certified as valid, with 290 more needed to get the question in front of voters. The group pushing the petition have 10 days to remediate the shortage by gathering the 290 signatures.
“Out of the 60 books we received from the petitioners committee, the only complete book that was rejected outright was book #60 due to lack of notarization,” City Clerk Elizabeth “Beth” McEwen wrote to the petitioners.
Read McEwen’s letter at this link.
The Juneau city government has already crafted an agreement with cruise ship companies to cap the number of cruise visitors starting in 2026. The agreement has the cruise lines agreeing to coordinate their schedules to limit passengers arriving in Juneau at 16,000 per day Sunday through Friday and 12,000 on Saturdays. But the petitioners want to go further and stop all large cruise ship activity on Saturdays during the 22-week cruise season.
A second petition is circulating in Juneau that would place a recall question on the ballot to boot School Board President Deedie Sorensen and Vice President Emil Mackey. Petitioners are upset that the school board is preparing to consolidate campuses to meet the needs of a shrinking student population.
That group was authorized on April 10 to begin collecting signatures and had 60 days in which to obtain the signatures of 2,359 qualified Juneau voters.
