Skagway Borough Assembly approved an ordinance that leverages commercial passenger vessel excise tax money to pay for certain capital projects.
Skagway is home to just about 1000 year round residents, and host to about a million summer cruise ship visitors. It’s a boon to the economy and a strain on the infrastructure.
Over 10,000 visitors can crowd into Skagway in one busy summer day, generating all kinds of waste material. The pain points lately are garbage disposal and “influent,” which is the nice word the municipality uses to talk about sewage.
The municipality is working to fund a composter that will take some strain off of the incinerator, currently the municipality’s waste management strategy. It must also pour over a million dollars into upgrades to the sewage treatment facility. Notably to reduce odor.
The municipality originally set aside $600,000 for these projects. Borough Manager Brad Ryan anticipates the cost will be closer to 2 million dollars.
At the Wednesday night meeting the assembly voted to make up the difference using $800,000 from sales tax revenue and $800,000 from commercial passenger vessel excise tax, or CPV.
The borough has 5.1 million dollars in CPV taxes to spend in FY20. That money is to be used for projects that improve health and safety for cruise ship passengers. Waste disposal and the sewage system are both directly used by visitors as well as the year round population.
Ryan says the borough will likely fund qualifying future projects with fifty percent CPV funding from now on.
