@seachanger We had a group of protesters at the roundabout holding signs that basically told tourists to go home. "too much", "come back without the ship." LOTS of comments on Sitka Chatters about it. Seems like the number of tourists question is really causing starker divisions.
@seachanger We had a private citizen build a dock for the mega ships. Some days we can get 9000 - equal to the number of residents.
Last year we had 550,000ish. Some days were absolute insanity. We just don't have the infrastructure or heck, even enough for people to DO when there's 6,000 or 7,000 people in town.
@SilverSalmonAK@seachanger I was part of the group around 2004 that advocated for putting the question of a deepwater dock near downtown to voters. We didn't advocate for a position, we just advocated for a clear vote on the issue. The group was literally called "Sitkas for a Clear Vote".
@SilverSalmonAK@seachanger The value of neutrality seems to have been lost since then. If you're neutral and focus on sharing objective information, the opposing side will just yell so loud that your information literally disappears. You can't just share information and trust people to make an informed decision, because of the deluge of misinformation. And as always with development, they only need to prevail once.
@seachanger@SilverSalmonAK It's definitely a good thing that we don't have a deepwater dock downtown. The proposed location would have been out in front of Totem Park! What a mess that would have been.
@seachanger@SilverSalmonAK But a private dock is really unsatisfying for a number of reasons. One simple reason: we as a community don't actually know how many visitors to expect on any given day. All we get is the capacity on any given day. So we're told "Up to 9,000 visitors", when they know a particular sailing is 1/3 full.
A deepwater dock in a small coastal town is just too impactful for one person/ private group to control.
@seachanger@SilverSalmonAK Like so many community issues, it is so hard to get a publicly elected assembly on the same page about something that impacts so many people, and involves so much financial pressure.
Regulatory compromise is a hard, hard problem, and that usually benefits the people doing the development.
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