Mushrooms and Ship-Free Saturday: what’s the connection? Mushrooms are an item that I have stopped buying because they are too expensive. Ship-Free Saturday is a proposition that supporters of Protect Juneau’s Future (PJF) won’t endorse because they say it’s too expensive. It’s easy to see the price of mushrooms in the store, but PJF’s economic figures predicting financial disaster lack little, if any, explanation as to their sources.
The PJF folks want you to think they are “a grassroots coalition” of locals working to ensure “Juneau can determine its own fate,” as their Facebook page proclaims. But their FB page also lists three major foreign cruise ship corporations as their top three contributors: Westmark Hotels, owned by Carnival Corp; Pride of America Ship Holding, which despite its patriotic name, is a subsidiary of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings; and Royal Caribbean Group. It is hard to imagine that Carnival, Norwegian and Royal Caribbean want Juneauites to determine our fate when they have loaded Protect Juneau’s Future’s coffers with close to $200,000 of the more than $280,000 in contributions PJF has collected, per the most recent APOC filings.
If we residents truly are in control of our fate regarding the cruise ship industry’s impacts, both beneficial and detrimental for Juneau, let’s support a transparent, community-based initiative process that exemplifies a true grassroots democracy. Let the voters decide. Support Ship-Free Saturday on the municipal ballot as Proposition 2. When it passes, I’ll celebrate with a side of stuffed mushrooms at a locally-owned downtown restaurant on a Saturday night.
Susan Schrader
Juneau