An open house this week to discuss Huna Totem Corp.’s proposed Aak’w Landing that would add a fifth cruise ship dock to Juneau got a mix of reviews from the community on Wednesday.

The $150 million project would also include underground parking, retail shops, dining, and an Alaska Native art and culture center. Two open houses were hosted Wednesday and Thursday by the City and Borough of Juneau as the Assembly prepares to consider a tidelands lease for the project.

The Assembly will eventually vote on the lease after additional public comment, following the Planning Commission’s approval of permits for the dock and waterfront development in 2023. The proposal originated in 2022 after Norwegian Cruise Line donated the waterfront property to Huna Totem. If the city’s vote on leasing the tidelands fails to pass, the project will not continue.

The public can share additional feedback with the Assembly via email at borough.assembly@juneau.gov. The Assembly’s Committee of the Whole is scheduled to review a draft lease and public testimony received at a meeting Feb. 24.

Some public comments at Wednesday’s event supported expanding businesses, Indigenous culture, and having a year-round opportunity to recreate in the empty lot currently known as the “subport” near Egan Drive and Whittier Street. Others worried about downtown already being at capacity with tourists.

“Why do we want to add more?” Martha Murray, a resident of downtown Juneau, said. “I hear floatplanes and helicopters over my house every single day all summer. I feel like Juneau is a really great community and adding more tourists makes it not a community anymore – just a tourist destination.”

Alexandra Pierce, the tourism manager for CBJ, said the five-ship cruise ship limit implemented in 2024 would still be followed with an additional dock. She said the agreement with the cruise lines is for five ships and it doesn’t specify where they are.

The city’s passenger cap of about 16,000 most days of the week begins in 2026 and would also be unaffected. Pierce said Huna Totem’s fifth dock proposal was part of the motivation to add a ship and passenger limit to ensure that Aak’w Landing “didn’t lead to explosive growth.”

She said the goal of the open houses is to share information about the proposal and solicit ideas from the public on how the development, if approved, could support the community’s needs. The community was invited to write what they would like to see the city require in proposed lease conditions.

“Our biggest thing in terms of the lease is we want to make sure that we’re able to connect the Seawalk to Gold Creek,” Pierce said. “That’s something that’ll be really important to us as an element. Huna Totem’s building a Seawalk, that we then have the opportunity to connect with Gold Creek. It’s really important to us that we have only one ship at the facility, no hot berthing, that we don’t have a sixth ship in anchor. For us, it’s more the port management stuff. We’re also concerned about the traffic study, making sure that this actually helps with congestion and doesn’t make the congestion worse.”

Karla Hart, a long-time opposer of the Huna Totem project, said the open house felt disingenuous. She noted Huna Totem’s dock is not the only one being considered right now – Goldbelt Inc. and Royal Caribbean Group announced last October a partnership to develop a proposed new cruise ship port on the west side of Douglas Island.

“What I see is that the city, in this presentation, is taking a very strong advocacy issue for the project and is not giving any information that would help to make a decision,” she said. “The city seems to have decided that they’re going to chop apart all of the different pieces of cruise tourism, cruise tourism impact, and address them as each a distinct unit. But the impacts to the community are cumulative.”

Hart challenged Huna Totem’s conditional use permit, with her appeal heard in January by the State Office of Administrative Hearings. A hearing officer ruling in June decided Huna Totem’s proposal “generally conforms” to the city’s waterfront plan.

Along with the proposals for cruise ship docks on Douglas Island and downtown Juneau, an icebreaker is set to be homeported downtown in the coming years. The U.S. Coast Guard port for the icebreaker Storis is very close to Huna Totem’s potential fifth dock.

Ed Page is the founder and senior advisor of Marine Exchange of Alaska, a nonprofit organization that provides information to aid “safe, secure, efficient, and environmentally responsible maritime operations.” He was also in the Coast Guard for 33 years. He attended the open house on Wednesday and said because Storis is “a very maneuverable ship” he does not believe it will cause a conflict.

“It has what is called dynamic position capability, where, I mean, basically, with all the engines they have, they can hold off a 40-knot wind and just stay still and they can move sideways,” he said. “They’ll be more maneuverable than the current U.S Coast Guard icebreakers – smaller, but more maneuverable. I don’t think that’s going to be a problem getting their vessel in and out of the dock with less space, if you will. And I think in some cases, they may have more space, because the Coast Guard has now also got the NOAA dock.”

He added that, unlike cruise ships, Coast Guard cutters are not constantly maneuvering in and out of port – at times they are deployed for months. He said the Marine Exchange of Alaska is also reviewing weather and current factors in the area. Diagrams done by the organization were shown at the open house and depicted vessel traffic in the area.

Sean Sjostedt with PND Engineers said his company is helping locate the dock strategically in a way that works with other vessel traffic and weather. Huna Totem will hire a separate company to design the technical aspects of the dock. Sjostedt said the biggest piece of traffic the Huna Totem dock would affect is anchor vessel and lightering. He said Wings Airways And Taku Glacier Lodge would also need to adjust its flight paths further south if the project moves forward. He said impacts of other vessel traffic, such as fishing boats, tugs, and smaller passenger ships, are minimal.

“We overlay the traffic,” he said, pointing to a diagram. “We look at the wind, the wave action, operational function between getting off the dock and onto the uplands, impacts to other docks, like the Coast Guard dock and the AJT dock, and then we park the dock in a spot that makes the most sense that satisfies everybody, equally, if possible.”

He said the dock intends to ease foot and vehicle congestion downtown. Sjostedt said the diagrams show real-time tracking of data from GPS equipment installed aboard vessels. However, he said they are unable to do real-time tracking for the incoming icebreaker. That’s where Page’s insight comes in handy. Plus, Sjostedt said they have vessel tracking information from Storis in its other ports. Within the next month or so, a simulation study will be done at the request of the Coast Guard and CBJ.

Corey Wall, the principal architect of Jensen Yorba Wall Inc., showed the project’s design at the open house. He said the goal of the design is to ease congestion downtown, provide more parking and connect with the rest of downtown Juneau.

“This is still a very conceptual design,” Wall said. “We’ve been waiting to start the major engineering, like landscape, architecture, everything, until it’s more certain the project will continue. So there’ll be a lot of development about exactly what this park is going to be and how we’re going to make the Seawalk even more appealing.”

Tracy LaBarge, the owner of Tracy’s King Crab Shack, which is located near the subport Huna Totem owns, said she supports Aak’w Landing. She said part of her motivation is to have her restaurant be year-round. LaBarge said business has been difficult in downtown Juneau due to outmigration, high expenses, and recovery from the pandemic. She said she would be eager to move her restaurant into the retail space.

“I absolutely love the idea that we’re finally building something in Juneau, something new and exciting,” LaBarge said. “I think in order to keep a lot of younger people here we need to keep expanding.”

• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz.garrett@juneauempire.com or (907) 723-9356.