Juneau Assembly puts decision on cruise ship limits on hold
Published 11:30 am Wednesday, September 2, 2026
The City and Borough of Juneau (CBJ) has postponed codifying its cruise ship limit into ordinance until additional work has been completed.
During the Aug. 31 CBJ assembly committee of the whole worksession, Mayor Beth Weldon proposed an amendment to making the five-ship-a-day limit a mandate rather than a voluntary agreement, citing the need for the Visitor Industry Task Force (VITF 2.0) to collect more data and finish their findings.
Weldon’s motion was carried on a 5-4 vote.
Assembly member Christine Woll, who is in favor of the ordinance, noted that the community has shown multiple times that it is in favor of the city being in charge of setting tourism limits.
“The survey every year says the majority of people from Juneau really appreciate tourism, and the majority of Juneau wants the city to do more to manage it,” she said.
While Weldon said she appreciates the time constraints Woll has, she also referred to the ongoing lawsuit in Maine involving the legal basis a city has for setting limits. Weldon and assembly members in favor of the postponement cited the potential of being sued for voting against making the limit a city ordinance.
CBJ has managed cruise ship visitation through negotiated agreements with the cruise industry since 2023, rather than through local ordinance.
“This approach has worked as intended to cap visitation levels in response to community concerns and infrastructure capacity while preserving the flexibility and collaborative nature of a voluntary agreement,” CBJ visitor industry director Alexandra Pierce said. “Juneau is frequently cited internationally as one of the few cruise destinations with negotiated capacity limits.”
Pierce added that the limits apply to the entire City and Borough of Juneau in an effort to regulate the city’s overall destination carrying capacity, not just the downtown port area.
The first VITF worked from 2019 to 2020 and studied whether limiting cruise ship visitation was legally viable and how it might be implemented. Their final report recommended a limit of five large cruise ships in port per day, which would be pursued through negotiation with the cruise industry.
The assembly accepted the report in 2020 and formally committed to pursuing the recommendations in 2023, with the city subsequently negotiating a Memorandum of Agreement with the Cruise Lines International Association on behalf of its member cruise lines to establish the five-ship-per-day-limit.
The current VITF 2.0 convened last year to build a data collection framework to evaluate how targeted infrastructure investments affect CBJ’s overall capacity to manage passenger volume. A large data collection effort on various areas of tourism impact is slated for next summer.
“The intent of this work is to give the city a quantitative tool for evaluating whether specific improvements, such as Seawalk completion, dock infrastructure, or other investments are measurably easing the pressures a ship limit is intended to address,” Pierce added.
“This data collection effort is ongoing and is separate from the question of whether to legislate the existing five-ship limit, but it will be powerful information as the assembly considers the broader policy landscape around passenger capacity.”
