KMXT 100.1 FM Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska
Editor’s note: The following was distilled from an hour-long conversation, edited for length and clarity
Rhonda McBride, KMXT: It hasn’t been an easy summer, especially with these recent cases of COVID.
DOT & PF Commissioner John McKinnon: We’re running the Matanuska at about 30% of its actual capacity — so that the passengers can maintain distancing, so that they can elect to stay in a state room, to keep away from everyone. The crew, even though they may share quarters, you don’t have two crew in the same room at the same time. It’s been incredibly complicated to coordinate everything, but we’ve been running that mainline route since the 27th of June for seven weeks, when we made that first Bellingham run with with minor, minor, little, incidents. And this is one of those. And this,I hope turns out to be a minor incident.
The crew has been incredible about maintaining the protocols, the distancing, the masks and the hygiene, wiping things down. They’ve been insisting on passengers observing those same protocols — and frankly, that we’ve had seven weeks of operations on those mainliners with only minor incidents is incredible. And it just shows the the effort that the crew and everyone is putting into it. But right now, we’re stuck with a ship in Bellingham right now, with a crew and no revenue, because they’re going to sit there for a week, while they’re tested and then wait to get back up on their schedule.
You know that’s a couple $100,000, to sit there for a week with no revenue. This has happened all winter long. Last winter, we were in the situation where, we had mechanicals. We had three ships with a lot of extra steel to replace in the Leconte, the Aurora, the Tustumena. They were in the shipyard for longer periods of time. We had relied on a completely rebuilt Matanuska, $47 million of work on a ship that cost $6 million when it was originally built. We had a mechanical on there that apparently was no one’s fault. It just happened. She was out for the winter. So while last winter was one of mechanical issues, this winter is one where we’ve been spending money on idle ships, on reduced revenue — because of reduced capacity and reduced traffic. Frankly, this winter is one where we don’t have the revenue to run more. If we had revenue, we might be able to bring another ship out, but when it comes to some of those roots, those ships just aren’t available.
Rhonda McBride, KMXT Radio: One of the complaints from people is they didn’t get much notice on the winter schedule cutbacks. They said, “They only gave us a week to weigh in, and it really doesn’t seem like we matter.”
DOTPF Commissioner John MacKinnon: On the comment period, it’s important for us to get that schedule published so people can start booking, so that October 1st, when the winter schedule starts, we’ve got some passengers waiting to get on. The scheduler puts a tremendous amount of effort into this. She’s in contact with the communities that we served, to see what events they have, to see how we can coordinate the schedule with the events. Some of those ships also have to be scheduled around the tides. Yes, we did put it out for a five day comment period. No question about that. But the reality is, we listen to comments year-round. It’s not unusual for us to alter the schedule to meet the need of a community, and that happens year round. There’s a very good chance that if somebody comes to us in December and says we got this big event happening in March, chances are we’ll be able to accommodate that. We have historically. So even though this was an official five-day comment period, the number of comments that have come in this last week were were pretty astounding. I think Kerri (Traudt), the scheduler, said she had a stack about one-inch, and she’s going through every one of those to see what we can do. But the reality is, this year we’re at the mercy of of a budget. When you six ships sit there for weeks or months at a time, with with no revenue coming in, there’s still a big cost associated with every one of those.
Rhonda McBride, KMXT Radio: Well, I guess people would say that if paved roads were involved — say there’s an earthquake or something like that — then there would be money to fix those roads. COVID is a disaster. Is there any way you can get any relief for the added costs so that there were be fewer disruptions?
DOT & PF Commissioner John MacKinnon: When there’s a natural disaster like the earthquake, or if we had or a big flood, we can access FEMA disaster money. There is no disaster money for this, although we did get, I believe, about $10 million through the Federal Transit Administration. A big piece of that went into just paying the salaries of the crews that were on the ships. When they were on overhaul and lay up, we don’t take everyone off. You keep the systems running. You keep the ship warm. Otherwise, it starts to rust and go downhill, corrode and get damaged very quickly. So you keep a crew on there — and the crew is doing a fire watch, a mechanical watch.
Rhonda McBride, KMXT Radio: Some of the department’s critics say they believe DOT’s long range plan is to kill the ferry system. And they see this latest reduction in the winter ferry schedule as part of a slow death, to allow the ferry system to become so undependable, people won’t care when it goes away.
DOT & PF Commissioner John MacKinnon: What if you have two ships that are 55 years old and four ships in their forties? The newest ships we have doesn’t have crew quarters, so they’re very limited in their operations. We’ve got kind of a hodgepodge of ships. The Columbia, the biggest ship in the fleet, is incredibly expensive to operate, because it was built in the late sixties-early seventies, and it was intended to be a cruise ship. It has two dining rooms onboard, a lot of staterooms — incredibly expensive to operate, so we’re not operating it. We subbing-in the Matanuska on it.
I do take issue with the comment that we’re trying to kill the system. We’re trying to make the system run efficiently with the revenue that’s provided, the incredibly complicated rules that we have to deal with, not just the Coast Guard, but dealing with three unions on the ships and an aging fleet. It’s not a simple thing to operate.
In a perfect world, we’d have more money to operate. We would have more revenue. We could charge more for tickets. I don’t have any recent numbers to go from, because we have an operated a normal year since the strike a year ago. But you know, the fare box return is about 40%. That’s a great subsidy, you know that? There are a lot of communities in the state that don’t have that. They’re paying full fare for their transportation in and out.
Don’t get this wrong, but if the communities were completely cut and have no way in and out, I’m sure we’d be able to do something, but they’ve got air transportation. In Southeast Alaska, they’ve got northbound-southbound barges weekly in the winter, two times a week in the summer. There are other modes of transportation. I do take exception to that comment that we’re trying to kill the system. I go back to — we’re trying to make the system survive. You look at the politics in the state. And there was a time when Southeast Alaska, who is the primary user of the system, had four senators and eight representatives in this area, and there was some political clout — and it’s not the case any more, right?
Rhonda McBride, KMXT: Some people see this latest setback as just one more nail in the coffin, a sign the ferry is doomed. But when the Tustumena came back online after its crew was down with COVID, people were so happy. Now, people feel like they’re back to where they were this spring. Port Lions, for example, says it would be OK with reduced service, just so long as they could count on it.
DOT & PF Commissioner John MacKinnon: I hear what they want, that they don’t care whether it’s once a month or once every two weeks, they just want to know that it’s a schedule that they can they can depend on. But you’ve got to realize there are winter runs and summer runs. I wouldn’t think of sending the Tustumena out to Dutch Harbor in November, December and January. That is not the time of year to be out there for a relatively small ship like the Tusty. That’s bad weather and you run the risk of being weathered in for days, or something more serious happening, so there are some places that we can’t serve on that regular basis.
And I recognize we have a limited budget — and it’s going to get even worse with the way the state’s budget is right now, with the price of oil being down. We want to try and be able to provide a frequency of service, that increases the number of riders .
Let me put it this way. There’s a certain travel demand from these communities — and if we go weekly, we’re gonna have X number on the ship, and that X might only be a quarter capacity of the ship. But if we went every other week, most of that demand will not go away, so we can fill the ship up more, and that’s one of the goals —that we need to start operating new ships with more people.
Rhonda McBride, KMXT Radio: But now you have COVID, and people feel like they’re getting penalized twice.
DOT & PF Commissioner John MacKinnon: Some people don’t want us to go there. Kake has an outbreak and they said, “Don’t come into our community,” so we’re having to deal issues like that. In April and May, a number of the Northern Panhandle communities did not want service. But absent COVID, hopefully we get through this. I was thinking come the middle, the end of June, we should be through this — and here we are in a second wave that’s hitting us now. This is a tsunami that’s hitting us now, 80 to a 100-plus people a day. And it’s not just Alaska, it’s nationwide.
Rhonda McBride, KMXT Radio: I spoke with Rep. Louise Stutes about the working group that’s meeting to reshape the ferry system. She says there are hopes to create a structure that’s independent from the political system, that’s self-sustaining — either a Permanent Fund type of trust to operate from, or a forward-funded program, where the Marine Highway gets money to operate for five years — kind of like how the railroad has a board to manage it and make decisions. One of the possibilities being discussed — sell the fleet and use money from that to buy new, more efficient ships.
DOT & PF Commissioner John MacKinnon: Let’s look at reality. If you had a fleet of ships or a fleet of planes, included in the price of the ticket, there would be money going into the replacement of those ships. We have never done that with the Marine Highway system. There’s never been a replacement fund that was paid for out of the revenue. If we could create a different governance model for the ship, and could be assured of a level of funding that was consistent year to year, in other words like the Power Cost Equalization, something along those lines…
If you can take politics out of the decisions of the Marine Highway system, it could be operated a lot differently.
Plus, you’re still dealing with these old ships. Most fleets get rid of their ships after 25 years. You look at what’s happened in the cruise ship industry now, and some of the some of the flagships that were built in the late eighties. They’re on the way to the scrap yard. You don’t keep ships for for 50 years and keep them running, right?
Rhonda McBride, KMXT Radio: It’s a conundrum.
DOT & PF Commissioner John MacKinnon: It is. It is. We got two brand new ships that I love. They were built in Alaska — but they don’t have crew quarters, so that limits the hours of operations. But they’re brand new ships. If we put another $30 million into them and put crew quarters on both, the Tazlina and the Hubbard, they could replace the 45-year-olds, the LeConte and the Aurora.
You know, I don’t disagree that a government structure that took politics out of it could result in a very successful operation. But the challenge is taking politics out of it.
