The Volendam cruise ship docked in Ketchikan this summer.
The Ketchikan City Council will take a look at dock and food vendor leases during its regular meeting on Thursday.
The City of Ketchikan rents out booth space on the downtown docks each summer for vendors. Some offer tours, and others sell food to the hundreds of thousands of cruise ship visitors that arrive each summer.
Thursday’s discussion has been deferred a couple of times because the Council wanted to talk about issues that have come up. One of those is a complaint about hawking – or calling out to people on the street in hopes of luring additional customers.
The Council also wanted to consider the possibility of handing the dock vendor program over to the Ketchikan Visitors Bureau, which could then use revenue from the leases to help pay for operations. Council Member Matt OIsen suggested that the KVB then wouldn’t need the annual grant from the City of Ketchikan. The lease program generated about $350,000 this year, which is comparable to the 2014 grant that KVB received from the city.
However, Patti Mackey of the KVB writes in a letter to the Council that the visitors bureau would have to hire additional staff to run that program, which would mean taking resources away from the bureau’s other services.
Also Thursday, the Council will talk about a new contract with Regional Disposal Company of Seattle to transport and dispose of the community’s solid waste. According to a memo from City Manager Karl Amylon, the price has gone up and the new contract will cost about $300,000 more per year, not including an added fuel surcharge.
The Council meeting starts at 7 p.m. in City Council chambers. Public comment will be heard at the start of the meeting.
