In lean budget times, it's always good to ask departments and services to lose weight. However, when the state Department of Transportation released the Alaska Marine Highway System 2016 summer schedule at the beginning of October, it looked more like weight loss by way of amputation. Responsible budgeting is required in all government departments, but you can't take an arm and a leg from a critical service and expect them to grow back later.
AMHS, the users of this vital transportation system, and all residents of Alaska will not be served by knee-jerk reactions to budget cuts or the anticipation of future budget cuts. Laying vessels up as a reaction to possible budget cuts means it will be harder and more expensive to bring those vessels back online later.
If the ferry system is going to weather this storm of low oil prices, declining oil production and budget pressure, it will need to do so with a carefully-thought-out strategy to provide essential transportation services to coastal communities. It needs to serve not only residents of Alaska but also the traveling public, just like the highway system serves other parts of the state and country. Saying that the ferry system is not necessary because of the cost, and because it only serves part of the Alaska population, is like saying the Richardson Highway, Denali Highway or Sterling Highway are not necessary because they are only connected directly to a small part of Alaska's residents.
The annual operational cost subsidy of the Marine Highway system is a concern and challenge, but let's take that challenge and build a system that provides necessary services more efficiently so the cost to the state general fund decreases. The best way to do this is to develop a long-range plan.
A long-range plan will first collect information about the system, the ports served, the vessels serving those ports, frequency of service, ridership, commercial and personal vehicle carriage, costs of operations and costs of service. The information can be used to consider options based on certain levels of funding, and it will help the ferry system prepare a plan for creating efficiencies in the system by looking at costs of operations including improving fuel efficiency, increasing ridership and vehicle carriage and providing rates that allow for sustainable commercial carriage.
The plan can help us determine how much, and how rapidly we can decrease the system subsidy from 70 percent to 60 percent, 50 percent or even lower. The plan should consider that increasing fares can raise revenues to a certain point, before travelers will choose other forms of transportation. For vehicle transportation, cost increases should be considered carefully because a significant share of the revenue received by the system comes from vehicle fares, and there are no reasonable alternatives for transporting vehicles between communities in coastal Alaska. Raise vehicle fares too much, and fewer vehicles will travel, and the lower revenues we will receive. AMHS commercial rate increases should consider whether there are reliable and dependable options for commercial carriage between individual communities served before instituting across-the-board rate increases.
It will take time to prepare a detailed AMHS system plan, and that is another challenge we face, but as the plan is put together, the Department of Transportation and Public Facilities should be able to identify a strategy for two or three years of reductions that do not jeopardize the overall health of the system. Is it possible at an annual reduction in subsidy to the system of $1 million, $2 million? Can those amounts be planned in such a way as to preserve basic and essential Marine Highway service?
The department should also take this opportunity to prepare a schedule that provides basic and essential services while maintaining a healthy fleet of vessels to provide transportation services in the Southeast, Southcentral and Aleutian archipelagos. These are not easy areas for traditional road transportation, and as we have seen with recent air tragedies, they are not easy areas for air travel either. These are the challenges we should address, and questions we should expect to have answered in a proactive manner by Commissioner Marc Luiken, Captain Mke Nussel and Captain John Falvey as they work to develop a comprehensive AMHS system plan.
Rep. Sam Kito III, of Juneau, represents House District 33 as a Democrat.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.