For years, Alaskans have caught themselves dreaming of a summer without all those damn tourists crowding the highways and clogging the fishing streams.
Now they're getting their way, and it doesn't look all that great.
Can you say: "All of the traffic and less of the money"?
In fact, it almost seems the traffic is worse, though state officials and tourism businesses agree visitor numbers are down 20 to 30 percent. Those statistics are buttressed by staggering declines in municipal revenues that come from taxes on rental cars and hotel room. By the end of the year, Anchorage could find itself short millions of dollars normally lifted from the pockets of largely unknowing tourists who fail to note all the taxes hidden in Alaska travel costs.
The reality of the tourism drop seems real elsewhere, too. Some downtown restaurants and bars that would normally be hopping every night this time of year are startlingly quiet. Buses that would normally be packed with curious visitors appear half full.
And yet, traffic on the Seward Highway runs bumper to bumper to the Kenai Peninsula nearly every day, and there have been so many collisions and traffic deaths along that stretch of road this summer that public officials convened a forum in Girdwood to debate what might be done to make the pavement safer.
Who knows how to explain this. Maybe Alaskans who would normally vacation Outside in the summer are staying home to vacation because of the weak economy.
Whatever the case, the tourism drop doesn't seem to have produced the one improvement in Alaska summer life most of us who live here would like to see, though it has clearly put a dent in Alaska's economy.
A lot of seasonal jobs are gone, and the general drop in economic output is going to ripple beyond that.
Look no further than the layoffs of municipal employees. Those cuts are linked, in part, to the tourist-tax money that isn't coming in as expected.
Expect more job cuts in the private sector as cash-short tourism businesses (not to mention those out-of-work seasonal employees) cut back or limit their spending on everything from bananas to booze.
And now tourism industry officials are warning that the situation is going to get worse next year.
At least four cruise ships are pulling out of the Alaska market, which is projected to cut tourism numbers by about 150,000. But that's probably not the biggest loss.
The cruise companies have historically promoted Alaska heavily. The advertising and marketing they do to sell the 49th state help rise a tide of tourists who lift all businesses. It's pretty simple how this works: The more people Outside, or in Europe or Asia, that are enticed by the idea of vacationing in Alaska, the more likely they are to come.
Conversely: no promotion, no commotion.
Remember that old saying, "Out of sight; out of mind."
That's where the state, which got out of the business of directly hawking its tourism industry years ago, appears headed. When Alaska decided to privatize tourism promotion in 2000, it seemed like a good idea. The Alaska Tourism Industry Association could take over on contract and use declining public funding to match increasing private funding to grow the marketing effort.
Where does the situation stand today?
The ATIA had a budget of almost $12 million for 2009; $3 million came from private industry, $9 million from the state. The state used to match industry funding 50-50, but reluctantly changed the formula to 30-70 after imposing a head tax on cruise ship passengers and subsequently witnessing a million dollar drop in cruise ship company contributions to the marketing association.
Meanwhile, unfortunately, the minds of legislators locked on the idea that the state shouldn't have to do much to promote Alaska tourism because that should be the responsibility of the tourism industry itself.
Thus a business that brings in about $1.5 billion every year and provides 40,000 jobs -- one in every eight jobs in the state -- gets a fraction of the marketing money it needs if Alaska is going to compete for business on the national, let alone international, stage.
To even begin to match what other states are now doing to promote their recession-threatened tourism industries, ATIA estimates it would need a budget of at least $20 million. That's a 75 percent increase. With state tourism businesses all looking at declining revenues, there is not going to be any increase in funding coming from that direction.
And though Alaska is one of the few states with the cash on hand to go counter-cyclical and spend money to decrease the effects of recession on Alaskans - instead of cutting back on state spending to increase the effects of recession on Alaskans - the tourism folks have only a snowball's chance in hell of getting any more money out of the Legislature because, as all Legislature's now know: "Hey, promoting the tourism business isn't a state responsibility; it's a tourism business responsibility."
If municipal governments all over the state suffer from this attitude because of big losses of taxes on rental cars and hotel rooms, so be it.
Those communities survived big cuts in state revenue sharing; they can survive this, too.
And if a lot of Alaskans find themselves out of work because of this attitude, so be it. Those tourism jobs aren't the best jobs anyway; everyone should have a $100,000 a year job working in the oil patch or ghost-writing Sarah Palin's book.
Yes, it seemed like a good idea when the tourism industry took over promoting itself and relieved the state of the idea that it had a major responsibility.
Now, well, one can always look at the bright side.
If things keep going this way for years and years and years, maybe Alaska tourism will finally shrink to that level where the roads are largely traffic free in the summer. I'm not optimistic that will happen, but the way things are going, it's the best one can hope for.
Craig Medred is a contributing editor at Alaska Dispatch. Contact him at info_alaskadispatch.com .