Tourism RFI Walkthrough

Thank you for joining me today. My name is Amy Ainslie, and I'm the Planning Director for the City and Borough of Sitka. I would like to share some information and background regarding the Request for Information, or RFI, that the city has recently published for cruise passenger support services. The assembly in April of 2021 tasked the Planning Commission to work on essentially a logistics plan for the upcoming cruise passenger season. Sitka is slated to have its largest cruise passenger season on record with 480,000 passengers forecasted for the 2022 season.

The plan has— is really focused on logistics, dispersion, transportation, traffic, and infrastructure needs, and again with that really tight focus on primarily the 2022 season. The planning effort has taken course over the summer, starting in May, and is slated to finish in mid-December with a final draft and then presentation to the Assembly in mid-January. If you have any interest in kind of keeping track of the planning effort that's been going on and would like to receive email updates, please email [email protected] and we can put you on our email list. So the purpose of this RFI was to help kind of get more background information on the potential budgetary demands of some of the services that have been suggested through the planning process. And I'll walk through, walk through what some of those services are here.

So primarily we're looking at traffic management, custodial services, and communications. And there's a couple of kind of breakdowns within each one of those categories here within the RFI, so I encourage you to look through those in more detail as you may have interest. The purpose of an RFI versus a Request for Proposal, or RFP, or perhaps a more formal bid is that an RFI is kind of simply what it sounds like. We're just seeking information, and the responses that we receive are informational only. They're not a bid or a contract or anything like that.

So the information that we receive will be used just internally for staff to get a sense of the market's interest and capacity in providing these services and also what the cost will be. This will be really valuable information as the Assembly considers adoption of the plan and the budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

I wanted to point out something, I think, that so that folks don't get overwhelmed looking at this, this RFI is that you are not required to provide a response to all the services listed. We really want to hear from any organizations, businesses, individuals that want to provide one to all of the services, whatever, whatever you think you might have interest in doing so. So, you know, if you're only looking at you know, something like providing crossing guards and daily litter pickup without the rest, or perhaps, you know, a company would like to do just the shuttle system. Those are all— that's all information that we would love to hear. So, you know, don't feel like this has to be a package deal.

We're interested in hearing from any and all who have interest in providing those services. But the kind of the format of the response, sort of a letter of interest. From, you know, someone who represents and is authorized to represent your organization or business, a narrative describing those services, and if they could be identified by sort of the letter and number that is on that front page, that will be really helpful to help keep things clear, an estimate of providing those services, and some background of, you know, kind of the qualifications that your organization might have to provide those services. Your response can be turned in just by emailing it to the planning department, or you can drop it off here in person, and those are due back on December 15th, 2021. Please feel free to reach out with any questions that you might have.

There are some other background materials that are included. There is a copy of the preliminary cruise ship calendar, and it has a color coding system based on the total total number of passengers that are coming in on that day. So that is there for your information. Part of the plan at this point are some preliminary plans for street closures on Lincoln Street. Again, this is all subject to the Assembly's adoption of the plan in January of 2022, but we're hoping to build some budget estimates to, to kind of help conceptual, uh, or make a little bit more clear what the cost of these kind of road closure plans would be.

So we've provided some background information on how potential road closures could work and therefore the support services that we would need to go along with them. And then we've also included this map here that has traffic control assistance and custodial/environmental services on a map. So for some of the services that we were looking for, like perhaps having traffic conductors to more efficiently move through traffic, particularly on our high passenger days, The map shows kind of those, those intersections where we're most interested in having traffic conductors. Same for crossing guards. We might need a little bit more help with traffic control, and having a crossing guard can really help with that.

And so we've identified a few key intersections where crossing guards might be needed, but we'd love to hear more from the public. I know if additional locations are requested, these kind of orange areas are CVS you know, kind of public areas where we will need some support on waste or refuse collection. And then we've also identified our existing public restrooms for custodial environmental services as well, just to kind of give folks a sense of the scope of the type of services that we're looking for. Again, I just wanted to really thank everyone for taking the time to look at this video. We like to hear as much information on this as possible from the public, so please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Again, our best way to contact us is via email, [email protected], and thank you for your time today.