The borough has finished working out a system with the state for issuing permits to commercial tour operators who take customers to the Petroglyph Beach State Historic Site, with 100% of the fees collected going to the borough for improvements at the property.

State law requires commercial operators who use state parks and historic sites to obtain an annual $350 license and pay a $6 fee for every customer they guide through the property.

The Alaska Division of Parks, however, had neglected to enforce the rules or collect fees from companies that took customers to Petroglyph Beach, which was designated a state historic site in 2000.

The division agreed earlier this year that the borough could help run the permitting program and retain all of the fees to use toward improvements.

Top on the list of improvements are bathrooms, parking and new decking for the viewing platform, Kate Thomas, Wrangell’s economic development director, said Oct. 16. Tour operators listed those three improvements as the highest priority, she said.

With the mid-year transfer from state management to borough management, enforcement of the permit requirement and fee collection was spotty this summer. Thomas said two operators obtained permits for 2025.

“We’re not going to chase people down” for this year, she said, but the borough will work with tour operators for full compliance next year.

Without any data from past years, when the state did not publicize or enforce the fee requirement, it’s hard to estimate how much the borough might collect next year. But, for example, if four or five tour operators get a permit and they take a total of 7,000 customers to the beach, about 10% of the expected cruise ship passenger count anticipated next summer, the borough could collect around $45,000.

The permit system will be a bit of a hybrid, Thomas explained. Operators should apply to the Alaska Division of Parks for their permit, using the existing online portal for commercial businesses; the state will forward the application to the borough for approval; the state will issue the permit; and the operator will pay the per-person fee each year directly to the borough.

“At the end of the day, it’s about as good as we could hope,” she said of the system. After 18 months of talks to amend the management agreement from 1998, the state and borough this summer signed an amended agreement for the Petroglyph Beach State Historic Site.

The important benefit for the borough is that it can use the fees at the site. Under the old system, anything the state collected went into the same account as all other state park collections, with no assurances that any of the money would be spent in Wrangell.

The Economic Development Department and Parks and Recreation will work together to put together plans for the money, Thomas said.

The borough will notify tour operators of the permit and fee requirements and work with them for compliance next year, she said.

Petroglyph Beach is one of the town’s most visited tourist attractions. It is the highest concentration of the ancient stone carvings in Southeast. There are at least 40 carvings, which archaeologists believe were carved about 8,000 years ago by early Tlingit.