American Cruise Lines, which operates a pair of 170-passenger ships in Southeast Alaska, is talking with the borough about a long-term lease on a new dock to better accommodate its overnight stays.
The borough will hold a public work session on the plan at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 29, at City Hall. Members of the assembly, port commission, planning and zoning commission, economic development board, and the convention and visitor bureau have been invited to the meeting where the cruise company will present its ideas.
“The City Dock doesn’t fit (them) perfectly,” Borough Manager Mason Villarma said of the cruise company. The idea is for a new concrete floating dock constructed between the barge landing and Nolan Center, with a ramp to shore and mooring dolphins for the ships.
“This isn’t about selling out our waterfront,” Villarma said. American Cruise Lines “is a good fit for Wrangell,” with its smaller ships.
The company, based in Connecticut, operates a fleet of 25 smaller cruise ships, ranging in size from 90 to 180 passengers. In addition to Alaska, the ships cruise Puget Sound, the U.S. Southeast, New England, and the Snake, Columbia and Mississippi rivers.
Its two 279-foot-long vessels that serve Southeast Alaska — the American Constitution and American Constellation — are scheduled for a combined 30 stops in Wrangell this summer.
The cruises operate entirely within Southeast Alaska, allowing more time in ports and visits to more communities that the larger ships that run back and forth from Seattle or Vancouver, B.C., to Alaska.
The company is talking with Petersburg about building a dock for overnight use in that community, too.
American Cruise Lines’ April 11 tidelands application to the Wrangell borough proposed that the company would build the dock, at an estimated cost of $3 million.
The borough is now looking at building the facility and collecting fees for its use, with the revenues going to pay back the borrowing.
The borough would issue revenue bonds, repaid by docking fees, not general tax receipts.
The company wants a 40-year lease, to allow for long-term planning and assurances. “It allows for an anchor tenant,” Villarma said.
“In the perfect world,” he said, construction could be complete by May 2027.
That schedule would require negotiating lease terms with the company this summer, issuing the bonds by this winter, developing construction plans over the winter, awarding the construction contract in the spring of 2026, he told the assembly at its May 13 meeting.
“We need to look at opportunities to move forward,” Villarma said of Wrangell’s economic woes.
Borough officials have no interest in pushing cruise ship traffic to anywhere near the high levels of Ketchikan, Sitka or Juneau, he said, but attracting more stops by smaller ships such as American Cruise Lines could be a good fit for the community.
“Wrangell is inherently very skeptical,” the manager said. “I would encourage people to wait for the facts,” he said in an interview on May 7.
In its application for borough tidelands, the cruise company said the location for a new dock “would provide our guests with consistent and easy access to downtown to visit the Wrangell Museum and Nolan Center.”
Villarma sought out the cruise line while he was at the Seatrade Global Conference in Miami in April, then went to company headquarters in Connecticut to continue the discussions.
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