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Should Cruise Ships Pay For Puget Sound?
Update: A version of this post appeared in Real Change News.
Let's say, just hypothetically, that Washington were facing a ginormous budget shortfall. And let's also say that the state had made an ambitious -- but mostly unfunded -- commitment to cleaning up Puget Sound. That would be a real pickle. But do you know what I'd do?
I'd levy a tax on the cruise industry, that's what.
Washington's cruise ships are only lightly regulated, sometimes to the detriment of the local marine environment. And cruise ships visiting Washington do not pay head taxes as they do in Alaska, which means that Washington is missing out on badly-needed revenue that can be used for environmental protection and oversight. Consider how they do it up north:
- Ketchikan levies a $7 per passenger tax on cruise ships that visit the port.
- Juneau levies a $8 per passenger tax.
By contrast, Seattle -- now the most popular point of departure in the Northwest -- levies nothing. But if the city were to to charge a comparable fee on the roughly 886,000 cruise passengers that left Seattle in 2008 it would have netted around $7 million. Granted, that's not going to fund the complete restoration of Puget Sound, but it might fully fund an important program or two -- the very sorts of programs on the chopping block of budgetary constraints.
But that's not the half of it. The state of Alaska also levies a $50 per passenger tax. What would happen if Washington did that?
