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Southeast Alaska Transportation Plan to include Cascade Point regardless of public input, DOT official says
Updated: 17 minutes ago
20-year multimodal outlook looks at connections between aviation, marine highways, roads, and bridges; plan could be altered after finalization in November if priorities shift
By Jasz Garrett
Juneau Independent
The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities intends to include the controversial Cascade Point Ferry Terminal in its finalized 20-year regional plan, but encouraged public comments on how that happens.
A public comment period on the Southeast Alaska Transportation Plan is open until Oct. 19.
Jill Melcher, planning chief of the Southcoast Region for DOT&PF, said every comment is recorded and responded to. She said the team also discusses whether they should make a change to the plan while reviewing public comments.
“Cascade Point, we're not going to remove. It's a department priority. I'm being completely transparent here,” Melcher said in an interview earlier this month. “It's in the plan. We have been asked to remove it many times. But as a department we're being told it's a priority and we're going to keep it in the plan.”
More than 90% of the comments submitted to the state rejected the Cascade Point ferry terminal during a public comment period earlier this year. Residents and regional leaders critical of the project say it will impose hardships on travelers, and claim the primary intent appears to be providing an ore shipping facility for a nearby proposed gold mine.
Melcher encouraged people to comment about environmental mitigation efforts and provide their input on operational strategies for Cascade Point, which would be about 30 miles north of the existing Auke Bay Ferry Terminal.
“You probably don’t want to get your family up at 1:30 in the morning, pull your kids out of bed, and then drive 30 miles up the road at that time of the day,” she said. “So it's a good time to still have the ability to comment about things like that. Like, ‘If you’re going to provide that, OK, we're going to need some kind of transit, or please don't have us get up in the middle of the night to get to the terminal.’”
The transportation plan is meant to guide the state’s future public investments in Southeast Alaska’s infrastructure by providing a framework to plan, construct, operate, and maintain a multimodal system for air, surface and marine facilities. An update on the draft Southeast Alaska Transportation Plan was provided at an open house at the Mendenhall Valley Public Library on Sept. 16. About 40 people attended.
The plan will be finalized after this round of feedback. A final plan is anticipated by this November, a month before Gov. Mike Dunleavy leaves office.
A governor may request to have a plan amended to include or exclude a recommendation or strategy. In an email Friday, Melcher noted it’s important to note that a plan is always subject to evolve with new and changing priorities.
The process to collect input began last fall, with open houses hosted across Southeast and virtually. DOT also held a series of small group meetings by request, including with tribes. Community workshops were also co-hosted with different agencies, according to Melcher.
The Southeast Alaska Transportation Plan is a separate document from the draft Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP) for 2027-30, which is also accepting public comments this month.
“But the relationship, though, is actually important because this plan helps inform the STIP in the future because those projects are listed in the plan — and we have hundreds of things in this plan for bridges, for roads, for marine highways, for aviation, all sorts of projects — and those help prioritize projects that go into the STIP,” Melcher explained at the open house.
The updated STIP, released Sept. 14, estimates the proposed Cascade Point Ferry Terminal will cost about $120 million.
The projected cost of the Cascade Point terminal has grown from about $36 million in 2022 to $77 million in the previous STIP to between $90 million and $100 million in presentations during the past year.
Juneau resident Michael Neussl said in an interview at the open house he’s concerned about building a ferry terminal so far from town and “what improvements it’ll actually make for ferry travelers.”
“It’s a long way out, Cascade Point, and it’s a lot of money for a project that I’m not sure how much benefit it's going to provide over the existing ferry terminal in Auke Bay,” he said, adding that people need to have a vehicle to reach the destination, which presents barriers. Goldbelt Inc. has pledged its intention to provide shuttle service between the terminal, Auke Bay and Mendenhall Valley.
One goal of the 20-year plan is for DOT to be more cost-effective, Melcher said. She pointed toward the Alaska Marine Highway System 2045 Long‑Range Plan that came out last year, which aims to improve efficiencies of the marine highway to save money.
“Not just for us paying for those ferries and the terminals and the upkeep — the operations of it — but for people getting on board,” she said. “ So one of the things that we recommended in this plan is a feasibility study to look at the trade-offs of building longer roads and shorter ferry routes. So that’s where Cascade came from: this idea of shorter ferry routes and longer roads.”
The proposed terminal aims to cut 24 nautical miles from the route, saving over three hours of vessel run-time each day and saving about $590,000 annually in fuel and maintenance, according to DOT&PF.
Neussl acknowledged that Cascade Point aims to shorten a ferry’s run length and make the terminal potentially usable for day boats, which the MV Hubbard and the Tazlina were built as.
“But we just spent a lot of money to put crew quarters on those ferries so that they are not day boats and they can operate 24 hours a day because they have enough crew and space for the crew,” Neussl said. “So looks like we're solving the problem that we've already spent a lot of money to try and solve by putting crew quarters on those vessels.”
Neussl said he’s lived in Juneau for nearly 20 years and typically takes the ferry to Skagway and Haines for recreation. Cascade Point would become the primary terminal for the Haines–Skagway route.
Movement on other Juneau projects
Juneau’s projects also include a Glacier Lemon Spur Extension with a connection to the McNugget Intersection and the Juneau-Douglas North Crossing.
“There's a lot in there so it includes a list of projects, of course, that are important to the department, but it also includes projects that are important to the communities in a regional context,” Melcher said.
She said she wants people commenting to look at: “What did we get right? What did we get wrong?”
“What’s important to you? What’s important to your community?” she said. “What can we do to help support the business and economy of the region?”
She said feedback from community workshops voiced the importance of maintaining transportation to support social connections, and the ability to travel for events and sports in surrounding communities. Fewer available vessels and staffing challenges have reduced service below historic levels, according to AMHS.
“Having safe access for people walking or riding their bikes. That was really important to communities to have walkable communities,” Melcher added. “Another theme was concerns with climate change and big weather impacts. Having increase in landslides and flooding, and those types of things. So resiliency became a big part of our goals because of that.”
She said the plan’s vision and goals were developed around this community input, and partnering with organizations like the U.S. Forest Service, Southeast Conference, Alaska Marine Lines and the Denali Commission.
“Funding was another one — are we going to have an affordable system to be able to just hop on a ferry or continue to fly somewhere?” Melcher said. “Costs are going up exponentially and it's getting hard.”
About $410 million for the Alaska Marine Highway System held up for many months is now being awarded as the final installment of a five-year allocation in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
But there’s still the question of where future funding comes from.
Melcher said the department relies on federal funds to maintain Alaska’s transportation system.
“That is an absolute real concern,” she said. “If we have less federal funds coming in for all these projects we want to do, then we're going to have to sit down and reprioritize probably a lot of that. Something is going to have to give, or maybe just focusing on maintaining what we have as opposed to building something new…And we can always go after grants. That's the other thing that's covered in the plan is different grant opportunities.”
The Juneau-Douglas North Crossing, which would connect Juneau with the north end of Douglas Island, has been studied since the 1980s, but has not progressed beyond preliminary alternative alignments. It was omitted from the STIP, but is included in the broader Southeast Alaska Transportation Plan.
Marie Heidemann, a DOT project manager who attended the open house, said the most recent cost estimate is provided in the 2025 Planning and Environmental Linkages study.
The timeline for next steps remains unclear as five proposed routes are still undergoing a review through the National Environmental Policy Act. There is also still a no-build option. It was included in the Southeast Alaska Transportation Plan after strong support from the City and Borough of Juneau.
The projected cost of the project has increased significantly from the $90 million estimate in a CBJ capital improvement projects study published in 2020. Estimates from 2025 place the cost of the alternatives between $340 million (Vanderbilt) and $530 million (Sunny Point East).
Neussl said he’s in favor of the second crossing, but he’s also wary of how and where it’s built.
“We need to make sure we don’t box in the airport by having it too close to the airport runway. We need potential room for future expansion, and we shouldn't build something that blocks the ability to do that,” he said. “If the new road is too close to the end of the runway, that would prohibit expanding the runway in that direction.”
Neussl is a member of the airport board.
Work on the Egan-Yandukin intersection is scheduled to begin in the spring of 2027 and be completed in about six months, according to project leaders.
The proposed DOT project seeks to install signals and create a partially signalized intersection to help improve safety. Like the other projects, the intersection upgrade is seeing cost increases. An estimate of $10.4 million a year ago is now $15.5 million, but a federal grant means the state won’t have to pay construction-related costs, according to state transportation officials.
The Glacier Highway Extension is not included in the current project due to unsecured funding, according to the project’s page.
“It’s one of the diceiest intersections in Juneau, I think, in terms of high-speed traffic and crossing traffic. I see pedestrians and bicyclists go across there all the time, even though they're not supposed to,” Neussl said. “So there’s a need. Especially as the other side of the highway, over in the Honsinger Pond area, develops, and there's more businesses and more entities over there — the need to cross that highway in that location by pedestrians is going to do nothing but grow. So we need to have a way to address that.”
Other local residents and officials have expressed concern for years about the Fred Meyer intersection, where numerous fatal and other serious collisions have occurred. State officials have also recently noted that commercial development in the area has resulted in more pedestrians trying to cross the highway.
Melcher said she hopes one or two projects that people disagree with “doesn't overshadow how much work went into this from all the communities.”
“There's 38 communities in Southeast, and we got so much great input from these communities, and it really shaped the themes,” Melcher said. “And those themes drove what the goals are, and from those goals we created a whole list of ideas and recommendations and strategies in order to reach those goals. So it isn't just a list of projects; it's also other efforts and strategies to get us there.”
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356.
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