State cuts cruise ship pollution inspections to once every two years, rather than every year

Reduction began July 1 without public notice from DEC; commissioner says discharge limits and monitoring requirements remain unchanged

People walk along the downtown cruise ship dock on June 1, 2026. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Independent)

By Mark Sabbatini

Juneau Independent

As of July, the state is inspecting cruise ships for pollution violations every other year, rather than every year under a program that began in 2021, according to Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation officials.

The cutback occurred without a public notification process, DEC Commissioner Randy Bates said in a conference call with the Juneau Independent on Friday that included two other department officials. The change officially took effect when the current fiscal year began July 1.

"There's no need for an announcement like that," he said. "It's just a recalibration, which I have that opportunity to do with all of our inspection protocols and staffing exercises."

Bates said the decision was made for both financial and regulatory reasons, noting on the latter point that other industries undergoing pollution inspections such as mining, oil, seafood and timber aren’t subject to annual DEC inspections.

"We're using our resources where we can best use them," he said. That means "equitable industry treatments so that one industry like the cruise industry isn't getting over-reviewed on a comparative level with the mining industry."

Two Democratic Juneau state lawmakers who are members of the finance committees in their respective chambers — Rep. Sara Hannan and Sen. Jesse Kiehl — told the Juneau Independent on Monday the change to the inspection schedule came as a surprise since there was no mention of that possibility during budget discussions at the Alaska State Capitol during the past session.

"In fact, when I started hearing rumors about existing inspections getting dismantled I looked back to make sure I hadn’t missed anything in the budget process," Kiehl stated in an email. "I had not. The budget request was status quo, so this new radical reduction raises serious questions about what the Dunleavy administration plans to do with the money they asked the legislature for."

The change does not mean discharge limits, or monitoring and reporting requirements for cruise lines, have changed, Bates said.

"We have all of this other protocol of reports and reporting and data submissions on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis," he said. "And that's where we spend so much more time as staff is looking at those, working with the industry on what those reports look like, and if there's excursions let's get those fixed immediately."

The now-biennial inspections are "minimal in terms of their impact," Bates said.

"They are appropriate and necessary for oversight to confirm what we're seeing and what we're doing, and that the vessel has got the controls in place that we expect them to," he said. "But the work that we do on a daily basis is so much more significant than maybe people understand."

But doubts have been raised by state lawmakers and others about the effectiveness of the state’s Commercial Passenger Vessel Environmental Compliance (CPVEC) program implemented in 2021. The program requires vessel owners and operators to complete an annual registration, pay compliance fees, and submit detailed voyage reports, sampling plans and discharge logs.

Also, critics say the current program is less stringent than the Ocean Ranger, which has been effectively dead since 2019 due to Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoing its operating funding. Monitors with the program filed 1,580 daily reports in 2018, the last year it was active, compared to 76 total inspections on large cruise ships by DEC in 2025.

"The program was extensive, but also expensive," Kiehl stated in his email to the Independent. "There was room to reform it, but Dunleavy wanted only to end it. Thus his vetoes. I worked with the administration in its early years to get the kind of inspections that just got dismantled. They weren’t what Alaska voters said to do, but in the face of the veto they were marginally adequate as far as they went. Now it would appear that’s too much for this outgoing governor."

DEC recorded 21 instances of cruise ships failing to meet wastewater regulations in 2025, compared to 56 wastewater and 40 oil pollution violations reported by Ocean Ranger observers in 2018, according to a Chilkat Valley News article published in April. But the article also notes that of 264 reported wastewater violations in 12 years of the Ocean Ranger program, only six resulted in notices of violation from state officials.

Bates said that while Ocean Ranger participants conducted in-person inspections on vessels, it was up to DEC officials to assess the findings.

"The important part there is they didn't have inspection credentials," he said of the Ocean Rangers. "They didn't have enforcement capacity. What they could do is write reports, submit those reports to us, and then we would look at them after the fact, and decide, is there anything to do with these reports and the numbers they show?"

Kiehl acknowledged "one benefit (of the new program) was that the inspectors were DEC employees so they could hypothetically write a citation for a violation on the spot, whereas rangers were contractors who could write a report that had to be followed up. Occasional overnight port-to-ports were also much cheaper because there was no need to buy a cabin for the whole cruise the way we did with the rangers."

The flip side, he wrote, "the DEC inspectors don’t have the same breadth of authority to look at everything onboard that the rangers did."

A $4 per-passenger berth fee is still collected via the Ocean Ranger program approved by voters in 2006, but funding is being redirected to other uses — including possible electrical hookups at cruise ship docks in Juneau and Ketchikan.

Reviving the original project is still being discussed by some state politicians. Hannan, in a text message to the Independent, stated the program was again part of this year’s budget discussions, and former gubernatorial candidate Tom Begich called for restoring it during his abandoned campaign.

Questions about industry’s compliance with the state’s self-reporting requirements again surfaced this spring due to Carnival Corp. withholding water pollution data from state officials.

Carnival argued DEC has authority over wastewater including sewage and greywater, but not exhaust filtered through what are known as "scrubbers" — and can be discharged into the sea — since that is regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Bates, in a letter to the company, challenged that as a basis to withhold data from the state.

In an opinion essay published by the Juneau Independent on Thursday, Bates stated DEC this past season "focused its routine cruise ship wastewater inspections on the discharges regulated under the state’s wastewater permit."

"That does not mean scrubber discharges are unregulated, nor does it limit DEC’s ability to address water-quality concerns within its jurisdiction," he wrote.

Because the change occurred at the midpoint of the cruise season, inspections of ships before that were still conducted at the higher pace that guided annual inspections, said Gene McCabe, director of DEC’s Division of Water. As a result, he estimates about 80% of cruise ships arriving in Alaska this year were inspected under the program by July 1.

"So any ship we didn't inspect this year, next year absolutely is on the list, right?" he said. "We're going to inspect those first. We are likely, until we normalize, going to have to have a couple of vessels to even out the inspection schedule that we'll have to do again next year, but once we hit the '28 cruise season we should be on that odd-year, even-year schedule by that point."

McCabe said the number of violations from this year’s inspections is not yet available since the season is just reaching its end. The last cruise ship in Juneau is scheduled to depart on Tuesday.

"This time of year is when they start crunching all the data and they're going to start comparing all that," McCabe said.

DEC’s cutback in cruise ship inspections is part of a series of environmental protections that have either been proposed or implemented since President Donald Trump began his second term in January 2025, with state officials often citing his day-one executive order to repeal all regulations that inhibit maximum utilization of natural resources. Bates said he doesn't see a connection between that agenda and the department’s new inspection policy.

"I was not told. I was not guided. This is just common practice," he said.

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.