Cruising

The city commission in Key West is pondering how to reduce cruise ship passengers from landing in vast numbers in the city. The battle which seemed to be over when the Governor signed a state law overriding local initiatives to limit cruise ship passenger numbers.

It's a frantic business as newspapers are reporting an advocate of cruise ships gave the Governor a million dollars to sign the law under the usual embarrassing guise of "no quid pro quo" lobbying.

Meanwhile the opponents of massive  seabed churning cruise ships argue the city can pass a local law limiting the number of passengers a cruise ship can land. It's an interesting debate to me as the local control loving Republicans in Tallahassee stomp on the local law preferred by Key West Democrats. 

This isn't directly about partisan politics, its all about local politics and playing to your audience. Cruise ship passengers don't bother me one way or the other. if there are a ton of marked cruise ship passengers swarming three blocks of Lower Duval I have plenty of the city to enjoy where they have no clue how to find me. 

I have seen a  ton of business tore fronts go out of business and these are hardly the kind of businesses locals need, though some are restaurants others are branches of chains devoted to tourist knick knacks.

The question is really one of economics. If you need three jobs to survive is the city commission doing you any favors by depriving you of places to seek employment?  Supporters of cruise ships make the point they are opposed by Weather people whose income is not dependent on mass tourism. 

Its just one more  step down the long gentrification path that Key West has been trying to deal with. In the end money talks and I'm betting cruise ships of any size and in any number will end up docking in Key West and I don't suppose they will make pirate town any the more interesting or exciting or eccentric. 

 

Yes Yes Yes Or No No No

You'd think there are plenty of things to occupy the mind this Fall, but Key West has come up with one more thing to ponder, at least for city voters. I live in the county on Cudjoe Key, so even though I work for the city I don't vote here (nor by the way do I get to buy residential parking permits incase you were wondering). But I am curious to see how the cruise ship referenda go down.

City voters have three extra boxes to check next month, lucky them. It's an issue referred to as one issue but it is a three parter. 1) Should there be no more than 1500 cruise ship passengers at a time in the city? 2)Should the city limit ships to 1300 occupants (passengers and  crew)? 3) Should the city give priority to environmentally friendly cruise ships?  The thinking is that it will be a straight vote on all three, all one way or the other as individual voters tackle this thorny subject in the voting booth. But in Key West you can never be quite sure..! Below we see the former Starbucks at Front and Duval, gone and soon to be forgotten no doubt.

As you might imagine there are business forces aligned in favor of stomping these ballots to death in November and they have made themselves heard in court already where a judge ruled the voters get to vote. The city's four bar pilots who make a tidy living guiding the cruise ships into Key West filed suit claiming navigation is a federal matter and can't be banned by a municipality.  And so forth. I have no doubt we will hear more from them if the vote gets approved by residents. An Italian boutique on the 500 block of Duval has gone the way of all flesh, see below:

Lower Duval, the area around the bars like Sloppy Joe's Captain Tony's and the Bull and Irish Kevin's to be clear, lives and dies by cruise ships. Other parts of the main drag have long complained that cruise ship passengers are funneled into that area to spend what money they will leave behind in Key West. That position got a great big shrug from Lower Duval businesses who it now seems might have done better to spread the wealth.

The Trump Administration has given the green light to cruise ship sailings to celebrate my birthday on Halloween so voters on November Third should have a clear reminder of what continued cruise ships in town will mean. Crowds yes, but crowds spending money. In a town that faces a rather severe test of future choices. The virus has put Key West at a crossroads and now we see which way voters want to go, more of the same or more upscale?

Businesses are closing all over the place. You can argue the virus only speeded some of them up and other businesses don't amount to much for locals as they were cruise ship focussed. The argument has long been that locals don't shop Duval as there isn't anything of interest to people not on vacation looking for souvenirs or alcoholic oblivion. The problem now its in filling storefronts where rents are in the $30,000 a mont range, or have been. While business turn over is a fact of life in Key West where the cost of living is absurd, I can't quite see how small local businesses meet extraodinary rent demands. And landlords are quite used to charging preposterous rent and getting it! Not so preposterous, eh?

The opponents of cruise ship limits have been very vocal online opposing the votes and their crude and rather overbearing tone has drawn the attention of the newspaper. The Citizen has recently made a subscription more worthwhile than ever with what you might call some good old fashioned digging. Worth a read and here is a brief excerpt fro what hey found out about the rather shadowy sources of funding for the no vote.

 As to who is behind the mailers and an identical campaign currently running on Facebook, that has an interesting answer. The three different mailers identify two companies that are separately paying for the ads: Protect Our Jobs PC, a political action committee, or PAC; and Protect Our Jobs, Inc., a non-profit 401(c)(4), which under Internal Revenue Service regulations is an organization that must be a non-profit operated exclusively to “promote social welfare.” The PAC joined the Key West Chamber this summer, according to Chamber Executive Vice President Scott Atwell. Calling the PAC a grassroots, “more positive” campaign group, Atwell said he didn’t know anything about the Protect Our Jobs social welfare organization but was aware they were two different organizations.

“The one that joined us is different from the one that is sending out scare tactic [mailers]. They’re different legal entities,” he told The Key West Citizen.

SHARED MESSAGING

However, The Citizen has learned that the two organizations are chaired by the same person, Maria Isabel Garcia Del Rio, according to Alex Miranda, who works for Garcia Del Rio and who is heading up the “Vote No” campaign in Key West. While the PAC is registered at a trailer park in Dade City, Florida, and the social welfare non-profit at the UPS store in Key Plaza in Key West, the two organizations share a postal permit, were both created in August and, according to Miranda, have media messaging that is aligned.

As for who or what entity has donated the $23,754 that Protect Our Jobs PC reported to the state elections division as “contributions,” Miranda wouldn’t comment on from where that funding came. However, Citizen research turned up another political marketing campaign sponsored by Protect Our Jobs, Inc., the social welfare group. That campaign is for a petition drive aimed at ending the no-sail cruise ship ban in Florida, possibly indicating a funding connection between the Key West “Vote No” campaign and national cruise line industry.

The thing is that the lockdown and subsequent reduced tourist traffic has opened a window on a key West that had been suppressed for decades. Less traffic, noise and pollution has a way of becoming addictive. On the water fishing guides say the waters have been this clean and clear in decades. Apocryphal say cruise ship supporters but it's hard to argue that giant hips don't stir up harbor silt. And all those passengers shitting and opening packages end up creating garbage that needs to be dumped. Supposedly not at sea but opponents argue not everyone is conscientious, hence the third question.

On the surface this issue comes down to money. Can the city do without the money that flows from the ships? Yes supporters sa tech city makes surprisingly little from cruise ship fees and passenger spending supporters crappy souvenirs and t-shorts more than art and high class tourism. These visitors come back say ship supporters and stay in hotels and on and on it goes. 

In the end I have no idea where the truth lies nor where in the courts a solid "yes" vote will end up. It's obvious lots of money is being spent to scare voters into maintaining the status quo and to me that's a pretty clear red flag, but on the other hand the gentrification that will follow an end to mass tourism may have some severe unintended consequence on a small tourist town that likes to tout itself as exceptional and quirky and unique. So far I have seen no interest on the part of the monied business classes and wealthy leaders to involve themselves in supporting the workers whose salaries fail to support a decent quality of life in this town. To expect these workers to kill off jobs and money that trickles down to them at all, may be asking a lot of them by the well heeled retired citizens with outside money and lots of it to support their island lifestyle. The devil you know or the devil you don't. This could be the start of some major changes in Key West. Or not.

Cruise Ship Docking

Cruise ships are money. The statistics are out of date and not always clear but most recent numbers show about three quarters of a million cruise ships visitors a year which generates $85 million annually for the city through landing fees, 1300 assorted jobs and the money the passengers spend in the city, mostly on Lower Duval. So no matter how much opponents talk about pollution, aesthetic ruin and over crowding money talks louder.  

Key West has three pairs for cruise ship docking. Mallory Square is the smallest owned by the city but constrained by the nightly sunset celebration, a private cooperative that leases the waterfront from the city and thus finds itself in occasional conflict with cruise ships that want to stay docked through sunset...

The Outer Mole (above) is owned by the Navy and used by the city under threat of closure in a national emergency. The pier is a "secure area" behind a locked gate and passengers come into town only on Conch Trains that are contracted by the city for the job. Pier B is the dock behind the Margaritaville Resort formerly the Westin which was part of the navy base and thus sold by the city when Truman Annex was ceded by the Navy to the city which promptly auctioned it off to nascent developer Pritam Singh. The Westin Hotel property and waterfront plus Sunset Key, known then as Tank Island was all sold in a brilliant move by the city for the princely sum of eleven million dollars. Not their finest hour but they did retain portion of the landing fees payable to the hotel by cruise ships. Between the three piers the city res in, if memory serves, about two point five million dollars a year. 

It's no small thing docking a cruise ship. I once saw a schematic of that worldwide symbol of luxury cruising, the liner Titanic of 1912 laid up against a picture of a contemporary cruise ship which is about 900 feet long. The Titanic was about a third the size over all of the ship you see above. Not only that, but protestors have succesfully stymied attempts to get supersized cruise ships into Key West, the giants that require even deeper harbor access. There was a protracted battle to stop harbor dredging which was proposed originally to "help improve military access" for the Navy, a scheme that was revealed as a way to get 1300 foot cruise ships to dock in town. These ships with 3,000 passengers each are quite large enough in a. town of 25,000 especially when they all walk and shop three blocks of Duval only despite best efforts to move them further down the famous street.

As much as they are disliked they are also found to be fascinating, these huge hotels, these self contained entertainment palaces always seeking to be more exotic than last year's floating entertainment offering, they come complete complete with the huge kitchens, an on board doctor with medical facilities and yes, a supply of coffins for those that cannot complete their last cruise in this life. Cruise ships are amazing organisms, self contained, polluting, energy hungry and incredibly complex offering very popular vacations. And they come to Key West all the time because this is a popular destination as evidenced by people wandering lower Duval with little round stickers on their shirts.

Docking a cruise ship is a business in itself and requires port workers to show up and attach the dock lines...

 The ship's crew drops thin pieces of rope first and attached to those lines are thicker lines with a  big loop in them which you can see in the bottom right of the picture below:

The ship is held against the docks by thrusters which are controlled from the bridge, propellers facing sideways at the front and the back which allow cruise ships to maneuver without the old fashioned help of tugs.

 Meanwhile the process goes forward as the harbor crew wait for the lines to reach them so the ship and be winched in an held firm:

 Once the cruise ship is docked it's held  by a cat's cradle of lines, which incidentally will need to be released in reverse at the end of the ship's stay.

It's hard manual labor docking a ship. The sailors poke the lines through holes in the hull (hawseholes if you want to be technical) and they control the tension with winches  but the port workers have to handle the ropes with muscle power alone.

The ship is directed into the harbor  by a harbor pilot who takes over control of the bridge from the captain and gives specific directions on how to arrive safely at the docks. The pilot is taken out to the sea buoy by this boat whereupon he (no women pilots as far as I know in Key West) climbs a rope ladder up the side of the ship which sounds creepy enough to put me off ever thinking about this well paid job as  a career choice, And of course they do the same in reverse when the ship leaves.

By the time the ship is tied up, the pilot's gone back to the office and the gang plank is down there is only Customs and Immigration to deal with if the ship came from a  foreign port. While all this is going on the ship flies a yellow flag, known as the "Q" flag as it represents that letter in the naval flag alphabet. In sailing days ships communicated by raising flags to send messages across the water and the yellow flag was adopted as the symbol of a ship that hadn't been cleared for entry when it arrived from a foreign country. You may have heard of the cruise ship passengers in the Far East quarantined on cruise ships for fear of their carrying the dreaded the Coronavirus so the Q flag pratique still can have serious consequences for seafarers.

Once the Q flag comes down passengers and crew are allowed ashore and you will see members of the crew catching up on their shopping in Key West. It may come as a surprise Key West is a cheap stop compared to many ports on the cruise ship circuit, so if you need shampoo or toothpaste CVS is your place. And as a way to save money and skirt strict health and safety regulations cruise ships travel under "flags of convenience," and pretend they are based in small countries glad for some income and not too fussy about regulations they can skirt. That's why you can see flags of Liberia, The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic or some small island state like the Marshall Islands...

Which means they offer no work to US sailors and  take advantage of desirable US ports. Fair enough; it's how the industry works.

Walking Rusty along the waterfront we had to dodge numbers of people pausing their vacations to observe the activity, which was actually what prompted me to write this essay. I guess peopled really do find cruise ships fascinating. 

 Some people just keep on keeping on.

But they find us equally interesting apparently: 

Not everyone needs huge amount of help to make like a leaf and blow. Key West in the rear view mirror and no one noticed:

Pines Park

Something strange has happened on South Roosevelt where winter would usually see lots of homeless squatters making day camps at the picnic tables. As it was Rusty and I had the park to ourselves.

It was a lovely day at South Roosevelt with a  fresh breeze and bright sunshine.

Everyone was out enjoying the weather.

The only reason I can see that Pines Park has lost favor with the day campers is thanks to the new parking lots. They have been neatly paved and edged so you can no longer roll your car into the park under the trees and use the picnic table as an extension of their vehicles.

Now that the place is clean and tidy and empty I shall come back a little more often.

The views are splendid. You can see why this was a favorite coastal hang out in Key West.

As usual the shrimpers were trying to duck out of the bad weather and the winds really were blowing.

A couple of tourists across the newly refurbished parking lots between Pines Park and East Martello.

The tower is intact and a museum. The West Martello is a bit of a wreck as it was used for target practice by gunners at Fort Zachary in the 19th century when there was a clear sight line across the south end of Key West.