Most of the staff at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center were fired earlier this month, leaving city tourism leaders worried that one of Juneau’s most popular visitor destinations may reduce services, or even close for the cruise season.
Last week, Juneau’s Visitor Industry Director Alix Pierce said she’s been fielding calls from tour operators who want to know what the lack of staff at the glacier, after President Trump's federal job cuts, means for their businesses.
“Everybody has a lot of questions about what the next steps are,” she said. “I think the Forest Service staff that remain from what I understand are kind of in triage mode trying to figure out how to best allocate resources.”
The visitor center at the glacier sees about a million visitors per year. It’s run by the U.S. Forest Service, which saw about 2,000 job cuts nationwide in the last two weeks under a Trump administration plan to reduce the federal workforce.
The Tongass National Forest’s spokesperson is directing media requests to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which says it doesn’t have location-specific information about staffing.
As it stands now, Pierce said the city isn’t getting information about how the glacier recreation area will operate. The dramatic staff reductions come after the city and the visitor center have spent a decade planning improvements to the visitor center. Pierce says there isn’t information about that either.
“We have no idea,” she said. “We have no idea whether those types of improvements will be funded. We have no idea about anything.”
Travel Juneau is the city’s destination marketing organization. Liz Perry is the director, and she said these firings come at an especially bad time as visitors are finalizing their plans for the summer. City leaders expect more than 1.6 million people will come to Juneau on cruise ships this summer.
“Knowing whether or not the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center is going to be able to operate, or how it’s going to operate, is going to be a key piece to a lot of those plans,” Perry said. “Because it’s one of the number one things for people to do when they get in town.”
Perry works with 260 businesses, many of which are permitted by the Forest Service to run tours at the glacier. She’s heard from tourism operators who say they’re worried about their business investments if the glacier is off-limits for the season.
Other small business owners are worried as well. Shawn Eisele is the executive director of Discovery Southeast, a nonprofit that offers natural education programs for kids in Juneau and operates the bookstore in the visitor center. It stocks items from local artists and authors, and funds half of Discovery Southeast’s budget.
“It is, in my mind, one of the best success stories of local tourism in Southeast and in Juneau,” he said.
Eisele said the partnership between his organization and the Forest Service allows for locals to have a hand in educating tourists, and benefit from the high numbers of visitors who come to see the glacier.
Now, he’s not sure what the firings mean for the bookstore this summer and he’s worried about the broader implications too.
“It’s a scary and dire situation,” Eisele said. “That’s true for the individuals who are fired. It’s true for the individuals who remain. It’s true for Discovery Southeast, and I think it’s probably true for our community too.”
But some businesses aren’t as worried. Juneau Tours buses run to Mendenhall Glacier five to 10 times each day during cruise season. Serene Hutchinson said her company has the second largest tourism operations permit for the glacier.
“It is a foundation of our business, to bring people to the Mendenhall Glacier,” she said.
But Hutchinson has seen government shutdowns and other obstacles to the visitor center’s operations before, and she’s optimistic the Forest Service will have a plan for the season.
“This is not completely unfamiliar territory for us as an operator, and every other time it’s been figured out,” she said.
If the visitor center shuts down, she at least wants her customers to see the glacier from viewpoints near the parking lot.
“Obviously, we want full service, but if they have to, I hope that at the very least we can keep the views open,” she said. “And the bathrooms, because they’re just as important as the views.”
Juneau’s first cruise ship of the season is scheduled to arrive April 14.
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