||| FROM SAN JUAN COUNTY COMMUNICATIONS |||
San Juan County published a report that concludes the County’s current tourism planning efforts and analyzes the public comments submitted for the Preliminary Draft Destination Management Plan. The draft received over 900 comments that spanned a variety of topics including defining island capacity, addressing affordability and transportation, reconsidering destination marketing efforts, protecting property rights, and many more. One area almost all commentors supported was the need to protect the island environment and quality of life. After reviewing the report, the County Council did not take any action to move destination management planning efforts forward at this time.
Background
San Juan County has long been working to thoughtfully guide visitation that both supports and enhances the unique quality of life, environment, and cultural heritage of the San Juan Islands. In late 2021, the Lodging Tax Advisory Committee asked the County to develop a plan to manage sustainable tourism that could meet the needs of our community, environment, economy, and visitors.
The County’s Department of Environmental Stewardship developed a preliminary draft of the San Juan Islands Destination Management Plan that was available for review and public comment during a ten-week period in August-October 2023. In the following months, County staff analyzed the extensive feedback, assessed further needs and prepared recommendations for next steps. The Public Comment Analysis Report for the preliminary draft plan is now available on the Engage San Juan County project page.
About the Report
The report lays out the planning timeline and process and provides context, both historical and current. The comment summary includes a qualitative analysis which identifies community sentiments and illustrates the handful of “hot topics.” The report also outlines lessons learned during the process and recommended guidance for future work.
Takeaways
In a presentation to the County Council on July 8, County staff noted the rich learning opportunity afforded by the project’s process and brought forward key takeaways including:
- Narrow the plan’s focus – It is recommended that actions or elements already in motion elsewhere, and bigger picture items which impact but are outside of the scope of this work, be removed or reframed.
- Conduct further analysis and focused engagement – A clearly defined impact assessment and situational analysis is also recommended to be part of any future Plan, to better showcase the balance of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and constraints that must be considered in this tourism management planning process. It is recommended a Sustainable Tourism Leadership Team of stakeholders from the County, Town, local businesses, environmental and social interest, LTAC, Terrestrial Manager Group, and the Visitors Bureau/Chambers be convened to strategically guide any future planning as well as oversee implementation.
- Reorganize and reframe any future plan – The key tourism elements should be re-framed into coherent groupings that can move forward more efficiently with better focus. Each grouping will be undertaken with appropriate timing, information, public involvement, and approval processes.
- Create more digestible documents – Future outreach should highlight and reiterate the intent of actionable language and the ensuing exploratory process for proposed actions.
The report notes it is critical that the community come together to address why destination management planning efforts are necessary. If the community fails to plan, it should plan to fail in balancing the needs of our environment, economy, and society.
Next Steps
The report highlights the need for sustainable tourism planning for San Juan County, and includes recommendations to step back, pivot, and reframe this work in order to advance collaboratively with the community.
Staff recommended that for the duration of 2024, the County observe and learn from subsequent engagement initiatives, including the Communications Survey, the Community Health Assessment, Land Bank’s strategic planning, the Climate Element and Climate Action Plan development, and the Comprehensive Plan Update, before re-visiting tourism planning in another form. Council accepted the analysis of this draft plan which will be used to inform future efforts in tourism management planning.
More Information
For more information about San Juan County’s sustainable tourism work, please visit the Engage San Juan project page at https://engage.
About San Juan County’s Department of Environmental Stewardship
San Juan County’s Department of Environmental Stewardship is responsible for solid waste, marine resources, clean water, cultural resources, and climate and sustainability work. The department offices are located at 1609 Beaverton Valley Road, Friday Harbor, WA 98250. For more information about San Juan County’s Department of Environmental Stewardship, visit www.sanjuanco.com/839/
How much was paid to highly-paid consultants to launch this lead balloon?
I did read the plan. When I encountered the parts about “freedom camping”, new taxes and fees on existing residents to support tourism, and the recommendation to spread tourism to previously unaffected parts of the county, I knew it was DOA. Not to mention the cloying, patronizing and revolting yap about “concern for the environment”.
The only plan that our taxpayers need and want is one that reduces the impact of tourism. The comments from the public could not be clearer.
Why not start the next boondoggle plan from that perspective?
In the comments I submitted to the county, I stressed that nowhere in the plan was there any proposal to REDUCE visitation.
Nearly every “harm” that the plan proposed to mitigate had the same root cause: too many tourists. Yet we, the taxpaying public, were being asked to accommodate extensive construction, pay additional fees and taxes, or — in the case of the proposal to limit access to Moran State Park at certain times due to large numbers of bike tourists — cede access to our own public lands so that tourist-centered businesses could increase their profits.
The draft DMP cited a survey from 2017 which found that 94% of residents felt that the islands were “are at or over capacity” (see page 41). Since then the numbers have only increased. Yet we’re being asked to accommodate what is ultimately a private industry -– the tourist industry — which increases the income of the few while reducing quality of life for the many. You can see it in the overflowing parking lots, the eroded trails, the garbage on our beaches, and the chaos on the ferries.
What I think most citizens of San Juan County want to see is a plan to REDUCE the number of tourists -– not “manage” them, distribute them over the off season, send them to places that are treasured by locals and not widely known to the public, or build more places for them to sleep.
The first step of any such plan should be eliminating county funding for the Visitors Bureau. This group takes taxpayer money and funnels it into tourism marketing, which has a direct financial benefit for some members of the group, many of whom are owners of tourist accommodations, whale watching boats, etc.
It’s encouraging that the public comments on the DMP sent a strong signal to the county, but the pro-tourist pro-growth cabal will certainly be back in a year or two with yet another plan to pad their pockets at taxpayer expense, falsely claiming that our local economy will collapse if we don’t do everything possible to bring more people to the islands. SJC taxpayers should be revolting against this public-to-private wealth transfer and demanding that the Visitors Bureau be defunded.
Death by a thousand cuts–
Tourism and tourism related development are some of the most predatory industries known.
By a profit driven machine that knows no limits.
They’ve skewed the laws in their favor, they skew the numbers in their favor, they enable policies that are detrimental to our long-term well-being.
While they make profit they pay us an unlivable wage, and create the dire necessity for importing outside labor.
It increases our taxes, it skews our housing market, and it’s destroyed our long-term rental market.
It degrades our natural environment, depletes our shared natural resources, and overloads our critical resources.
It overruns our quaint hamlets and villages, our harbors, our trails, and our parks; it is taking away the most precious attributes that our island communities have– our peace and quiet, our rural atmosphere, our sense of community, our sense of place.
It’s a lot of people against a lot of money, it always is. They laugh in our faces, and dare us to stop them.
They know not what the word “stop” means. It is, in every sense, a form of cultural rape.
And in spite of the obvious… they deny what they’re doing.
Has anyone ever done a detailed analysis of what % of SJC total commerce is based on tourism and tourism-adjacent activity? I was hoping for this a couple of years ago when Cindy Wolf came on board but I’ve never seen the data. Seems like it would be essential information within this debate. Thanks in advance if I missed it and someone can point out the hard numbers.
To clarify “tourism-adjacent” since it could be confusing, I’m speaking of money spent for laundry, income earned by employees in tourism industry (housekeepers, landscapers, septic repair), purchase fees to Land Bank and OPAL housing, supplies bought at local hardware stores, donations from rental property owners to charities (Children’s House, Community Resource Center, etc), investment in local businesses (like Orcas Bakery, Island Hoppin, etc.).
As I wrote as part of my comments on the plan: There is no such thing as “sustainable tourism”. Tourism requires travel from far-flung places, and unavoidable impacts on local ecosystems.
The only sustainable tourism is zero tourism.
It won’t be long before there is zero tourism to SJC because of the impacts of catastrophic ecological overshoot. Whether this is in 10 years or 30 remains to be seen, but it will be fairly soon, given the rapid progression of ecological devastation, climate change, and pollution.
The authors of the plan wrote, “Tourism in the San Juan Islands plays a vital role in sustaining livelihoods and bolstering economic growth.”
It is economic growth that is causing catastrophic ecological overshoot, and this economic growth will not and cannot last for much longer. Making a plan with the assumption that it will is misguided at best, and disastrous at worst for the future of SJC residents and the natural communities of the islands.
The authors of the plan wrote, “With each passing decade, the community has identified the need for balance between the environmental, social, and economic costs and benefits of growth.”
There are no benefits to economic growth over the long term, when we are already well into ecological overshoot, having breached 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries; there is no “balance” between environmental concerns and the economy that doesn’t make that overshoot worse. The environment and building resiliency in the local community should be the top priority. Why this isn’t obvious to the authors of this plan is rather astonishing given the many warning messages from the scientific community (1992, 2017), the UN, and other international groups.
The authors of the plan wrote, “Visitation is a major economic driver for the Island economy and helps support year-round livability for Island residents. It is second only to construction in terms of tax revenue generation and local job creation.”
Visitation must and will end. That means year-round livability for many island residents dependent on tourism will not be possible. Facing this reality now will help planners make better plans. Ignoring the obvious will only make the inevitable crash far worse for people.
The top priority of any plan for the county should be on projects that increase local community resiliency for residents (human and non-human), and to maximize protection and restoration of ecosystems to prioritize habitat, biodiversity, wildlife, and local food production. All other recommendations of any plan (related to tourism) should take a back seat to these priorities.
Given all that, it’s a bit ironic that the San Juan Islands Environmental Stewardship Team is the very entity that was tasked to write the draft tourism Destination Management Plan.
“Has anyone ever done a detailed analysis of what % of SJC total commerce is based on tourism and tourism-adjacent activity?”
” Seems like it would be essential information within this debate. ”
It doesn’t matter… the San Juans are not for sale.
Like I said previously, “They know not what the word “stop” means. It is, in every sense, a form of cultural rape.”
The San Juans have already been sold, and largely destroyed as a result of that sale. We can barely even talk about the harms of tourism, much less address the fact that it is unsustainable or contemplate reducing or ending it. We who live here are often tourists elsewhere (half the people I know go to Mexico or Hawaii for a month or two in winter, for instance). To reduce or stop tourism, we’d have to take a long, hard look in the mirror first.
We know that Americans represent around 5 percent of the Earth’s population, and yet consume 25 percent of the resources, release 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global climate change, and generate almost 50 percent of the hazardous waste produced on the planet. Yet we think that somehow we can continue to maintain this way of life?
How on Earth will we ever address the extreme impact that we are having here in SJC, in the state, in the country and in the world if we can’t even admit that tourism is ecologically devastating? Both tourists coming here, and ourselves as tourists going elsewhere? Tourism seems like one of the “easier” problems to solve in the huge list of environmental catastrophes we are facing, and yet we can’t even do that. What hope do we have of addressing the more difficult problems on the list?