May 02, 2022 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM
Yeah. That's well, okay. First of all, so I'm Ryan Anderson and I'm the commissioner designee I could get confirmed this week. So that might be interesting, but I'm not technically all the way there yet, or just put that out there. But I first just wanted to thank all of you for taking the time and, you know, being on this board, the DOT has, I think we have, we're involved in four board, the highways, the aviation we've got seat on the railroad board and then with the Marine highway operations board. But I, I will say of all the boards, this board is, it has the most direction in terms of the statutory and, and the bill that was created for it. There's some pretty good focus that I like when it comes to the operations and the planning. So I support that. I think that these types of boards where we as DOT, the opportunity to listen and to hear, you know, from an outside entity, a group of all of you who have such a varied experience and, and, you know, knowledge on the subject, these are healthy things for DOT.
And I just want to say that that's something that's important to me on a lot of aspects, and we're gonna go through, I was just gonna take you through DOT because, you know, we're, so we're DOT thousand plus people, and then we have our, our divisions and kind of just take you through the overall on the DOT side. But then we're really trying to do some things to tie all of us together. One thing with DOT that I've come to respect my, in my previous career, I was the Northern region director for DOT. So I was focused up north. You know, we had a big, a big area. We ran down to Beld from Porto. Then we all went all the way up to north slope and up to that area. And you really come to realize there's a lot of differences between our, our state and geographic and the massive geography, but there's also a lot of similarity.
And this idea of multimodal connections, I think, as we go into the future becomes really important. And, and I think even when you look at the nationally on the federal side, and what I've been hearing from my counterparts in other states is that's where things are headed, where dots are becoming more multimodal, things are becoming more interconnected and there's this bigger push, even on things like economic development that, you know, we're becoming more facilitators. We're not necessarily becoming the ones that are driving and doing all the work. We're starting to expand how we do things. And even the federal rules are starting to head that way. So it's pretty interesting time for us. The, the governor will talk a lot in our cabinet meetings about their kind of unsettled times in that what's going on in the world is affecting us all. And how do you, yeah.
An example is the Sam's Sam. There is, Sam's got this great newsletter out this cuddle button. I dunno if you guys have seen it's going out weekly. Yeah. Weekly. Definitely. Anyway, the idea there is, you know, it's just a really, we're not, you know, internal communication is a big thing as a commissioner, and we're trying to increase that, you know, nothing better than, you know, what's going on in your organization. And we're just trying to tell good stories, successes, celebrate people of Marine highway and, and to try and build the culture and morale. And again, focusing on recruitment, how can we get these easy wins, go into trade shows, et cetera, and, and everything from the masters down to, you know, the steward department and it's been great and we're starting to make some progress. We've got a couple successes so far, and I think we're gonna get somewhere. Hopefully, obviously I don't, you know, we're not gonna get Columbia going this year, but by next summer, maybe we're fully staffed and healthy. So
That's the goal. Yeah. Those are, you know, the more we can, I think, you know, pull the staff in to help us with this. But then also I would say for this board ideas on getting out there and doing a better job of recruitment and then retention, I mean, we're still negative when it comes.
Yeah. Negative to zero with what we're gaining and lowing. Although we've got quite a few new hires, got almost 90 new hires in the queue, but it takes four months to get the certificates just to get 'em on board. So, you know, but we've got this $5,000 bonus out there for the IBU, which that's creating a lot of attention in actually, and working very closely. We have a, I hate to use the word head hunter, but we have a, a recruitment company from Anchorage and they're, they are finding people. What we're seeing is as they find 'em, we're not hearing much back and we don't know why we're gonna try to start figure out why aren't we hearing back? Is it because Alaska then two, is it, is it the schedule that, you know, which is different than what merchant ships run that I spent 35 years doing? We're not sure, but we're trying to find out why we're not here in back because they are finding AVS. They are finding Oilers. They are finding junior engineers. We're not here in back. And as soon as we get a lead, we're going off from sending correspondent, sending an application, sending an email, and one meeting weekly with them. I have a team that meets with them weekly. I'm getting weekly reports. So that's, it's, it's challenging. Yeah.
Commissioner. I mentioned this to the deputy commission earlier about of why aren't we pulling our high school resources right now for high schools across the state. And having someone reach out to that and get these people in the training program to get 'em to go to OC tech, letting 'em know about these jobs, you know, letting 'em know about tongue point and academies, different things, the key people that are already here and state working in state. So
I don't know if catch can here. I mean, I mean, we're looking at that and that's what we're trying to put this recruitment unit together to go and do is to go out on the road, go to the high schools and try to see if we could recruit, you know, the entry level type position. So now we're, we're looking at that. It's not, we just gotta get this team put together, get the yellow LOA signed, and then we'll start. I mean, it's
We're starting to, you know, one of our, our own worst enemy type things is they have the S set of minimum qualifications when they come to equipment operators, they're across the board. And we're trying to talk with ways where someone could come outta high school and get into a role without having all the certifications. And then they could obtain those certifications within a certain period of time. And while they're, while they're working, there's a lot more discussion about how we can do that. You get into these things and we have this department of personality relations and they drive, we don't, I don't get to make those decisions. And so we're constantly going back and forth and they're looking at of another angle across another whole state agencies. So really makes it yeah. Tougher. But you know, the model, the recruitment in this model that that's the troopers to that with success. And that's the one we're going with, what, what we're running into though, is these maritime unions have different rules in the union that the troopers very utilizing and it's been tougher to get it established, which has been frustrating to be perfectly honest, because it's a good model they're having success with it. And so I've talked to C many times about it and a huge advocate for getting this division.
This particular commission actually nailed it. So I was gonna say the same thing. I didn't know if there'd be, I mean, our intent, we've talked about retention bonuses as well, but given the negotiations going on, we see how that goes first. I think some come out of negotiations, but yeah, the commissioner's right. I think that when you're not held over after every shift, it's kinda like great, we got more employees, I'm okay with this, but we'll see how it works out. What's the balance. It's different balance for us, for the nature of the beach.
You know, and on these action teams, if you, we be more than welcome to have any, any board member be part of them, I know we're all busy. So, and we be like a lot. So don't be like, you have to, but if you'd like to be part of these recruitment teams, we're more than open to that. Well, the, the, the school board and the native corporations for me. And when I mentioned that to you, it's about getting Alaskans to stay in Alaska and go to work.
There's a lot of trade schools. These are a lot of, these are two year, you know, two year degrees and they're out in work and why it doesn't fix our employee issue in the short term. Definitely help in the long term, if we're sponsoring children already live here and already established here to come and get a job for Good thing, John.
Yeah. You know, one of, one of the challenges I've seen in this role, getting the information on hiring and retention that we don't have great systems. And so if you were all to ask that maybe you should ask this for a report on how many local, how many local hires we have versus how many out-of-state hires versus, you know, looking back five years and his friends. I think we probably struggled with putting that together. I mean, there probably we could probably do it, but it would probably be a lot of people digging into the files, right? Yeah. I mean, well, yeah, I mean, it would be, it wouldn't be easy for us. And that, to me, that understanding the problem is, is something, you know, we want part of this modernization for Marine highway system, and you really need to have systems where we can have access to information so we can understand the problem. It's not just Marine highway on, on that side. Well,
Something has changed and you know, I've been around a very long time. Let's just go back to say 2014 and 15, when we had 11 ships and then you'd be down at six or seven in, in, in the summer time, we would, we would very easily and very reliably hire about 125 new hires every single winter, over a four or five month program easily. And we would doing it mostly in state. And we would do that in one shot. We'd have multiple classes to get, 'em all set to go. Of course they'd work for five months and then get, they get laid off. Okay. And that went on for your years and years and years. And now the, we just, we feel we've capped out Alaska, unless there's other avenues that we can get into. And that's why about five or six years ago, we started, you know, recruiting in Alaska, but also going into the lower 48 going nationwide to try to find these folks because we weren't getting the response back to from Alaskans.
And for years and years, we are easily 125. No problem, boom, get 'em in off you go. And something has changed. Something has gotten way more difficult to try to hire 'em and bring 'em in, especially, especially in Alaska. So we're gonna have to work a lot hard for pro lab. I don't know whether we tapped it out or what's happened, but that was a routine program. Every winter four or five month program, passenger services department ran it along with our training officer and ops engineering, and it's all changed. And now we've gone over to a year round, everyday hiring process for, you know, to try to find the entry level positions. You know, we do have cadet support. We've got, we've got, you know, the maritime college license cadets, or, you know, that are working for licenses. We've got 20 tongue point cadets board, you know, one license. So, so we're, we haven't had the tongue point cadet board for years. We, we started that in hope that when they get out, we can grab some of them. You can cause they will have as far as unlicensed, not only passenger service type training and skills, but oil or junior engineer and a
I was gonna get into the issue, what the whole department is going on. And the limited amount of information that I have and having the going out of the system very year, it's kind hard for me to connect, but when you start talking about 5,000 bonus, you've got employees over here that haven't had a raise in morale issues where that solves or sets us forward and try to fix those morale issues. But again, I'm reading just what I, I get
That that's kind of why we did that. We are, we are trying, and that was on my list, kind of hit, but you know, we're trying to communicate more, you know, Sam's got the weekly newsletter, I'm getting ready to put out an operational newsletter. Usually do that quarterly. We are meeting, you know, with groups. I meet every two weeks. I started that when COVID started with all the leadership of all three unions, we've just flipped that over to teams. We can see each other. I'm feeling like as far as the union leadership, we're, you know, we're, we're trying to become closer. I think we are getting closer. We're having more open dialogue with them.
And we've been a little shorthanded on the operation side, what we call port cap, but we've got two now and Ray to hire a third by this summer. And for the first time, in a long time, we had a port captain out riding on the Manino. He, he was bored I believe. And we're gonna start doing a lot more of that. Hopefully we can get an engineer out writing and we're gonna see more and more of that. You know, I think it's important that the ships crew and see those that are in the office, directing things out there with, You know, it's all part of front group tomorrow. We haven't had people riding in a long time
We're, we're in the process of that. And that, and that goes back to one of the contracts itself right now from kind of that audit of the whole system. And how are there things, cause we want to, in some folks from other parts of the country that have seen a lot of what's going on in other places and see what they're doing and are there things that they're doing differently that people are responding to? You know, one of the other gears up there was culture. And so we gotta focus on that and it's definitely things are changing like captain fall said across the board and where do, how do people wanna work? These ways of working are changing, what young people want and where, yeah. We're trying to understand that more. What, what I keep hearing about, and, and, and this gets toughed in the, in the trades.
And I think in the maritime world, I wanna get to equipment operators, but how can you provide flexibility? We hear a lot about that. People want flexibility and that, and they may not be doing after these jobs, you, that don't provide those types of opportunities. If we had really interesting things happen when it comes to morale, I was talking to the airport, police and fire officers just last week. And there's another group that doesn't feel like, you know, they, so another disparity, so the troopers got raised is this group didn't, even though they're in the same, the union, so got split. And it's just a complicated thing. But what they said, Fairbank is morale's really high because they came up with this work schedule of like three, you just work three days straight, 24 hours, and then you get four days, five days off. And they said, people really like that.
And they've been able to fill all the positions and there's no more money, but it's just that they that's, that's something that was appealing to people. And so it may be more of those types of things. When we went on on M and O side of the Dalton highway, we went to two weeks gone, two weeks off. We had a real problem on the Dalton highway. We couldn't build positions. There were a week on, week off now we've gone it two on two off, no more problems. All the positions are filled and they want whole people, one about their work. So just things like that. It, it seems like it depends on where you're at and you know, how it works, but I mean, those types of things seem like they help. But yeah,
And also even in, even in the office environment where we're struggling front by what we'll call field positions in the office, not the, you know, the administrative technicians, but we we've just made a hire a young lady she's, she's working now as our safety management coordinator. That's a huge part of what we do. And she's working from Sterling, Alaska. Okay. We're getting ready to make a hire for our environmental officer. We lost our environmental officer, not the young lady, very qualified. She's gonna work from Soldo. We've made the decision to allow port engineers to work from a distance. We feel that they, you know, can do that and be here when they're needed. And you know what finding that is helping us recruit more of the, the skilled office type type positions. We have noticed that now that we're kind of coming out of, COVID more of the office staff, believe it or not as well back into the office, but some new hires really don't want to come here and we're allowing them to, to work from a distance. And so far it's working out, it's a new world, it's a new world, new world working from a distance and they're doing a great job.
Cause there's cool stuff that's going on. We have a lot of smart people, I think the same at Marine highway system. I mean, even, even within these divisions, right. There's there's divisions and how do we start? Okay. Bringing that together and making everybody feel like team that's, that's the big thing. And the team thinking that, and as a team, it's like, everybody's part of the team. So we have each individual division is a team you're part of the bigger D O T team D OTs, part of the governor's team. All of you are on the governor's team, you know? And so we're all part of these teams and that's how the thinking should be. And when we get into challenges and whatnot, you know, I just never come into a, it couldn't be solved everybody's yet. It seems like where we have problems is when people start button heads, because so that's, that's the overall, but the culture piece is really challenging because there's so many different aspects to it.
The, the telework thing and working remotely has been huge for us over the past two years. And there's been a lot of good and there's also been a lot of challenges. And so we're kind of now we're morphing into what the new world will look like. And we still have agreements disagreements between different people on what that should be this idea of attracting younger generations. And do we even need to start being more flexible in the lower rank and letting people move around and working different positions and seems like people want more or variety in their work. Some of those types of things, even this thing. And I know we've talked a lot about this INHS wifi on the ship. Is that a culture thing? Because is that, what is that? If you're a young person and you hear, oh, Maureen highway, that might be kind of cool, then you hear, well, you're gonna be on a ship. You're not gonna have any connectivity for which you that maybe that's the kicker. They, I'm not doing that. I don't
Well, thank you for explaining all the work that you guys are doing. I really appreciate, especially some of the sort of markers you've laid down about hiring more Alaskans and doing that work. But recognizing that, you know, we're in a different operating environment, I'm really glad that Rob mentioned culture piece and that you've talked more about it because what I wanted to say about your graphic is that culture culture is really the driver of organization. And so I really think your big orange gear is your culture and it should be more central to it. And culture is what drives successful organizations. Culture is what makes workforce sticky and want to be within that organization. And so all of the things that you're talking about, I think really are for, and I'll, I'll use an example with the military. The military can stay connected to of their home life, wherever they are in the world.
And I, it seems to me that one of the challenges having been in positions where I'm recruiting people for remote work, the challenge always is I still have to be a part of my home life, like even if I'm working remotely. And so to me, I think that probably is one of the challenges and providing people with, even if it's not an all day long situation, but some opportunity to be connected to their life. People don't wanna make those trade offs anymore. And if you can create a culture where you're respectful of the employee, who has that, I, that you'll find recruitment and retention eases up. I, I wanna, and then I wanna roll back a little bit to the recruitment of Alaskans, having worked in the department of labor and in training program, young people want the jobs that they can see. And if they can't see Alaska Marine highway jobs, you have to show them that it exists.
And so whatever you can do to take that message out to the high school, you know, for example, I use, I use this, I mean, if you're carrying a hunting knife and you get involved in, you know, an assault, not with the knife, but if you have a class B felony conviction, you can't work on an appy processor guy. So many young people make mistakes early in their lives that precludes them from careers in maritime. And so all of those messages have to be taken out to the high schools very, very early. And the, the one thing I, I, I just wanna come back to in that conversation is it seems to me that especially for the unskilled unlicensed job, not necessarily maybe that, or even maybe the licensed jobs skilled on licensed jobs, sorry, that I know you're tied in with ABEC. They have an Alaska maritime apprent program that corporation developed really to bring young people in from rural Alaska maritime occupations.
I worked with the CBQ groups and other maritime groups over and over and over again, you know, the situation was, they couldn't see the job. They didn't know what it was. They did something to disqualify themselves and they didn't know what the pipeline was to get into that occupation. So it just seems to me, you know, work, earn and learn is the message. If you can do that within the Alaska Marine highway, you can get some Alaskans into these jobs. And so, you know, I'm happy to have some longer conversations about that, but I just, I, I, I know the challenges and, you know, even, even since I've been out of that particular area, the, the native corporations, the CQS, their, their challenges, they don't have enough jobs to hire the people that they're putting through training program. So those partnerships understanding that there's a connection when they enter a training program, there's a job at the end of that training program is going to get those young people into the last market.
Part, part of what we, we we've had in, in the Marine highway and probably collaterals to all of VOT as the failure to communicate. So as captain one of the vessels, this is the first time I'm about wifi for the crew. We, we can't help if we're not part of the problem. And that's what my fear is. And one of the reasons why I talked with Katherine and volunteer to join this board is to be here, is to try to affect the positive change for. So the challenge that we face here is board both in short term and long term planning has to be to, to get the pieces of puzzle presented to us. One of the questions I had is what, what roads to D O T plan to build where's where's other term planning to build? How can we, how can we make this system official, better efficient?
So my career here, I've always heard, you know, we've been doing it this way for 50 years. And it's like, okay, well, it's not working. It's not working. So we gotta challenge that. Just like everybody we're in a new world, COVID changed everything. Everything needs to be looked at in the new light. And we need to prove that it still works. But back to what I'm saying. So my fear is when we don't get those whole pieces of the puzzle on the shift, and now you're telling the board, you're you you're planning this thing. It's like, I I'm worried that we're, we're myth and pieces of the puzzle that we need to make decisions that are gonna guide forward. So
It is puzzle it's puzzle and piece. And I think one of our challenges right now is we're so focused on keeping it running that we aren't doing the bigger picture and, and probably on the communicating piece, we should, we should think more about that on how we can create some cause we need, we need a, a structure for that, or it doesn't happen. You know, it's gotta be like a real thing that it schedules structured that everybody agrees to. And maybe that's something I know we've taken steps already starting some of these teams up. And I know we've tried to integrate, like I know, oh, it's Dan Haskins. He's participating on this low mission ferry Ary piece. And I think is having those connections does a lot for us because now you have someone that is working and can communicate. I, I had a lot of success working out in rural remote communities and when be able do field work, we take someone with us and they have a role in it. And then when they go back to the community, they tell the community, this is what they're doing out there. It's okay. That kind of relationship, I think, is the nice one where we start, including folks that are on the, whether it's the vessel side or the short side and integrating the decision so that they can take it back. Communication always be a challenge.
Yeah. Keith your point is spot on. And commissioner's point it's one of his, again, one of his driving internal communications in D O T. And obviously we're not there yet, but it's certainly a goal and to prove it and, you know, cause you're right. When people know what's going on, it feel part of the team. And then that improves morale. So working on it and always open more input on it. So,
We, you know, part of this two day fact fire is to get information. That's, that's why we're here. And just, would you point out something like that? That's a little teased. If now a surprise and, and I'm not casting blame or, or, or doing this stuff, I'm just pointing out the fact that I feel as one of the members in this board, we're missing a, a lot of the pieces puzzle. A Allen's brought that up a lot. We, we have a hard time looking at how we're gonna make recommendations because we don't, we don't know all the pieces. So I know we need new fair. I know we need new theories. We got the, the hub and Talina, they got this going, you know, we know, we know the little pieces that go with that, but we don't necessarily know the big picture. So that that's part of my, my understanding here is, is trying to get, how, how do we get that? How do you guys present stuff to so we can make a logical one, one
No. That's. And with all due respect, I'm gonna do what the leadership wants. Sorry, the governor, but you process 1950s. When they first started talking about the Marine highway system, it was about the service to provide to the state of Alaska, the citizens. Today. It appears as if we're talking about how much money we can raise the system to keep it going rather than how to continue to provide, to provide the service. And I think that's part of your culture that you're facing right now. The difference that we had from Marine highway is no different than we should build the road to Fairbank, and we should surface it all year. And so it, I think it, part of the culture that what is the vision of Alaska, the vision of the commission of legislation, part of this is gonna be, as we indicated, maybe a letter to the legislative, you know, 30, 30, whereas the rest of it, and on a continuing basis, go back and run the numbers to see what the average let's say through, put into it over the last 20 years and what we put in last year. So it, the culture, right? The cultures me at this point, pop down to get us to that. So,
Yeah, I, I really appreciate those comments, you know, in 2016, you know, across the, we have budget cuts on the side. So I was up at Northern reason director and they cut M and L big time. And now we're in this situation where, how do we serve communities? Because service levels are going way now, but they found cool stuff. They found ways to change scheduling. So if we could actually do a similar amount of work, but because of the way the schedules worked out, you know, with, with less man hours, we, we worked out so bigger equipment. So you could clear more road with one piece of equipment. Instead of two, they started really leveraging technology and, and understanding weather systems and, and getting weather information. So maybe there wasn't so much snow in this area. You didn't send the truck out there. Those types of things, a lot of efficiencies came out of that for the Marine highway system.
I'd be really curious from the sport. What is that measure of success for community service that would help us a lot. I see 'em tied together. You know, it's like efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency is what Johns do it. And making sure we're are doing the best shifts to the most efficient, but effectiveness is how well we're serving the community. And what does that mean? Does that mean the number of times they get service year? Does that mean the time of day they get serviced? How long a shift is important? I don't know. I mean, I think those are the things would be really helpful for us
That's what they did. Various routes were subsidized differently depending upon how much service they would provide on those routes. Right. I think it's important to look at, even go back to 2014 and 15 when we had 11 ships running and also look at capacity utilization that tells you a lot right there against the six ships or so that we've got running now are a lot more coal than the other ones that were running around empty even back in those days. So where does that all play in? I think that's what this board and us have to try to figure out.
Thanks Madam chair, you know, and this all ties like we we've been dancing around that essential service level, which I think drives investment in the future. And captain B's point there Le shift running empty is that, but I don't know if that's it, but you know, I would've said a year ago that my job was being driven to increase capacity. That's where I increased revenue, make the system more self sufficient. That's what I was getting through the legislature on the governor from everybody that's sort of changed. I'm getting this different kind of vibe from everyone. It's more, we want some service level to be provided to all these communities. It's really an extension of the road system, but what is that level? And then, you know, good question, how do we identify that? But, but then that drives that at investment in the future. And is it all the ships we have now? Is it a, some other smaller ships? I don't know. That's yeah. Tough question.
And just, just, I, I, I just will say having been on the reshaping working group, you know, that, that very issue was recognized early on. They really didn't wanna really didn't wanna come up with those definitions. Yeah. And, you know, recognizing certainly at that time, several years ago, we were looking at a very different financial picture, but I mean, it really is the crux of this. What, what is an essential level of service that can be provided? And then how do you operate the system holistically to support that essential
Cost to operate. You've got all this federal money coming in. How we, how we gonna spend that for the next five years, we're gonna spend that on things like that. You know, transportation's gotta be affordable Expensive right now. So, you know, those are things that I say, I, I mean, we've got ideas of, you know, how many ships we should have 10 and 20 years out. And we are gonna talk about that tomorrow. But you know, morale is big, not good right now.
Take some responsibility for that and try to prove that that's, that's what I'm saying, but you know, new ships are important, you know, getting cabins in the, the has in the Hubbard now we've got the TRV underway and we go from there, what are we gonna do at the kennecot? So 1998, that's getting old. We struggle trying to get that ship out of the shipyard here, this, this past week, it was, it was horrible, A new ship that's not working. Those are kind of my visions, but full staffing's very important. And we're hurting real bad there. Folks that run on the shift, they, they need to know that when they're week or two weeks is up or whatever, longer on Dustin and cans, a little different, but they need to build to go home
I like bottom up too though. I mean, it, if there's a way to hear through votes, but you know, this is what people are looking for. And I think we're hearing that about, you know, being more informed in those types of things, but yeah. I mean the vision statements, mission, vision values, and those are all things that, yeah, this group is interested
Mean. I mean, we have a change manager. That's, that's something unprecedented and that's at a director's level at my level, you know, and I, there's a commitment to that and you knows doing a good job with that, cuz we're not, you know, the folks that work for me are, are chip people. I I'm a ship person, you know, I'm don't know a lot about change management, but now we have someone that can help guide us through it. You know, we, we spend day after day trying to keep these ships operating and keep 'em safe. That's number one.
I just, if, if I could just speak to that point, I, I do think that we probably do need some consultant support to look at scenarios and options. This is a, you know, a lot of the questions that are being presented to the border relatively complex. And, and in order to look at the operating side, the capital investment side and the customer service side simultaneously, we're, we're getting iterative reports on different aspects of the system, but in order to see it holistically and understand, you know, system systemic impacts of certain decisions, it just seems to me that we're not gonna be able to achieve that in this kind of a setting. We need somebody who can sit down and do this scenario analysis.
This, this is where I, I part ways was thinking on that because it's yet another consultants bring in that has to be, that's probably not coming from inside the system that has to learn the system. I learn all the elements of the system, have those people. We have those people at AMHS. So my hope is that the two days here, day and a half, two days, that we're here, that we have the opportunity to tie all those things together, more at the board. Cause again, we're not part of the basement. We've have studies. We have plans the in house proud about other people that have all been coming down pretty much following the same path for a couple of decades. That's just never been followed, just never created a long term plan. So I, I would be really concerned that trying to hire a co consultant to come in and work like come and tell us what we should be able to understand people. I just have real concerns about that.
I just, just as a follow up, I would say, I think you can write the scope of work narrowly to draw on the work that's done internally. You know, just to look at this in a, in a, a spreadsheet format, not be able to apply some. What if analysis, if we make this decision and look at it in terms of what is, again, it's operational impact act. I think that the capital side of it is a lot clearer right now than the operational
I think that can be done inhouse. I, I really do. Yeah. And, and I'm hopeful after we've talked to captain Carella too, and Carrie scheduled scheduler, a lot of what is bringing up, which true going to make stuff when you start see the connections. So why does this do that route? Why the two o'clock in the morning and, and once we get a, a really better understanding and feel of that, then I think it's really gonna start to make sense. When we start looking at the modernization of sleep with makeup and the service level, that one concern I still have left and I'm not quite sure where bring it up, I guess, tomorrow. And I, I think you will still be here. Okay. Is the modernization plan and concerned that this board has that the, I, I J a money is not gonna be utilized to its full potential to put the vessel on the water because it's been split with 50 million taken out corrobor operation.
If we got, we gotta keep repairing our facilities, we gotta, we gotta upgrade the facilities. We we're trying very hard to get the facilities to a point where they can accommodate more in common with, especially the ACF. We can get to most of the docs, but not all of them can't get the PE. We can't get the, we can't get the Chika bay Cordova needs a little bit more dolphins and mortgage capacity for winter time when the wind blows hard, we know it, and those projects are already underway. And we're gonna see if we can fill some of that in with federal grant money potentially, but still driving ahead, nonetheless, I'm doing these projects, especially for the ACF,
Looking with the information I got looking exactly the last two years on how much operat, 60 million a year in operation fund, it's not enough. That's gonna be problem modernized. Can't all what I'm saying is the 50 to 60 million that been in from the state in the past. I'm wondering whether that's enough to do the operational aspects of it, but doesn't build ships. And so that gets the question of how you use the several dollars. And so if you had that 50 to 60 million in COVID and course ridership goes up all the rest of that definitely anticipate is the 50 to 60 million a year, operat efficient, as long as it doesn't apply to You speaking, not just
I think we'll just go ahead and move along last folks. Want take it just a quick to minutes us quick break, catch. We'll do that real quick. You, that was on the phone. We're just gonna take a very short little Three, five minute break cam. We'll be back with operations planning with captain Tony CORBA.
Oh, so, so I came out here on a, you know, I knew a guy that, that came to work for the Marine highway system. And, and so I came from Massachusetts out here because I knew somebody and I got here and I started working for the Marine highway system. And I fell in love with the community, with the system. I care a lot about it and hoping that kept so happy to be a part of this and speak to everybody today. You know, part of living in catch scan and being involved with community is giving back. And I, and I do that volunteer work, actually go start Hillary. And I go out and I help people not kill themselves when on, so
My, my role at NHS, I do a lot of different things. I, I, I'm pretty much a lot closer to the deck place, my job to making sure that the operations department works one of the largest. It is the largest department, as far as personnel in the Marine highway system department, the tech department, you know, the licensed tech officers. So it's quite big, I'm emergency response leader. You know, one thing about the Marine highway system that I really enjoy, I really enjoy and is that we do put safety first. And the reason I know that is because I've worked for companies that do not play safe for job one. So we do that. We do it consistently. Yes, we have a bunch of, of old ships, but we do it the best we can with what we have. You know, I've never been asked to do something that's or asked happens.
So, so I really like that. I don't want to change. And I won't, and I know my boss won't let me do that either. So there's other things I do. The, the, the drug and alcohol policy, I kind of responsible for making sure that the captains get promoted, the right captain get promoted on the ships and that we, we have the best people working in the positions that are, you know, essential to safety I've been involved in the COVID response, helped break the plan, the general manager or delegation, not around at point, and it's always working. So I don't know why I have it. So, and I'll call 24 7. And I, you know, try to coordinate when I, when I first got the green highway system, I used to walk in, I started out as an assistant for captain and started out in the dish room as an assistant for captain.
And I worked my way up again, system. And the, the, the receptionist used to say, you're still here. Every time I came in, because we have some, you know, some, a lot of people leaving back. It was, it wasn't a lot of consistency in the parks office. So I tried to bring that with me, tried to think, been pretty successful at it. Had people working consistently know we've had some departure retirements, but the, the revolving door report captains was able to get a handle on that. And I was able to, one of the first ships I walked on the, the chief made that complained to me that nobody had file and that couldn't get any sleep. So I spent the first part of my career as support captain time, promote people to, to get the file. They got pretty successful with that. That's been a little while ago. Now we have a system set up with the expectations, I'll move it along. Sure. So,
I have to be, you know, I always think like I want people with me in the office, like human resources and those, you know, maybe procurement people, but I have to be honest with you, I haven't experienced like a bad situation with procurement person. You know, we've always been very responsive and I, you know, trying to think of my staff and how they deal procurement. I've never, I, I've never experienced like a big complaint about how, You know, procurement let us down. So to be honest about that, you know, I just have to say, you know, it might be a good idea, but I don't see it as a Big pressing issue.
They they're pretty responsive. Well, it was as a team of them up, up there, actually, Tom me leads that group. And he reports to the chief contracts officer and, and I deal a lot with Tom on, you know, new contracts and renewing certain contracts. And then Kevin kava is down a little, you know, you know, dealing with, you know, more of the everyday stuff and the Iris, you know, you know, with our procurement system and purchasing and they're they're, and it's always something that's crossed my mind too, you know, but they're pretty responsive. You know, they are pretty responsive to us and, and get things done pretty
Okay. Alan, you have a question I'm kind of loose to last thing. I was just, I been involved at all in the last eight years, so I don't learn my way into what I'm supposed to doing. And so you're talking about improving the customer experience board. Is that improving from what it is now or what it used to be? Have we lost something in customer service board and where are you going with improving customer experience on board, better understanding of what that for
I hired a passenger services manager who used to work for the cruise ships and he's a, what I would call a polished man. You know, he knows how to provide customer service, job number one. And he tries to, when, when we orient our employees, he tries to bring that in and do that. You know, customer service can be affected by morale on the ships. You know, we got, we got an issue with that now, people working over, but it's, it's that public facing part of the operation. That's the most important, you know, we train our employees, you know, if a customer comes with you with a problem, what, what's the one thing, you know, as an example that you hate when you try to talk to somebody and they, they interrupt you or they don't let you finish, you know, you've gotta listen to people.
It's just simple skills, you know, you know, and I learned those from my dad. There's things out there that, you know, the, the guidelines for customer service, we just tried to teach those, those basic principles. Before I came on board, when we had plenty of people working for us back in the day, I'm sure that the morale was probably a little bit better out there before we had all the cuts and the, and the, and the departure of, of employees, but just making sure that, that, you know, that they, they understand that look, you know, we're the only reason we're here to transport these passengers, right? And their experience is, are, are very important as part of what we do. And, you know, you're expected to, to behave a certain way when you see those people. So I think, you know, it's combin, like we had great customer service.
Maybe we went down a little bit, you know, after we started losing folks and morale went down a little bit, I know that, you know, and I don't wanna say that cuz of the people out there, they really try, you know, this, this, this organization, isn't just a bunch of ships floating around the water. It's the people that make the difference. And, and they do try and they do the best that they can, you know, the people that have been here a long time, I think they do provide that, that good service, but it's getting to the new people, you know, to make sure just like any service industry that they have, those skills
And I think it also, what we've been talking about a little bit, maybe plays in the customer service is the, who comes on board, the vessel, you know, they may be looking for different food offerings. They might be looking to buy a t-shirt or a hat for boat. You know, the bars closed that made a little big change, but you can get here in line in the gallon. So in terms of customer, our services also physical cruise are great. I I've never had an issue. It's the rider who goes, well, is this all you've got, you know, can I get this? Can I go back? No, I'm sorry. You can't. So those are some of the things that apply for us.
So where I, where I was going with that is if, if, and then two, so now the, then, then FVI, you mentioned before that, you know, we we're reimbursed with customers when we leave, 'em stranded somewhere we're, we're starting to pay for things. So how does that balance with, if we're making up for, for loss revenue and flying people or chipping their cars or whatever things, how does that, how does that money come out of regions or where does that, does that come outta the operations that comes outta operations that coming outta? Yeah. So I guess in, in a way, how did you know the Kenco missing that Bellingham sailing set us back as how much did that set us back? Just for, for that one failing?
Revenues we would've made before in having that. Cause the, the purchasing really isn't an issue that I've seen for us, except for when this last minute a lot of stuff was done from overseas and more custom and ability to get stuff to Alaska. That's the, the hard part of the family finally fashion.
It, it, especially with COVID, it's getting it. It is hard, you know, and I think they may have been on, on the wire. Some things get lost in transition where something got ordered, but didn't get pushed too hard. When shipyard go. I had a contractor assumed that they were good for five years for Solas roles and they weren't because the coast guard defaults the CFR roles. And by the time that was realized, then we've got behind the eight ball, big time trying to get these things here. And, and you know, that leads to, you know, my discussion about trying to get court engineers, even if, even if, even if we have to have them work distance we're we're, we're, we're very short staffed on the engineering side, you know, two, two port engineers and three vessel destruction managers. He we've got less than 50% of the staff that would normally be a hundred percent staff out just on the engineering side.
Governor Gava has been shorthanded, you know, back back 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago. He, he had, he had four port cap and himself. He had a security officer too. We we're looking to potentially the security officer back commiss. Sure. I met the fentanyl had mentioned fentanyl while we're talking about that. But you know, over the winter we lost our environmental officer. We lost 50 management officer only had one port, captain. He eventually hired a second one. So it it's been a struggle. And, and we hope to, we hope to get a, a third port captain hired. We have a, we have a young lady that we think will built to join us by summer of the three port, captain, captain, covais potentially a security officer back. We've got our ism officer back and hopefully we could make a hire on the environmental officer. So, so, so this has been a, this has been a tough overhaul, went to forest, namely with ops engineering, very short staffed, more so on the engineering side, but, and wires got well transition. I've gotta admit that. And by the time we realized he's are good for four years, not five. Then we were scrambling trying to get something out of Norway. We wouldn't be late. And we ended up being,
We need, we need to, we need to get more shore side staff and, you know, and, and improve how we do business. You know, where we looked years ago at reliability based maintenance, a system like that the's working group, like then talked about that, right? Paul essentially bringing in a contract to help you with focused teams on certain things that take place in that shipyard all winter long, that's something we're looking at again. And this board needs to help us through that. Is that, is that some way maybe we want to go, especially being a short staffed as we are on the short side engineering and things, because we struggled in the ship yard is, is one we did. And you know that I'll look it up to your ship. That that was one of the follow up questions I had because short side engineering pays gloss on a pretty hefty sum.
Yeah. So it's like, you know, and then, you know, speaking to that point on a different subject, you know, when the, because the, the passenger services managers able to use the, like the hiring software of this, he's able to send like when, when jobs are offered or they need to provide information, a text will go out. A text goes under people. Nobody smart fault.
Yeah. Thanks to Cynthia's point. This whole conversation, you know, again, tuning the horn of my commissioner is one of he's trying to harness the resources in D O T to work with other aspects of D OT. And one of 'em is the communications. We have a strong communications team and a it's headquarters. Now it was siloed like Northern central, you know, and even highway. And we're trying to bring that together because people like Sam and Shannon up in central, they have those ideas about Twitter and Facebook and, and, you know, all of that is happening now. And we're transitioning to that to, to bring it in, in the Marine highway, you know, and there's resistance changes heart. Right. There's always resistance, but I think people are starting to, you know, okay. Cause they don't work for Marine highway. They're part of D O T and they've got some good ideas and a lot of that's happen cause it start to see it. It just takes time
While we've got we both here, gentlemen, can we, there have been some questions from the board about the ACF, basically their design, their design change wide there's stuff on the board there. See, but could you briefly, there's a couple things that you can give us touch. Just kind of an overview of things that have come across from the board start with brief changes on their design and, and why, why they were the final design was just,
So it was good crew cabs, right? Adding the cabins on the, on the vessels so that we can make the ship more flexible and it's operated day. So right now, without the crew cabin, we're pretty much stuck to a 12 or 14 hour day, depending on, you know, the proof size. And so adding, you know, so you're stuck, you know, you're in LinkedIn now, or you get to Davis get, you know, to 10, he, you know, places like that. So you need the flexibility. You need the flexibility in order to make the operation work cause the ships need to do multiple things. So with the addition of the crew cabins, you can run the boat around like you are like now with the 2 35 on Aurora where you pretty much go well for most of the day, you know, the boats do come back and, and sit the same port every night, like the county, the Aurora Portola.
But you can go out and do more things. You can have a longer day buy better, better service, better, longer service. There's no, there's no ferry system out there like highway system. I know there's been studies done, you know, maybe there's similar ones, but you know, for the population we have and the distances we go, I think you can't compare us to Washington state barriers where they do a point to point server as, and they're carrying millions of people every year. You know, we're not point for point. I mean, we have that's point for point, but you know, for the most part, we're going on voyage over multiple miles, carrying fewer people and this, you know, you need that flexibility in order to accomplish that mission. So adding the crew cabins on the, on, on the last priority, good idea. You know, it would give us more flexibility and you know, so they're, they're adding, they're not stretching the ship or doing anything like that. They're just adding on the top level of the ship behind the bridge deck. They're just adding the crew cabins are gonna add a gal cause we gotta feed the crew. Right. So yeah. So that's the logic behind
Well, different too surely is, you know, the routes were running the two 30 fives on or even the ACFS is their, their, their shorter routes. Whether you know, you're up at prince William sound, whether you're running offline canal into the villages you are in and outta port more frequently, you call 'em the crews up and down that all plays into the work rests with the cabs. It allows you to stretch that out a couple more hours, as opposed to a straight 12 hour day where you gotta be back. And those crews have gotta be off the boat. Time starts when they walk up to the gang time, they walk off the gangway. So that, that allows you to stretch those routes out just a little bit more. You can income average, some of that work rest time too. So I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a big advantage to have the cabins on this type of ship on these shorter routes.
You know, if you're running a cascade point doesn't mean you gotta, you run it that way. Although it, it might be beneficial. I mean, it's something that we all gotta look at. You know, it says you're having a night crew up there. It, it, it, it, it says you're not having to move crews in an, in and out every one. And then every night to try to deal with that 12 hour day. I mean, it's, it's, there's a lot of things to look. It does provide a lot more flexibility than you'd have just a pure rate 12 hour day,
I don't think we've totally made that decision. And I think that's a lot of what this board needs to alpha with. Is that ship going up to prince William sound? Is she gonna run down here in, in, out of Juu there's pros and cons to all of that, it's gonna be very difficult to put the Hubbard in prince Williams sound during the winter until we get the moron arrangement in Cordova fixed because our captains are gonna tell us I'm not sitting there when the one's blowing like that with the Moring line's proper, that's a, that's a fairly quick fixable. We gotta do that. So there's a lot of things that we gotta take into account.
Are they projects that they, I don't, they're not gonna be done by October 1st day, this year. So, so hub will come out with quarters. Yeah. And she'll need to go do something. Well, Lina comes in if she gets quarters. Cause I understand that that still has not been authorized a million dollars of federal funding for the, and could that come from existing money that do D has, or is that something that has to wait for I money? Or where, where, what, what is it, what is needed for that to forward?
Ferry, we would have to discharge because you know, the fast varies ran up there with no MSDS either. So, and these ships have got, you know, extra, large carrying capacity. They were built that way. So yeah. But yeah, no, we'd have to run the same way as the did and pump off and I believe it Paul's right. Cordova.
There's the plus up in the very well, like 16 million a year. So there's opportunities there to do TA approve orders. And it's really not a funding issue at the moment. It's a matter of Talina is especially is a policy call needs be made and decision made on it and then terminal money. There's numerous grants we're applying for now. And then I'll put also the rural Berry money is terminal eligible. So that's another option there, but proceeding, I don't think it's gonna be as fast as everyone wants to get those, those terminals upgraded those five, I think pelicans number one right now. And then unfortunately everything takes time, but yeah.
A little bit? Yeah. And you know, it was hard enough getting group waters on the hub. You know, we had to get that through, you know, you have to educate a lot of people on why you need it. And five years we kind of made a deal to get not a deal, but we well essentially to get to Hubbard. We, you know, there was, there was a lot of demand for other money for throughout the rest of the state. And it's like, you can do one crew quarter now and then we'll trust the other one later. And you know, again, where we go next is is I, I personally have said many times and I think Tony just said it is, you know, the crew quarter make sense to me if only the reliability aspect of just having that redundancy and have shifts that can cover for each other, you know, LAORA the con goes down, you have another ACF that can move in, or maybe you get some new vision of configuration routes you hadn't thought of. But, and then I think the modernization plan eventually sees if two 30 fives going away and the ACSP more efficient and, and they're there replacing the, but
This board formula it's understandings of, of the system and tries to figure out what we're supposed to come up with to do it, or all this information is very good to give us some things what we're talking about. I'm little confused, I guess, on things like crew quarters and those kind of things that are currently going on in the system that are those questions that are coming to the board to make a decision on. It seems to me that the process that's going on right now needs to continue to move forward, to continue operating and make things happen. And then we get into the modernization plan of future developer. Then we start making those future decisions, but I'm a little confus, whether Harvard and group orders and all this stuff is something that we're not currently gonna make a decision on and that's ongoing stuff that's going
On. Right. Well, Lina's not really ongoing from what I'm understanding that the final decision policy decision hasn't been made and we, we can't make decisions for the system, but we can make our recommendations. And if we're looking at our, our monitorization plan that we looked at several times now, it's always comes with both those ACFS crew quarter so that they can do two different things cover for each other, et cetera. We knew that they were gonna have to be knock adjustments and also adjustments to live that a pump sewage or treat their sewage. So the board I can, it should make a recommendation policy recommendation, you know, look at that tomorrow in the modernization plan that, you know, we don't wanna be left with another one on, and we're trying to avoid that and give fleet where it can, it can do a fair amount of things. Well, instead of one or two things, well, a handful of things, not so great. And we, we don't wanna be stuck with that. So that
It's been, it's been stuck for over four years to be. And a lot of it has to do with the other thing I was going to ask, which is about cascade point questions about cascade point and leaving it without proof quarter keeps it as a day vessel that would do short cascade points. My question is where is that a and HS vision of long term is, is that something that we need that crew quarters to be flexible and do all cause, you know, think about it. I mean, if you don't need in the winter, if you don't have that ridership where you don't need those staff turnarounds, you don't have to put two crews on the vessel. You can do the one that one, one map with the fall improve. It just gives you that possibility you can't make that decision without support. So I, so I understand what's probably talked about, but if we could find out how it's connected to cascade point from the, the OT side and does that make sense from the side and hope I'm not getting anybody together, but, but we need to know
Let, to me that there's all of these decisions. If there's a batch of near term decisions that are the next one to two years, that we need to, I, I think fully consider and, and make some specific recommendations. I think there's medium term decisions that are, you know, obviously not as, not as urgent, but are informed by those near term decisions. And then the longer term, you know, even 20 year investment decisions that, that are, are also gonna be a part of our agenda. But obviously all of these are mixed, mixed together and some of them are contingent upon one another. So understanding that set of near term recommendations, I think rather quickly, if not in this meeting, after this meeting and, and then working through what the cascading choices are or after that in terms of recommendation. But it does seem to me that I, I, you know, I'll get on soap back again, the box again, I can't reremember, I can't believe we're still here asking ourselves this question about crew quarters on the ACF, so let's get on with it. And cuz it's just one of those important things for the, we have to, we have to move past it because we're, we seem very high centered on it as a state.
Yeah. I, I was just gonna, you know, I think we're looking at planning right now and to Allen's point, we're doing obviously internal planning, looking ahead, trying to make him estimate decisions simultaneously with this board meeting, that's starting out, you know, one of em is Talina group, right? So we have to look at a, like we're looking at three year operating plans to try and figure if we start Talina right after Hubbard gets outta the shop, what happens next? Where does Hubbard go? You know, when do we put the Matuski in the shop, dead corridor that to happen? How does it play out? When does Columbia come back out after a CPP and where does she fit in? You know, so, so we're looking at that and, and, and then at the same time, balancing, you know, prior to this new bill balancing the money throughout the rest of the state and DT was a big, so we're in a new place. We, we have a lot more money that we can it's it's more acceptable that we put crew quarters here. We do these terminals. We think about new vessel. That was not the case just six months ago. So, well, the, the, the Matt is, is on a very much a kicking clock. So coming in of 23, 24, she's she's done and tied up if we're not planning for shipyard, now that ship's gonna be tied up. Yeah,
We were talking to Hi, Carrie, I'm here. Yeah. For, I think I know there's several items on here. There's some traffic volume numbers helpful, but I think it would really be good to spend most of the time on patiently operating schedule, 24th through 27. Some of it is based on what, but then the current map, route that vessels and sales, and then map routes with vessels in that, you know, the map. And she doesn't give the side corridors if through falls up just hypothetical, but I could ask,
Where would she go? How would she be used, you know, the ACF, the, the side festival. So just kind of walking her through things that we've been talking about with the modernization of vessels. If you're going down to your vessels, are we taking away? Are we, are we squeezing surface or are we not with the newer vessel? I, I think that if we get the 6 or 7 vessels, it'll be adequate. It's, it's difficult now running vessel, adequate cause. And those schedules written stop gap. And the more I write stop gap schedules, the more they become the normal and the more continues to shrink the longer standards are. So without reliability, we have no credibility. And, and that's where we're at right now. There's liability. Therefore, no credibility. And what we're running now is minimal in the summer. Ideally, we would have this long running as well. We're stuffed. We cancel. Now those people go away. There's no way to put 'em on any of the routes until September. So we come laid outta the yard. We cancel Bellingham. They take a bar, they fly reverse. It's starting to fill out it's it's.
So I got some space available with kennecot and mountain strip sold out curation. The Ruper vessel provides a couple extra turns to Southeast communities that, you know, the native communities case with that continuity, you can't do that with a Columbia or the kind of God. So, you know, at some point when you get main line vessel, self standardization, they'll be smaller than the Columbia crew. And also be able to hit all the supports and ties out, be together, whether rubric stays in the equation or not, you're still gonna have to have a boat like gonna task. We drag it around couple loop without Rupert in order to hook up the village and the town. So people can get to event. You're going to Bellingham. You're cutting all that time out. You cannot hit all those courts. Can I ask about traffic and out of Rupert in the winter past that house, skinny, it is skinny, but again, you know, you're only, and six and a half each way to get to Rupert and bring people to, from, we don't actually go down to supporting investment Canada in new offer.
We take a lot of kids down skiers. You get a handful of skiers when you have spring break. But again, it's the tying up all of the, you know, payback parties, all of the basketball, all of the regional stuff that everybody relies on. Can't be done with the Bellingham both before I get into questions and I should have before. I'm sorry. Sorry. Can you just briefly tell everybody, I don't know if you can do it pretty quick. That's pretty complicated. What, what a scheduler does? How do you the schedule for a vessel? Do you look at the money first? Do you look at the vessel available for high? They all plan. What happens when you get a budget or start with the operating plan? I work with Matt on the operating plan to determine how much money do we have available. Set the overhauls, get the operating weeks, set the overhauls.
Read em and weep. So it is, so you look at what, what, what ships you have and, and what kind of capacities you have on the card deck. And you know, how, how, how frequently can they get by? And you the 10, you're not gonna fill it out with a, you're gonna get, you know, get the elders groceries to get groceries to 'em Shane, you know, be happy. And then surprisingly in winter, get Davis or link, cuz you still only have one ship. So you've gotta link these communities in order to have that essential service level. If you do not have third quarter, you will not link anything together. And therefore it's very inefficient because you can't get there in the allotted amount of time. You can go to afternoon and take Shane's groceries, go to 10. The next day for the doctor, the dog at kayak does not efficient. Right? And, and so just, there's not enough days in the week in Washington like communities together. And it's also a sense because the people are traveling between these villages. You know, I guess Davis, they, they travel Andrew T they have events. So without being able to like, yeah, they're all in excess of 12 hour days. So, and you can also bail yourself out of some stuff you
Have. I want the board to understand that the, the regulations have changed since the two 30 fives were built. So when she's talking about work rest, there's no more cabins. There's no more ability to put another body on the 2 35 where you, they can have more call out and more port stops. So you have the work rest requirements. And that is why it's hard to get to laun to do more work. So hopefully with the hub, Talina, they're building them where if need to add in another crew, which is the opposite of where we've been going with, this is less crew, less, less crew. You also make it less functional with that. So there's, there's work less requirements and that's post third. That's not, that's not a crew, a crew piece. Yeah. That's not, yeah. It's not, it's not negotiable. So just wanted to clarify that for
And you will get into like, even with the ACFS, if, if they're gonna keep the Talina the way that you go, as soon as like captain car was talking about that too, like if they stretch over that 14 hour day, that crew can't come back to work the next day. I mean, then you're replacing a whole crew. And by the time
Yes. Yes. We are looking at that. Or we're we're paying for the ACFS being politically driven and built. So we have to live with the concept in of it. And we're we as the Marine highway, you know, F said it's four is we're, we're trying to make them work. We're trying to plug them into the system, but it's not apples and apples. Very hard to. So what that's what, you know, I keep saying like that. That's why I'm think I want to, the decision outta this meeting is we need to tell Rob and, and his crew, you know, get the money and things. It does we need. Right.
45 years before you started getting the chip run off, it was brilliant. It's when he started, it was brilliant. Truly. It worked perfectly well. If you wanna look at essential service, look at how it was built before you started growing past vehicle periods. You're gonna have nine of 'em and they're all gonna shuttle between all these places and you have hotels. You're gonna have all these roads not gonna have them. So the initial fleet, I think is brilliant. Start getting one off. You'd have APER shuttle. Why would you do that? Why would you do that? Nobody wants to come to ke a can they want to go up there? Right? So you're gonna bring 'em here and wait for what boat. You don't have any main liners to put 'em on.
No, no. Can, can we go up to just to wrap the map? Yeah. Great. Cause this, it really helps in terms of looking at where, you know, the vessels where they're running now, where, where they're able to run, where they can't run, why they're used and, and it, I think it's really helps tie in the main line too, up to not be so, okay. So say if you're running out of Bellingham, you're, you're, you're spending three days out of the schedule just to get from here to there. And again, I think it was one outta earlier, so you're gonna subsidize these will never like that word, but you're subsidizing the essential services. Small buses were the ones that actually haul the people, which is out Bellingham. That's the, so you come out of Bellingham and you can, and, and again, it's time just to speed you.
Something. So it was between 86 and 90. So yes. And, and like I said, that the main liners on the linear stuff, they work, people don't want to get off one boat and get on another boat and get on another boat on drive. They want to get money boats and get to their destination. You see that too, when you try to hook on with connections, it not as viable as they way. And you know, and they're comfortable on board. It's, it's like a little cruise for them. They wanna get to their destination and not have a lot of on and off hotels and disruption, but, and Edward's full. And that's my fear with these old folks too right now is what happens when we break 200 board, you know,
Nightmare. Well, it's a nightmare when it happened, nightmare, a nightmare. I mean, even selling the kennecot late by a few days or into everything right down to working with D OT and the subcontract, just to keep the tunnels open two nights in a row all night. I mean, that was the money that was, and also fuel trucks in and out of the tunnel. One at a time
Is also now the test because the TuiNa is not coming out of the yard. So that was not planned. That was a complete and total rewrite of the kennecot schedule to squeeze crap, test a change trip and something over here to these people. After the fact that a published schedule, the shot out time, a comment
I think that the priority with this political football IST, there is no way to plan for that because it was always based on the money. Therefore, you can't go out far enough to do that. Your priority shift and change depending on this, the first string of where the money's coming from and how much you're gonna get. And generally we would not know that until the 11 hour. So you can't get schedules out the public and travel on. So it's really hard to prioritize when there is no plan and you don't know what your money's gonna be. I mean, there was times when we had two months to get out of schedule that people were supposed to book on. That's not efficient. So I, maybe I must be misunderstanding your question on, on prior.
It. Well, I think he's asking where, where do we go prior? I mean, the forward funding has helped us with going out full as opposed to back in the old days, getting schedules out for the summit before the legislature was even done telling us how much money we would have on a, on a, on a prayer, you know? So we don't have to do that anymore. But yeah.
These giant ships we can't get into for, so the cross up stay so kind, you know, it's longer. So that would be one that go later that new could need the main line of replacement for that. I think you need a main line of replacements. That would be one Bellingham vote, one roofer vote. I think you could, or two out of Bellingham, even if you had a few to Kenco on a double cross, never got to try, you know, because that all kind came apart where we did that. So three main liners they don't have, that would be two outta Bellingham. One outer one would see the Ken out on the turn. I think it still allow. And then one would provide the service to Southeast and here, well, all over Southeast, you want the
Reliability is, is, is gone. And they won't trust this. And they're not gonna, they won't arrive with us because whenever time they want to go somewhere, they won't, they can't get anywhere. Then two, you know, it it's the age, it's back to the age of the shift. So customer service, I still think that that tell this to Rob last night, just like, just like Vegas. If we wanna wanna improve our revenue, it's gonna be like Vegas. When they're on board, we want every penny in their pocket. So how do we make the gales in the, you know, some form of a gift chef, some sort of bar, how do we make more money while we're on board doing think we're already
Thing that goes to the, I don't know if people agree to me, if you need parody from summer and winter, you cannot run 11 and up to high. Cause you can't, you can't keep a crew. You need somewhat a parody to keep these crews going. You're gonna have to bring 'em up through the ranks to have masters with these retire. At this rate, we're not gonna have anyone to run the boat cause not running any boats parity between the two so that you can keep these crews working so they don't go away and don't come back. Even the stewards, keep it working, have parody, not a giant suite to a dwindling fleet. So yes, consistency, I think six or seven
Well, I think again where you, it just started shrinking on its own from 11. It just started shrinking back. And when we ran 11, the traffic was all just spread across the board, nothing wrong. So I think again with the Columbia route that Wednesday Bellingham was teaching successful, the second Bellingham boat, the kind cut on the turn and we didn't get to do that a whole lot, but it was, it's a great idea. I think when he kind of did and then everything kinda went to hell, but, and then, and a boat. So yeah, at that level, and then, you know, a smaller boat, Berlin Lynn canal, cause the, is there, I mean, I hate to tell em that the percent of the universe, but you know, it, it, it, the, a vote up there in the summer and then through the roof, at one point in prince William sound match and Aurora too much, it was too much.
She, you need one vote up there that just make the turn and put them all up. Right. That was overkill. They were run the kennecot down here Ru and did a cross golf. That was an epic failure because all the money that was going. So the direct route, the express route capital valley like college, but then also not going out chain custody two times a month that because we want go to cover the chain. So we come down to Juno, do the turn and the hookup. I, I still don't think sure though, that we need two chain in month at this point with Condit better than, you know, you got, you know, so that enabled that turn. So I would say that level 1, 2, 3, 3 main liners of kennecot for two ACF down here in summer dropping the one and winter to cover the villages. And when canal, cause you don't need a dedicated vote in winter and then Aurora or whatever, ACF up in prince Williamstown and then we'd cover for their overhaul bike and the TRV has to happen.
Next year. And in comparison to the Lason I think she's a one remote. She's got a lot more of a better shape. Better general. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So what I'm hearing then is that, I mean, it's really for kids to main that continue Columbia and replaced and then in the future, maybe a third half, but we've got Aurora, I guess that's breathing room. Right?
Needs bigger. I, I, if she did get another kennecot I'd I highly recommend way bigger, bigger, somehow bigger car. Cause it car small, but LinkedIn and the kennecot creates all kinds of problems with, I say you just need a new kennecot that's bigger car wider. Yeah. Wider. Not longer. So though on the car immediately, I mean, it opens,
You know? Yeah. You just, I don't know how you design it, but again, the card is real limiting on that, that quickly. And the elevator operations take a couple hundred feet off of it too. And roll on, roll off. So I would say that would be what my wish list would be. Yeah.
Let's bring that up just really briefly. We have to it doesn't you anything sorry, but the question being, how, how, how does the cascade point criminal sit within plan have good quarter on that's just my opinion. You still can only get one trip and one canal on a 12 hour day. If you had crew quarter, you could be more, but you still have, you know, your crews would have to drive 30 miles or if you're on bay to get out there, you walk on traffic, you'd have to hire a magical bus somewhere to get you walk on traffic of which there is a lot to get on another shift. People don't want get off a main line or a drive house. Get on another shift. You're not getting there's no more frequency of port call seasonal at well, it seems isn't the cascade point thing. Just really being proposed. If, if there are no proof orders on the second. Yeah, I suppose we still, again park that boat in the winter cuz you don't can't run anywhere. It's the mine dedicated cascade. Well of course it's not necessary early effective. I mean, I think the idea was if you could get additional turns and provide them more service, that would be fine. But you don't, it, it just seems like a big inconvenience to get your crews out there and your passengers out there, you walk on people out there and, and, and a night group out there, you know,
Well, yeah, there's no interest. You'd still have to go back, be to pump off and take fuel and water. So that would be at least a day a week where you're gonna have to go to bay anyway and take it outta service essentially. I mean yeah. Bring people down once a week, I guess
Be better off to, to the, the road from sit this side to jam and or PE in a road Pelican out. I mean a really big floating dock mean right between Huna and Tenke maybe. Yeah. Huna and Ken would be, would be a lot more service for them service for them. For sure. More usable, real short.
Yeah, let's take five or 10 minutes and grab lunch. Terry can help with that part. And then we have two speakers here for the working lunch. We have John Binkley and Dave Larson who up from Seattle that talk about CRV so we can grab food and stretch and then come back down.
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See how many people are called in. Thank you. Y'all have reviewed the agenda. I'm unaware of any, I don't that to be added or removed, except for one for lunch today, we have offered from John Binkley to come and speak to the group and just give a, a brief overview of what they plan to do with the Malaspina, And so he will be here at new day and have him working with his, the schedule with the conversation that we're already having with the design to the lens, but we should be able to. So that would be the only addition. And Katherine, did you have anything to be added or removed or We have a motion to approve the agenda approval of the agenda.
And seconded and minutes of the last meeting Were sent electronically to, I hope y'all had a chance to, to look them over. I read through them and I, I did not say anything that clarification, but members, they could Let us know what those are now. And if last would make a motion to approve Move approval of the minutes. Second, that would've been that April. Yep. Okay. Without objection, we'll consider the approval for the meeting minutes. All right. So our first stuff online this morning is a vision for the system. And this was a, a good idea came from co-chair as to get to hear from captain now, commissioner Ryan Anderson to give a, you know, a position of, of what safety for the currently and in the future. So we'll start off there and then invite captain Anderson.
How do you deal with that? And so we've been, we've been looking at that at our, at our leadership team at D O T. And what we, we started to come up with is where as the bigger picture D O T we've wanna focus across all of our decisions. And I wanted to run through that with all of you today, just gimme that sense of what, what our, what our folks from all over D O T all over the state are, are telling us we have that the deal. So the first thing I would just run through, so D O T's mission, keep Alaska moving. And a lot of, you know, folks, what does that mean? And, and for, for me anyways, and I think for a lot of folks at D O T that keep Alaska moving slogan is really our commitment to serve people in the communities in Alaska, you know, keeping the economies, moving, keeping all of us rolling in the right direction.
I think what, you know, I I've been in this role now for eight months and what I've heard from the correspondence and the communities that I've interacted with is reliability seems to be the number one piece right now that, that we need to have reliable barrier services. I think everybody agrees on that and that the biggest, the threat to the mission of keeping Alaska moving are all these disruptions that we're having. And so when we start talking about vision and whatnot, I, I think people, a lot of times want to go into this long term vision, but just to be honest with all of you, I mean, I, I mean, sometimes captain be's the one day by day, we're just, we're doing this thing, you know, taking a lot of it as it comes, but we're trying to learn from that. And then, you know, think, add, so, you know, thinking out 20 years right now that that's, I mean, I would love the sport, you know, for that, those types of thoughts, but for us at D OT, I think, you know, with where we're resourced and everything, we're just, we're keeping it, we're keeping Alaska moving, but it's not thinking out quite that far right now.
That's, that's, that's our challenge. What, what we came up with, and this was a result of our entire leadership team, ATT represented all the divisions was really what is it? That is our biggest challenge right now. And, and really, and I think, you know, having a position like Catherine's kind of a Testament to this, but we're in this mode of constant change. And so what, what everyone, you know, when we went through and talked about what, where all these challenges are, cause all over the state, we have workforce challenges. You know, we have a lot supply costs, all these things, but it's just, everything keeps changing on us. So what is it that we want to try to do? And the word resiliency keeps coming up because that's, you know, how you can adapt and how you can bounce back from changes that come at you.
And so what we started talking about as well, what does it take to be resilient and not just infrastructure, but as an organization and the, the types of things that came up were, and number one, and, and this was kind of a cool graphic that our going through with, but workforce, we have a lot of challenges in workforce. I know, I know MHS and talk, talk, talk, but it's also M Ando, you know, equipment operators, it's mechanics, we're starting to see it on administrative staff. And I mean, yeah, I mean, John, you you've actually done some pretty cool things to try to accommodate that, but across the board. And, and so what can we do on workforce, maybe Rob, deputy commissioner carpenter. He actually has instituted some, some team to focus right on that. Do you want to speak for a minute, Rob, on, on that one? Yeah,
Sure. Well, through guidance from a fearless leader here, we created some for Marine highway itself, and Catherine's been instrumental in that, in that we've, you know, basically focusing on three big unions plus shoreside, and then splitting up IBU in two component skill and unskilled, we're actually meeting with the leadership of the heads that recruit for these, these sections, plus the union lead and the, and a member of the union. And we put these again, these action teams together to sit down in the same room and just identify the problem that we all agree is the problem, which is, you know, often challeng challenging, just do we all agree? This is the problem. This is how many people we need and when we need 'em and then to actually just start, Hey, let's, what's some low hanging fruit we can do to be successful. And surprisingly positive people are engaged and they're, you know, let get through some easy wins for us.
The other part I don't, I mean, I wish we could attract more last. It's gonna, you know, how do we get there? And that, that's another one that seems to be pretty tough. I know nationwide, right? Washington various have a big problem. We talk, talk to those guys, figure that out too. Another step on workforce we're, we're starting to integrate more with our statewide D O T recruitment effort. So it's not just, you know, expanded from AMHS division to, Hey let's and this is across DT. All the divisions, let's start reaching out to everybody on a broader scale on these things to see if we can attract more people. So we're, we're starting to work through that. Our hiring processes, we got problems, you know, and that's, that's actually written up to the cabinet level in terms of just bureaucratic processes to get people hire. And so that that's being worked speed up the hiring approval and the ways to get the postings out. So hopefully we'll get something going on soon there. And then we are pushing on still those letters of agreement to retain people know, we have the bonus that does that approve officially
It's just for the unlicensed right now really only have unlicensed problem with, with what we call skilled unlicensed, the, the, the abs, the junior engineers and the, and the Oilers. We feel we have access the op hired seven or eight new maids. We've got a list of 34 that captain Al is sitting on. And we met with NEBA just this past with be deputy commission on myself. And I, and we've agreed to also have access to not just the Seattle iron hall, but Portland, LA, and, you know, to pay the travel on up. We've never, never done that in the past, but willing to pay that kind of travel for the hiring hall to, you know, send me engineers out of the hall. And we also agreed that it's okay for me to use the head owners to also attempt to hire engineers. We were unsure of contractually, but maybe as that's. Okay. So, so we're gonna do that.
Well, we work with AEC. We have MOAs with AEC. We do training with AEC. So yeah, there's potential more unlicensed, but no, there's, we, we work closely with AEC too, and, and departmental labors work. I mean, as far as our whole hiring program, which is pretty robust, we're working really closely with Dool department of labor. They got different contact with AEC and, you know, we're kind of depending upon them to try to grab from AEC, if possible, they've got an entire program with within itself, just for the Marine highway that we have developed and their own advertising, their own contacts, all this sort of thing.
No. No, but as say, what we're doing now is somebody commission has just talked about we're putting recruitment teams together, but to do this with, with, with the unions, we need LOAs. That's another LOA that we we're working on. So we can define how we pay for travel and what are, what are the ground rules I'm sending our, our Operations manager and our port steward it to a very large job fair in Bellingham in two
No, we're, we're finding these job fairs. And, and then we're attending our marketing manager, Danielle, when, when she she's going to four or five travel shows this year, she's, she's in Dallas right now, she'll be back in a few days, she's been around forever, very capable of talking about the Marine highway. And she takes all the collateral material with her. These are big shows with thousands of people passing through, and there has been interest as far as, you know, We rent a booth, just like any other trade show. And we've got all our posters and collateral and handout material applications. And she's actually, we had interest at all the shows she's been to quite a bit. So We're, we're even utilizing our marketing people to try to help with the higher
Well, we do a lot of training with them, the tremendous amount of training, but this, these, these hiring groups that we've got, we're also looking potentially now at job shadowing, how can we get new recruits aboard that maybe don't have that, that are in that four month window where, where they don't have their documents yet to get 'em a board, you know, on the, Lalia going back and forth. How's, 'em on the Columbia while it's here, ships in the shipyard, getting 'em out on the ship, see if we can just, you know, get them out there with, with a TWI. Do they really need an MMD? I don't know while they're waiting, but as long as they got the TWI, get 'em out on the ship pay, 'em let 'em job try to let 'em really see what goes on while they're waiting to get their dock. So we'll look at that too. And that's all part of this recruitment team that deputy commissioner has put together. Multiple teams, actually
I think working with the school district counselors to deploy this information on recruitment, once you have it together with, you know, be a little more cost effective and maybe zooming in some to meet with the students. And then also a lot of, most of the Alaska native corporations have scholarship programs. And I think sharing information with, with the ANCs would be really helpful to put out to their students. Yeah.
It's a challenge. These groups we've put together have come up with some quick wins and thoughts, and we gotta try to start falling through on this stuff. You know, because I think over the last 10 years, we've had a net loss of just over 300 jobs, a net loss. When you look at all the ones we've hired, all the ones we've lost 10 years, that's what we said. And we gotta turn that around.
And, and so the threshold there from the D O T side is, you know, in Alaska is great out of state. We're not there, you know, so if we have these adminis or whatever these jobs are, and we can make them work within state, that's, that's great, but we're not hiring people for all 48 to those jobs.
I mean, it's a little more work because we do set up protocol to evaluate and be sure that they're doing what they need doing as a, to someone that you're supervising in the office day in a day out. That's, that's a no brainer, but it's a little more work for the supervisor, but it's helping us find those skilled office positions that believe it or not, we've lost quite a few of them recently. And yeah.
Since he's come on. And I think it's a big part of Marine highway and where, you know, it's, it's a DOT's mass and we have three giant regions. We have all these divisions and we have a Marine highway and it's part of that. And, and the change in culture that he's trying to implement and, you know, bridging a lot of gap. We have so many divides in our, I mean, between regions, they're like night and day, a lot of times, and same thing, you know, green highways are shoreside vessel site. It's it is to bridge that and realize we're all I don't you expand on that. You've got some
I mean, I, yeah, I don't talk about it as much cause I want people to see it, but you know, you want action, right? I don't wanna be the guy to talk all the time, but the, but working. So what I got into this role, the thing need to start realizing, oh my gosh, you know, the OT, we have the international airport system, we have 2 37 early airport. We have Marine highway system. We have all the highways and the roads. I mean, the majority of 'em, you know, we have all of our, our communities. And the, the thing that you realize is D OT has a lot of resources. And so when we get in these situations where I have one region or an area where let's say Homer airport, all of a sudden, it's down to one, one employee at the airport, and they're talking about having to reduce service at the airport.
We got people that work at the airports all over the state because one region doesn't have the resources doesn't mean another. So we need to be able to start, you know, I know the, the boundaries when it comes to, there's always this, you know, boundary thing, but they need to be great out and everybody needs to be working across to figure these move out. And, and so that, that's, what's always, if there's this there's been a very, oh, how does Andy mills describe it? He describes it as, you know, the regional directors or the division directors are like land Barrons. And then, you know, you're the king and trying to, but it shouldn't get out. We all should be working together, figure this stuff out. So that's, and, and then now in this role, you go to these different areas and you see these successes, people are having, okay, grab those successes, start spreading them around.
I know, I know, but look at it, Shirley. And I'm saying, why not? Shirley is writing a letter to legislatures. We're talking about making a wreck recommendation to legislature for money for the Marine highway system. Okay. We need to do that. So they have some idea of the way the board is making what route we're going. We've decided we need to write a letter to, to give them some kind of information of where we're going. But that's part of the problem I see is, is, is we don't, I don't know if we have all the, the picture to do that just yet.
And, and if I can, I, I do understand what you're saying to the, oh my God, there are so many pieces. Yeah. There are so many pieces and some of them, and they're at varying stages of, you know, some are just a very infancy, you know, and, and others are, you know, preteens and like that to put it in a not ball way. But then I, I do recall as well, some, sometimes some of the ideas that were coming down, either through AMHS or passed down from the UT or administration theh, they really never knew if they were actually gonna come to fruition or not, if they were gonna work or work. And then the idea was, well, we tell people that we're gonna try and do this one and get those folks. Can't, that's almost worse than us, you know, having no beforehand. And, and just, just to say that is that we are definitely gonna have to make some decision point and we're gonna have to start out broad term, large element that strategies to get there, realize that a lot of this stuff is gonna come along behind because of that. And, and it does help to just get that information that I think that's a great piece. And I, we hear more about that tomorrow with their retention and improvement and the proof, you know, letting them know that, trying to do something to like when medicine connect them back to their life. I think that's the key.
I, I would, I would speak to how I think we should get that because I don't think we have the answer. So I'm a big advocate for scenario based plan. And so, you know, you gotta, and, and this is where a modernization effort would help us out because I mean, you should, in these days, you should be able to have all this information on the ship, to the route and the infrastructure and, and what is capable of supporting that. We should be able to plug in, you know, some objectives and have that shift run on computer simulation, and you should have a, these are all the pieces that you wanted to know about, about what that would look like. And so you can do a hundred of 'em and then eventually, you know, you would start seeing the patterns and some things of, Hey, that actually that one is for some reason, because there's so many facets for that. I, yeah. There's so many people.
And we're actually gonna see that when, what Carrie comes, that's your part where Kevin car with the, with the route of what vessels are doing now, just Catalina, where she can go without good work Lina, where she can go with proof orders, Matt, where what she can do if she doesn't get, that
Surely one time that, you know, like, no we've had plenty of studies with the community, what they want, what I know from being on the shifts right now, but public is very unhappy. So sitting here on the board and look at this, I'm going, how can I get the public trust back? How can we do things to get them to want to ride the system again and not be complaining about the system all the time. So to me, and I'm not trying of disrespect you there, but I just, I find it's. So that, that there isn't an answer for that question. I mean, even if you told me, oh yeah, well we want 15 shifts. Figure out how we're gonna pay for it. At least you got, you got an idea about what the community needs and, and, and does. So like, you know, how many snow clouds you need to service a region and that, you know, dump truck gets replaced at a certain age and things like that, or get traded in its outta
Exactly. Yeah. You know the cause I'm okay. So I I'm on a learning curve over eight months, but on the highway side, the way, the way it works is we have a priority system. And so certain routes are priority once. Cause they have most volumes where they have some nature to 'em accessing hospital schools, those kind of things. They have, I live on a party for row.
It takes takes three days before my row and stuff that's and so when the budget, the budgets are gonna always go like this, I just that's how it's been in the past. Yeah. That's how it's gonna be a teacher would, I would hope that we could, you know, design a system that could do the same thing and, and that would so that it, it, it like, I think what you're asking for people systematic, we can describe exactly why we're doing what, because we have this methodology that we put together that that was at least in my head. That's how you know, but I think there's still a fair amount of work that has to be done before we get there. I, I agree with you on the report, that was being a report from UAS last night, a and that was all about model. And after the British Columbia Carrie system, I think there's all sorts of ideas out there that we want to capture. And you, but yeah, I, I'm not ready to say you how much s**t.
Well, I mean, it sounds like we're, we're almost in a position that that's no win, cause we have to figure out what the communities want, what we need, the budgetary, what ships are needs. So we're basically starting scratch. I, I don't pulling that information together and having
Oh, I was just gonna say, I, I guess to your point about different classifications or, or types within different modalities, the way that I've always seen the ferry system is that there are economic routes and there are subsidized routes. And that I think BC fairies essentially went to that model, which is that the provincial government pays for the Marine highway corporation to provide essential service to communities that have an economic route, or that's probably not the correct terminology, but there needs to be essential, a certain level of essential service. And the economic routes essentially subsidize the service.
If you look at overall, I guess vision on the D O T side is really that focus on resiliency that has change has hit us and they're gonna continue to keep coming at us. And probably next year, if there was this meeting, I bet we'll have a whole new topic set of topics of challenges that we're facing very likely, but that we have that organization that can adapt to that really comes back to that vision of team structures that we can, we're working as a team to tackle these things. We're not sitting in silos trying to do are not that's that there will be. I mean, one thing we're doing more now, too, that you're gonna see more of this idea of partnerships, you know, Southeast conference. We've got a, a nice MOU right now with Southeast conference on electric, Carrie, and we're actually funding with some research funds to, to get that thing rolling.
But looking for those we're, we're gonna start the, the fentanyl problem right now in Alaska is, has the governor's attention. And we're gonna be starting to take some measure, even with Marine highways system, to partner with law enforcement agencies and others, to start getting more of a presence, our ships that, you know, people see that people are paying attention, those kind of things. So you're gonna see some more on that front. Yeah. But just that, that idea that if we can, you know, and then if we start talking about these training programs and whatnot and these partnerships, and those are good things for us, so we're gonna stay focused on that as well. Rob, do you wanna speak to the vision statement?
Yes. Thank you. Yeah, it was actually Alan's point of vision. Cause our mission, the mission statement for Marine highway is like, I don't know how many years old, a hundred or something, and it's like 18 pages long and ineffective basically. And if we, I would be totally supportive of, of us as a group addressing that and making it, you know, more focused and getting that vision to what we're trying to do and all ties back to that essential
And it might be really good time for it now. I mean, looking towards, you know, a, a modernization plan for this week, so things won't change. Some people have very strong feeling about language in a vision statement and it can become very personal very quickly, but I think to start looking at it, if it really, and to the point,
I mean, thank all of you. This is, these are really great for me be able to hear from all of you and great questions and, and your thoughts today and yeah, we can challenge super. Yeah. There's anything else I can do for all of you? No one, one thing just to kind of, I guess the end, I do want this board to have that feeling of independence. It shouldn't be, and I know Mr. Officer, the statement about, you know, we'll do with, but I mean, we wanna hear from you. I, I want it would be great and we're all a team bring your ideas forward and let's figure 'em out. I don't want T just about no, that's not gonna work. Ah, no, that's not how, that's not the way my thinking goes. So if there's ideas and we wanna work together on em, if, if there's things you need for support, you're not getting, we can hire people. And so, and I think you're gonna find that right now because we're pretty, we're pretty stressed on resources. So, but if there's things you're frustrated about, cause you're not getting, let us know, we can get that worked out there's resource. It's back to one of the gears on there is resources and that's because we recognize that we're pretty tight on resources, but there's still resources out there. So
So there's no G GF. And we think that's a really big mistake, cause it's not gonna get us where it's not gonna get a and HS where it needs to be. And this is always gonna be a someone service there's always going to be U GF. So that's, that's kind of, you know, we, and I, I know you can't speak for, for administration for your general, but you know, you need to know that that is something we feel very strongly about that we are going to suggest and not let the generational funding for this system to fix these problems that we have coming for decades. Go, go, just go. And water is operating for
Leadership. If I could just comment one quick one on, on the scenario based planning. When, when you look at what you're gonna ask for, if you could give us timelines on when you expect it, because we do have a lot of challenges on, you know, the resources side of the MHS. And so just the expectation in terms of we need this information in a month or, or what that is that may affect us, whether we can deliver or not. And, and I'll just be honest with you guys. I have kind of a bar up here on what I'm expecting to see out of scenario, because I, I, I feel like because I don't have a lot of money, I have experience. I'm a good if I can't understand it, I know a lot of those people want, and so I'm gonna, I'm gonna be expecting a certain amount out of that.
So we can't deliver, we do really need to think. Maybe there's like says maybe this group could write an R or something like that, but regarding the, the AMHS yeah. The funds, the, the rural ferry program, we have a lot of different programs coming at us, right? There's, there's increase in the rural, the rural very funds. We have a Subaru vari program. We have the electric very funds and yeah, the, the recommendations outta this group is important on, on how you feel like we should be investing those funds. Cause there are a lot of opinions out there on how to do it. Our biggest struggle right now is we don't know what exactly is eligible yet. And so the, the details and the program haven't even come out. So I think once those come out, this would be a great one for this group to sit down and really look at it and say, Hey, let's, let's do for those funds. Cause we just we're, we're not sure if, I mean, to be honest, you in capital is eligible that it hasn't been litigated yet. This assumption that operating done today could be used for operating, but it hasn't been stated yet. So that's the, that's the rub on that one. And that's why I don't think we've been real out there with it about how we want set those funds yet. Wait,
Well, it's FTA and we don't D O T hasn't done. I mean, we do FTA with boxes and some things it's a minor amount of work, so we're developing that FTA relationship now. And so, I mean, we've met with Linda there that kind of running that this region program, but even she hasn't had a lot of information for us, so nobody's really willing to stay right now. We're working on a letter. I mean, yeah, that's, there's a lot on
Green highways had very little activities of FTA over the years. Yeah. FWA, well, there's grants out narrow grant out there got a very discretionary money out there. That's further money. You got all this other federal money that commission, I just talked about it. There's a lot of different pots of money out there and we gotta deal with that.
Yeah. But I I'll be honest with all of you. I like the idea of investing in capital because I know whenever we take Marine highway ferry money out of the highway system, there's a lot of half. So if investing capital from a rural very fund, I think there's gonna be some support for that, for what you guys work on
Yeah. Well, the modernize, I mean, so we have a lot more tools to communicate. Now. I think some of these things like with this public input.com, that ability to, I, I guess if the board wants better access to the commissioner, that would be a question. If there's something I can do to, you know, I, what, well, I've been trying to stay a step back because I know the way everything's been written up, it's really deputy commissioner on the board and then your recommendations go straight to legislature on the governor. And so, you know, the commissioner has a role here, but trying to, I, I don't wanna influence, I want the board to provide recommendations. I want it to, and, you know, trying to, so that that's been kind of the role, but if there is more respons, please let me know and we can make that work. But in terms of modernization and the board, I think there's so many areas modernized in. And if there's a priority list, that's, those are always helpful too. If there are things where the board feels like we need to be putting attention now versus later, those kind of thing we wonder about those.
Yeah. But point being dots, you know, when, when bill was being drafted and pushed, it was our voice as the agency, we wanted to be on the board to be part of the process, you know, not to be outside watching, but to be, you know, do, and the commissioner and the commissioner's office is on the board. So that's kind of an idea. And, you know, he and I are conversing all the time as a team throughout all agency issues. And, you know, I'm basically representing D OT. So, and the commissioner's voice,
Yeah. I just wanted to, I, I understand that federal guidance on some of the, I, I money is, is going to be probably law long time coming. But I, I do. I appreciate what I just wanted to say. I appreciate what you were just saying in, in terms of prioritization and, and some recommendations about that. I do think that, you know, modernization has to be more than just, we, it has to be shoreside services. It has to be approaches to, you know, business practices and processes have to be modernized as well in order to be compatible and to truly be a system that works.
Yeah, we we've had some cursory conversations, but like, to be able to see crew members being able to, I, I don't know what your process is for assignments, but I know airline crews that bid for their, their work schedules off their phone. It's a very dynamic process, same thing with maintenance that all of those things, anything need to be modernized
So we'll go ahead and come back to order that are on the phone. When you have captain Tony Karvelas sitting up with captain Falvey and they're going to go over operations long term planning, several elements of that, and provide kind of verbal overview to the board of some information requested earlier, just on at point, but the bulk of this is operational. So that's about, thank
You. Well, I, I appreciate the invitation to come here to speak today. Just wanted to talk a little bit about myself. I'm not really used to that, so I'll give it a shot. You know, I come from humble beginnings and I've worked most of my life. Just like most of you all have, And you know, my beginnings, I started because I think it's relevant with my current job when I was young. I so were Greek and I worked in a restaurant. That's how I was brought up, made a movie about that. A lot of it's true.
And, and that's what I did. And you know, this sounds like a joke, but I started in the dish room and then I got promoted to Boston fan. So, and that was an actual promotion in the, my fathers restaurant. I got to get out of the sweating dish room and, and, and watch the, you know, the pot and pan. I got the boil lobsters and, and they oysters too, and do things. And then I got promoted again to a cook and I started cooking restaurant. And so here I am today operations manager, the Alaska Marine highway system in charge of the passenger services division on the ship. The port do works for me. And so I do have a little bit of experience with commercial food, food, service operations. So that's relevant patient in Adam chair. I, you want me to talk about other things, but I just gotta, I just gotta get this out. So that's where I come from. If you go to the next slide, you can see my, my professional experience. You know, I started, I started working on, on ships and HC, and then when I got married, I moved to, to tugboats. They became operator of tugboat, had a better schedule, a lot like the schedule we have here at the greenhouse work, you know, a few weeks on, get a few weeks off
Back then they didn't have a special endorsement. You could just walk off a chef, start working on a TBO. Now they have a special, special thing where you've gotta sign off on all these, these skill sets. So my first watch was going up the Hudson river and the captain turned to me, had to be a chart and then a flashlight, good luck. Don't call me. Don't, don't run, don't run the TBO ground. And I was working on 150 foot tugboat pulling a football field. I, me flyer and crane. Was that captain hazing? No, no, no. He didn't have me a beer too. So yeah, no, it's funny. So I, you know, I have some different experience, you know, you know, my, my youth, which I don't consider rep you know, professional experience, but I, I have experience, you know, with food service operations, working on large ships, working on tug boats, salvage companies, my own small business for a short period of time had about 20 employees did delivery logistics in Southeast Massachusetts might be able to tell for my, and then, you know, I got a college degree and,
So my objections, my objectives, move it forward. My objections, moving forward, my objectives moving forward, you know, I want to continue to comply with the regulation. That's very important. That's probably the most important thing that I, that I do, and that my staff does, you know, comply with the regulation and make sure that we're safe, gotta hire. I know that there's been talked about that hire and fill those vacancies and, and increase the, the quality of life issues for ships. So we'll continue to do that. I know that's been talked about strive to do that open communication.
We want to do that as well. I used to have a newsletter when I had more staff. I had time to put together a newsletter with my staff. Yeah. Do you remember the newsletters? Yeah, so we, we tried to communicate to those, bring up the issues that, you know, are kind of in the gray areas between the lines and, and it wasn't just me. I, I used my whole staff to help me write that newsletter and communicate the complete I, so I'd like to bring that back. At some point, when I get more staff positions filled in my department, foster communication, we used to have people out on the ships, write some of the articles too. So those are the good days. And so I hope to bring those back and then the customer service, you know, so I bring up the restaurant, I, I learned customer service from my thought, and I try to teach my staff.
They have customer service when they're talking to the customers, but also to our employees, you know, the people on the shift, those are our customers too. And so customer service experience is important. It's one of the things that we can offer to the public. That's, it's low hanging fruit, right? It's, you know, treating people nice when they come afford the ship. I think for most part, but that customer service experience, I mean, you need a good product and you, you need to have, you know, a good service, but that customer service is what really makes a difference for a lot of people. And when people walk aboard our ships, I want 'em to be our own individual appetizers and go out and say, you know, Hey, you know, the worlds brewing highway, I bill nice, you know, at a good trip. That's what, that's what my objective are just within the operations department. I think some of it might be, you know, might go out beyond my department. It might be good ideas for other departments, but yeah.
You know, another thing I do, you know, not to get off. Another thing I do is I mentor my staff. The state has programs with, you know, mentoring. And, but I've always tried to do that without having to have a program to tell me to do it, you know, so try to get my, so if I got, I told I gas, if I, I hit my bus tomorrow, there somebody that can step up and take my job, you know? So that's good. I think that's important, but yeah, mentoring and, you know, working for the state, trying to work and think outside the box, but you gotta think within the lines right. Of, of the state service, you know, you can't do certain things within the state. So you gotta think outside the box, but within the lines and trying to, trying to get people to think that way is a, is a challenge and open to have our success at it.
I think, you know, for the most part, my experience with, you know, setting up contracts and going through the procurement process with like, and those folks, they're, they're pretty good. You know, I haven't run into any big issues, you know, try to keep the ju warehouse full for supplies.
You know, Paul, one thing that are looking at is the carrying on the federal side, there there's a difference. Okay. And we are potentially looking at a position to assist us procuring on the federal side. And maybe that's more, what you, your driving at. We are looking at that someone being here in Kegan, working for Jeff Jenkins, chief contracts officer in Juno, who I work very closely with because I'm, I'm the contract officer for the Marine highway. That that's something that deputy commission governor I look at, if you gotta point out, you gotta find a free position to, to, to create the position. And we're, we're looking pretty hard at that where that person would be with engineering, doing the federal procuring, which is a little different than what, like Tony's talking about here. Tony's about the everyday procurement for supplies and everything we need and know operational contracts and stuff like that. That's what the Juno group does. Hurdle procurement, that's Jeff Jenkins and the ju contracts officer. So we're, we're looking very closely get deposition hearing
A, yeah, just to Tony, your point about thinking outside, but within the guidelines, I know that there are other enterprise corporations that have gained exceptions to state hiring and procurement practices. And I'm just wondering if you may not be familiar with them, but, but essentially if they operate under their own set of procurement in HR practices, and I'm just wondering if that would be something that would be helpful to the Marine highway, if, if you're bumping up against the guidelines and they're not allowing you to be as flexible or, or it, it, it seems to me having operated under those same kinds of guidelines that it does, it's, it takes a very long time in comparison to, In the private sector of, you know, particularly hiring, or I know there's other federal processes and other things with hiring, but are, are there either particular guidelines or maybe some additional freedoms that would help you guys move more faster, be more nimble?
Oh yeah. I think, you know, yeah. Free, you know, coming a little more freer from the, some of the processes, you know, with, with hiring, I mean, you know, the human resource department, I mean, they're here, you know, I feel sorry for it. They're, they're probably some of the folks that take the most stuff, you know, cause they have to, you know, tell you that you can't do stuff or, you know, Hey, you gotta do this first, but they're here to, you know, to protect the employer from making a mistake. And, you know, with, you know, speaking of hiring, you know, the, the passenger services manager who works for me, he's been able to use some of the online hiring resources because our employees, our ship employees are exempt. So they, they can hire a little bit outside the box with that. That makes it a little bit easier. And he, but he needs to follow, you know, the guidelines still, but he is able to do it a little more efficiently through software instead of going on workplace Alaska and hiring everybody through that. That's not, you know, that's, that's, that's not the easiest thing, right? Yeah. I mean, I, you know, can things always be better short? I remember having the board of stuff for my business. I just call somebody, give a credit card number here. Yeah. Not proven that I think could be a positive, proven price.
I, I, I believe years ago, one of the administrations, I don't know, course the McKowski administration did, did bring in a private contractor for procurement and that came and went with administrations to do exactly what you're talking about. Now. That was a long time ago. Oh 4 0 5 was way back.
Every, yeah, we have quite a few term contractors. We pay a lot to not typically to manage sleep condition survey and what condition the boats are in. Yeah. So I, I would ask to that perspective, especially with operations and you guys is Marine engine earing not being proactive is not sharing enough that cuz Ken had three days notice for cancellation. I think they're, I, I think the bigger problem is they're very short staffed and, and they're, they, they, they become overwhelmed. I, I honestly believe that when you look at who they should have on staff and who they don't, it's almost like it's the situation of being overwhelmed and get you on the ball. So where, where where's that in the hiring process to, yeah. Trying that to help guys, your end hire port engineers, the head hunters are outlook too. They found one, they found one, two weeks ago. And for some reason they did an interview with his fellow and he thought he could work two weeks on two weeks off. He got confused at two, what the deal was. So we we've recently within the last days made a decision. We would've told that fellow and maybe we get a chance to call them back. Hey, you can work home. And when we need you here in the winter, we'll, we'll bring you, they pay the Preem and what, but I really think that's they, they got overwhelmed and we, we got behind,
This is something we can talk about with our engineering long term planning with Jerry About that. Yeah. I just had a comment on communication. That's was brought up about vision and, well, this is a piece I think instead of, you know, nowadays with the technology, there's a lot of great apps for doing like email or mobile blasts instead of taking a lot of time on designing a, a newsletter and getting it out, you might look at some of those and a lot of people are more open to up the text message. They receive what information
That's a great suggestion. Cause I, you know, I could pride in that, in that newsletter cause I put it, the marketing department gave the template and so you should have seen the first one is all best, but they gave you to clean it up and gave me a template to, and then we would work together with my stuff to put it together, but you're right. You know, it's probably more efficient to do it. Do other ways quicker and more access.
Can I add on to that? You also might think about doing video because I mean, I can see that being very effective in creating, you know, again, going to building and enhancing culture and, and creating connection between shoreside and, and, and Beth operations. And it's, it's relatively easy to do. And particularly with younger generation people, it's going to be to, it catches their attention.
A hiring video, but a video and we're gonna bring in our, you know, we've got an RFP out there right now to bring in a professional group to develop a video that we, that we can use believe news in general, just in the hiring part of it. Now that's not to say that we can't do something different
Or, well, I'm just thinking, I'm just thinking newsletter, not so much a static thing. I I'm thinking even just a monthly video newsletter, even if it's just the lead in that, Hey, this is, you know, captain Fay and Tony, and we're here to talk to you about this and, and we want you to take care of our customers and our vessels who we're gonna take care.
Well, we talked about that too. And, and so I, that doesn't have to be a barrier. And, and if it's just something that you do at a hotspot on a vessel for, to start with everybody gets together and they hear the same message and you're repeating over and over again, the key points of culture,
What direct, well, just more of a comment. A lot of the focus is on south and I understand that's where the money's made, but also the villages are benefiting, which is great from those services and, and they get the ships in there, but I kind of feel like Southwest Alaska stepchild over here. And we also need to think about essential services for those communities. No one, you were talking about a time when there was essential services that was provided. We built our dock in 2012 and that could port Harbor. Yes. Okay. And you know, our stores, we able to bring in all their supplies in and out of there. It wasn't, you know, we don't expect, you know, a lot of service, you know, once a month of the summertime, this is back to reliability and credibility need the PRV because your shift, your shift is not reliable. Yeah. Well, and people, you know, we don't, and with can't tap, I mean, everybody gets a skinny little bit of something and then if it goes to hell in the Gulf, everybody gets a little skinnier bit of something. And can I ask you, I'm sorry.
I, yeah. How would it look, schedule wise and route wise, if the TuiNa new Testament, when she comes on, she still just makes the chain rough once a month, but does a little bit more around Kodiak twice a month. Yeah. Actually we'd go back to that schedule, which we haven't with the COVID interrupted. So s**t not having the T mean. It's hard for me to remember what we were actually doing, but with one chain a month, yes, there would be more service available for Homer Kodiak, Fort lion, U Zike. I, I have have an old Harbor needs to get in on the chain. Right. Or, or some other type of service that I'd help take a look at when we have a boat that's actually on the run and reliable cause that's me as part of essential service because from out no Absolut transportation, Northline large. Absolutely. And, and is it twice a month? Once a month? I don't know. Again, we could engage with that. It seems like if we could just period.
You know, I've heard recently from, we'll see the captain of the Aurora who I have a lot of respect for that's that's a great crew. One crew boat. Yeah. It's a one crew boat and they take really good care of it. We've kind of gotten around the engine vibration problem there. We had a VI problem with that. We've gotten around that they feel that boat has a minimum of eight years. All I,
And do that. That's hard to, and I, and I really hope that that's where we're going with everything we're talking about the next day and a half, because, because it all ties in together. Once we start looking ahead of the modernization plan and the, you know, reporters on the CA very nimble, flexible vessels that can do multiple things, we get, whether the really old seal, the water new guys in now, you're not saying, you know, for three or month or eight months and the overall, like you used to be you're out of there on your time schedule. So, so you, that service level picks up, you know, when you look at the years of how many weeks, 300, you know, and 45 or 75 weeks of services compared to 200, say 75, you can almost always tie that to what happened with the budget and where the ships, you know, stuff, you know, cuz they were told, needed so much work. So as we really start getting all this information and talking to, you know, like captain car, captain Fadi and schedulers and you know, and, and find out how these changes that we all need to happen are gonna are gonna happen and it's, and it's gonna change. And maybe then you can provide all those waste of service and all those communities with seven vessels that to take 11. So we're just gonna have to work our way through that to better understand.
So if I can ask a question about just that vision briefly captain tell, just, just based on that, what do you see when you look forward to the system? If you see a water knife fleet with fewer vessels that can do more and stay on the water, one, keep working, do you see positive for workforce retainment, recruitment, service levels, funding levels trust with reliability? What do you
Think? Well, as we talked about, we, we've gotta, we've gotta determine what do we need fleet wise? And, and I think that's gonna be the job of this group and the operational staff. Of course, as you say, with a modern plate, they're gonna be a lot more reliable. It's it's gonna require a lot less maintenance, at least initially coming out of the gate. You know, I, I had, you know, just wrote a few things down as, you know, as far as, you know, challenging the agent ships through recruitment and retention, reliability, lack of public confidence. That's huge. And the lack of public confidence is because we are canceling, you know, we are doing something a little different when we cancel, we not only reap on we're assisting the travelers to get to where they need to be. And in most cases that's a financial thing.
And we've just done that with kennecot. We did it with the Matt Nuco a few months ago and the public seems to like that very much. It's like, we're we cancel you. We'll, we'll get you to away. You need to go and we're gonna pay for it. And we've been doing that. And, and, and so of that has worked, you know, modern plate improve morale. We have to improve morale morale. Isn't isn't good. You know, we gotta, we gotta get our staff out, writing, you know, with the crews, Sam's got his newsletter going, I gotta get my, you know, quarterly. Here's what we do in operationally. You know, we've gotta be a lot more transparent with, with, with the unions. And I, and I think we're really driving to I'm feeling a lot more closeness as far as with, with the union leadership. We gotta get it with the crews. Okay. And, and I, I think we can do that.
You know, we gotta work together as a team, you know, reliability, you know, get, get closer working, you know, with crews, full staffing, we're working very hard to try to get back to the full staffing. That's that, that dovetails back to morale, you know, and when the ships crews are on for a whole summer and they're supposed to be off every week to two weeks, that's terrible for morale. That's not what they signed up for. I used to do four and five months on shift sale and offshore, but that's what I signed up for. And you know, one of the, one of the nice things about this job is, is you get to go home, you get to be in a maritime environment, but you get to go home, you know, reducing redundancy. I mean, do we have of ships that are reducted? We've gotta look at that. Try to be more efficient capacity utilization comes into play. And, you know, I, I think we need to provide affordable, You know, is, you know, our are the tariffs too high, you know? I mean, there's been a lot of, you know, pressure legislator to, to, to create more revenue because revenue is part of our
Well, you know, and Shirley, you know, the, the ACS with cabins, if they both have got cabins, you know, you got, you got a lot more flexibility. You got a lot more redundantly, you know, running an ACF, let's say the Talina auto cascade point, you know, with, with the cabin, you have a lot more flexibility on the routes. You can run, you can get into double shuffling between sag. That's important sag, you know, in, in, in the winter, in the summertime, without the cabins, you have very limited, you know, as to a strict 12 hour day, you've got a lot of operational concerns getting crews in and out of there every day, you know, as, as you know, night crews in there at night in and up. So, so there's just a lot of things
Well, that's our thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah. It absolutely. You know, if you get into a situation on some route where you don't need the crew, it that way, well, you don't have to, but, but you've got a lot more ease of operation with, with the crew quarters, E even out of cascade point and a lot more availability of the kind of routes you're gonna run a triangular type route, you know, but it's important Pelican. We gotta get the dark fixed because we can't get into Pelican. We can get in everywhere else. The Pelican, I think it's critical that Cordova gets done pretty quickly to tilt. We've outsourced that in the past, in the past, that has worked. That would probably be the last one to try to do. Janika may be more important
Know, we know that to keep the Le around, you need an overhaul and to fill in the gaps, it's about 2.2 million a year. Do that to overhaul it and to fill in gaps 2.2, that's the number right now? You know, do you do that? Well, then you got all your gaps covered or shipyards.
You know that then surely what we do is once Carrie gets this established only work backwards with the money, we then work backwards, Matt pricing, everything out, and then you start fine tuning it with what we think we have for money and What we're gonna do. So it's like she needs to bill her schedules first. And then we work backwards with the money. Well
I think two, I think two, until you get the crew quarters on and maybe get the main line replacement vessels going, I don't think that you would necessarily free would be you'd have a spare. So ideally I think you'd keep 2 35 while you're waiting on the main liners, because three ACFS. No, no,
You're not able to, but try not to do that a lot. You're gonna hit the main ports and you have to go through, gotta go right by. Don't see you. So, and it's all linear as we were discussing with Rob on the board, it's linear. So ideally you're gonna do that. That's the plant. How far we've go very far. That was like four years. We already had, however long it was long. It was slip it away. So we go Bellingham, you get to catch a again. And I, you got change for that. You have to hit, obviously there's big one catch cancer group change Southeast. And Umang Petersburg, cuz you gotta go through the narrows to, you know, and you can only hit Sitka one way. Even them being geograph, we challenged, you could hit 'em both ways, but you'd cut up when cut off canal and on the Bellingham route, when we do run northbound Truca it's about two thirds, the traffic of hitting wind canal first, which is shocking. We don't want to take the time. The at least at least two could less traffic. And so yeah, you're just gonna hit the main and then go back and do it again.
Allows you due the shorter distance. Again, you're gonna go through wrangle Petersburg and then cake Kate likes to get to Sitka. And if they don't want to get to Sitka, they're very, very patient people and they will ride through CIGA to get to Juno and they'll go through Juna too. So the grouper vessel enables to hook up local communities all the way along the route. And we did turn to talk to, and then have of the mal as which was day boat, which was giant, which was kind of silly too. But you can also turn them for both one of its rotations in, you know, in order to add another to stop and shuttle day boat to get people up. And even if they don't have a connection, there's a lot of people who'll still fill up a boat out the funeral, which is shocking. Like where did they come from? I dunno, I don't know what they're there. So yeah, it's robust traffic in summer. They haven't seen it for quite a while. And the mainline it's just really skinny because you don't have mainline. It it's really
Right. And then you, and at one point when I first started working here, it was like silly business though, because the Kenne went to talk, went to Matt, went to all in that a one of them within three hours, three hours that was really schedule I'm like, that's just pretty silly within three hours of each other. So has three. We were probably driving around on one of them saying, can I was 10 o'clock just did on that. I can see him the right in front of us. I said, no, we got five 20 cars. So some point Rupert was a big player, but it was again, not essential because you had one of the half card deck from third to card deck and you're down there within hours of each say, so basically what we're doing now, surely to answer your question, if we don't go to Rupert, I have time. So get, well placeholder, you call it even winter, but it enabled us to haul the people around. And also with the aging ships, it's never bad to have, you know, 12 to 20 hours sitting somewhere to save yourself.
It was Seattle originally and then they shifted to Bellingham. So yes, it has been, I, I actually came up here on the Wicker shack. Me too. Yeah. So it has been a, a player. It shifted from Seattle though to Bellingham. And I don't know exactly how many years ago that
And we, we walked through, you know, I was a new guy and I gave Carrie all this hope that something was actually gonna happen. And I will say something is happening. It took a while. Things take while. So here we are at a board and we're talking about it. So things are happening. We got hover right there, getting fruit water. So things are happen. We got the, we got the Ford finding the budget. The point I'm trying to get at really is Carrie's an ideal person. She's passionate. She cares about what she's doing. And she knows intimately the service levels that have been provided and maybe how to even come to that, what essential level is right. And I mean, she has her opinions and they're very strong about, you know, the golden days the, you know, the fleet was perfect when it was embedded, as she just said a few minutes ago. And, and it
Yeah. And, and maybe that's where we need to go as it wasn't as the board recommendation. So getting to that point, and I'm not fabric advocating for that right now. It's not my point. It's just like, maybe that's getting your vision of that service level and why it is that way is what I'd like to hear. I mean, what is your vision of, I mean, you're, you're saying the, is it a, is it eight vessels? What are we talking about? So are we at three main ladders or two? Well, not including Kenco I guess my mal being Columbia and Matt NewCo were one time. Would we do two or three? That kind of question.
The best thing that come outta this board you is in my opinion, is we should be contracting with somebody to build three vessels right now. The other two aren't designed, we're hiring one to build the TRV, to replace the test. We should be contracting with that yard to build two more. We need two more. Mainliners now not later, but why do we need two more? Mainliners that's the question I want answered is to show the service level that's provided with that investment.
The wintertime. And ideally, probably you would drop one boat in winter. You'd be able to, well, if you've got, if you've got standardization, your functionality winter would be fine that too, because you rotate to their overhauls. I keep one billing, half boat going and one roofer boat going and shift them in and out to cover for each other. So you pull one main liner in the winter, then you've still got some hair you could run in the winter and three in the summer.
Yeah. I, I think the challenge with keeping the Aurora Orion is that, you know, again, we're sort of maintaining different vessel types and at least from the reshaping working group, not necessarily this board, It, you know, the firm recommendation was moved towards the level of fleet standardization, right. That will streamline maintenance and training and all kinds of which I agree. I
But I, but I think in terms of, of a vision of how the fleet operates in the long range, you, you know, having a third AC is a fleet extender because you have the ability, you're gonna be able to maintain service reliability and not have months of suspended service in either Lynn canal or the Juno villages or, or prince
That makes, that makes sense to me. And, and I mean, I, again, I, you know, we don't know what the, I mean, I guess I I'm sure you do have a sense of what the operating costs are, but things change once the boat gets in the water and is in use. Right. And that's learning has to occur still.
You're losing car with the elevator operations. Your car is smaller plus cars and slow. I, yeah, I wrote the kennecot a few years ago out the chain sat in Salil and watched some, the cars on Excruciatingly slow. So you could get more port calls out of Rolan off than elevator operations because you're looking at five or six hours. The elevator, what you could do two was roll longer along,
The elevator will have to do, but the roll on roll off will still allow you to have more cars. You put the elevator, it allows more cars and it's quicker over the course of those kind of routes. If you have five to six hours on a full car deck and you cut that down to two, roll on, roll off. Is that possible? I'm not thinking on the chain with all the different docks that
Yeah. Right. Thank you. You're welcome. You're certainly more than welcome to. I know you've got a gazillion things to do, but I don't know that you can, but here there, during the conversations, maybe even tomorrow, as we're talking about the modernization plan, going back to kind of long term planning ideas, it might be helpful if you have some, everything seems to be running right now. You're a good connector. So it keeps
That's. That's why I, this crystal ball reading ball reading for beginners. So you attempt to set an overhaul period is somewhat realistic and they tend to slide as you've seen alarming regularity because solar to get the operating plan, plug in the over hauls, and then take a look at what you have left. Oh my, we have the time. What are we gonna do with her this time? So this couple winters we've been running her to ground. I mean, we're taking her from Bellingham to cover for everybody. And if something goes haywire across the Gulf in winter, I don't know what that could be. Then she really needs a C I P so yeah, she's gonna need some love too, but so basically look at what vessels you have available and service levels, generally revenue and ridership do reflect how well these routes are working with the future.
Stewardships. Obviously they're all working well, cause we don't have anything enough to lift right now. But in winter say we used to do 10 keen Andrew every week. Now we, we have only the LA Connie and, and the demands are, you know, a lot higher for, as you can. You know, when you know, so we found that I didn't get a lot of kickbacks saying, oh no, no, no, no. We have to have every week you get your groceries. It's essential. I get requests from communities. We have to shift something up. Anyway, I try to do it prior to state publication. So you still got consistency. Consistency kind of shot though, because if the ship's break, you're going every other week, you gotta try to squeeze it in somehow within work rest, which is difficult on the LA county, because the legs are so short in the call out, you got everybody getting called out to tie up the ship.
The legs are, you know, anywhere, some five to you go to PE and that's a long one. You can kind figure that one out. It can actually pass. But when the legs are short increments like that, trying to squeeze more out of economy becomes problematic solution. You someone only go every other week, they're gonna figure out how to get there. They need their grocer, senior citizens. If their groceries schools, their grocery, Shane needs his grocer. So that is essential service. And they're comfortable with that. So I also engage the say, Hey, you know, here is where I'm headed. Can make it work, just keep coming.
And now there's just, you know, I think they've gone through the seven stages. The anger's gone now. The anger's gone now. That's true. Now there's just a lot of sadness. They just keep coming. But it's every other week swinging, just make sure that's kind on all of the routes. Don't destroy our Marine highway. Just keep coming. We will take whatever you can give us Cordova every other week. Okay. I gotta figure out how to get you to town. Get you, you know, over through the tunnel and get you back. There's enough time to go to the doctor and just keep coming. Cool. Lions, you think you just keep coming? I don't care if it's once a month, don't cut us out.
The, the essential thing with communities that you, you know, everybody builds their personal plans, their business plans around what the Marine highway is is doing. And that reliability becomes an essential part of their, their lives. Whether it's gonna be daily or weekly or bimonthly, whatever it is, they, they adapt to it. And, and then when, if you pull that rug out from under them, absolutely, they have to re juggle all their balls. And that's where the issue of, You know, getting winning the customer back. And again,
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