Alaska’s primary provider of real-time marine vessel tracking has lost a portion of its funding to cuts by the governor to the state’s 2020 capital budget, a report said.<\/p>\n
The Marine Exchange of Alaska lost 11% of its state funding, CoastAlaska reported Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed line items equaling $444 million in reductions to Alaska’s operating budget in June, including $34.7 million in cuts from the capital budget.<\/p>\n
The Legislature restored $400,000 in cruise ship passenger revenue to support the network of ship-tracking stations. Dunleavy retained the cut through a second veto.<\/p>\n
The maritime industry pays a fee to the Marine Exchange to track vessels in real-time including cruise liners, cargo ships, oil tankers and fishing boats.<\/p>\n
The Marine Exchange funding was to be drawn from the $34.50 head tax paid by every cruise ship passenger visiting Alaska. The governor has suggested the tax revenue should be redirected to port projects across coastal communities.<\/p>\n
The Marine Exchange has received about $2.8 million in head taxes since 2013 and the governor believes it should look elsewhere, said Dunleavy spokesman Matt Shuckerow.<\/p>\n
“While they have done good work, they seem to be an organization that has unspent funds that can begin looking at new ways to operate,” Shuckerow said.<\/p>\n
The head tax money is restricted and must be appropriated by the Legislature, said Marine Exchange Executive Director Ed Page.<\/p>\n
“It’s not a fund that could be used for other public services or for schools or for housing or drug programs or what-have-you, it’s restricted to maritime application,” Page said.<\/p>\n
This is an Associated Press report.<\/ins><\/b><\/p>\n It lost 11% of its state funding. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":51839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-51838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51838"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=51838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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