How a fight over cruise ships visiting Key West
has changed tourism in a tourist city
Key West couldn’t be a more idyllic spot for a cruise ship pulling into port.
A tropical island with lots of bars. An endless party on the main street. A small town steeped in the history of shipwrecks and pirates.
Then there are the Conch Tour Trains chugging along narrow streets. Sailboats bobbing in the ocean. And, of course, souvenir shops galore.
But behind the images and the advertising campaigns, this small island is torn over tourism.
The Key West economy gets a boost from visitors, about two million a year. Yet more and more residents are wary of the crowds. And they have turned their attention to a source that drops thousands of people at a time onto the narrow streets: cruise ships.
While the pandemic put a halt to all cruising for two years, ships are sailing again.
After a series of protests against the big ships, the Southernmost City changed the course of cruises.
Ships will continue to bring thousands of passengers — and there were nearly a million in 2019. But there will be fewer ships than in the past.
The Key West City Commission decided on March 10 to direct ships almost exclusively to the only privately run pier in the small city. With the change, two publicly run piers won’t regularly be used.
The capacity of the private Pier B means just one ship at a time in Key West instead of two or three making a port of call on a single day.
“In the early ‘80s the whole thing was, how do we attract more,” said
City Commissioner Clayton Lopez, 68, who was born and raised in Key West. “That’s obviously a view that’s changed. We’ve done a full 180 now.”
Ships bypassing Key West’s two public piers mean a possibility of 21 ships a week cut down to seven, Key West Mayor Teri Johnston said.
“They can have one a day at Pier B, which is all that can fit there,” she said.
CONFLICT OVER CRUISING
The battle over ships in Key West gained national attention over the past couple of years. But people here have fought over cruise ships for decades, almost since the first one arrived in 1969.
A fresh campaign arose in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. That’s when an activist group started navigating the tricky waters of the tourism economy. The Key West Committee for Safer Cleaner Ships, a nonprofit advocacy group started by four friends, set out to change how the city deals with cruise lines.
The issue of reducing the presence of cruise ships eventually went to Key
West voters. And in 2020, the voters overwhelmingly approved referendums that changed the city charter and clamped down on the number of arriving cruise passengers.
Then state lawmakers stepped in.
New legislation, signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in June 2021, overturned the voters’ wishes. State legislators said voters shouldn’t have the power to meddle with maritime commerce.
Meanwhile, the city seemed to keep sailing along even as the cruise ships weren’t.
While ships were absent for nearly two years due to the pandemic shutdown, Key West didn’t fall into economic disarray. Tourists kept coming. Sales tax revenues flourished, with the island taking in 25% more in 2021 than it did in 2019, according to City Manager Patti McLauchlin.
The argument that Key West relied on cruise ships to pay the bills changed. Suddenly, it looked like Key West didn’t need cruise ship passengers to power the tourism engine.
“It shows at a minimum our economy is not dependent upon cruise ships,” said Arlo Haskell, a founder of Safer Cleaner Ships. “You can eliminate that and we had our best year ever.”
But when cruise ships disappeared at the start of the pandemic, fear set in among some business owners and city leaders, said Tony Yaniz, a former commissioner who is director of marketing and sales for Coconut Beach Resort.
“The initial hysteria,” Yaniz called it. “The city did not go lacking when cruise ships did not come. Overall revenues are through the roof.“
Said Yaniz: “Some people did get hurt. But the majority of them did not.”
When Florida advertised that the state was open for business at a time when most other destinations were closed due to the pandemic. Key West reaped the benefits.
“The only states that were open fully and worth coming to were Florida and Texas,” said Bill Lay, who owns the two La Trattoria restaurants in Key West. “It’s going to take until 2023 to see where this
While cruise ships stayed away from Key West during the pandemic, local divers and fishermen said the water looked clearer and cleaner.
levels out.”
CRUISE SHIP RULES
Cruise ships will keep coming to Key West, including large ones from Celebrity Cruises and Carnival Cruise Line.
But now ships will not stop at the publicly run docks, including Mallory Square, the famous spot for the nightly Sunset Celebration, where vendors and entertainers gather. After the new state legislation dismissed Key West voters’ decision to limit cruise ship passenger arrivals and cut the largest ships from coming, city leaders said they’d work to keep the caps in place.
“We have to have their backs,” City Commissioner Jimmy Weekley said of voters.
But the city has only so much control. Key West manages two of the three piers where cruise ships can visit. The city attorney warned commissioners that they would likely be sued by the private company that oversees Pier B if they set down blanket rules limiting ships.
So they stopped short of going all the way.
In a unanimous decision in March, commissioners said they would steer cruise ships away from the city-run piers to the privately managed Pier B, the busiest of the cruise ship docks and the one that takes in the huge ships.
“It took a lot of courage for the City Commission to take the stand it did,” Yaniz said after the vote.
That decision means no more two- or three-ship days in Key West. If a ship pulls into Pier B, there won’t be another in town, according to the new policy. And if the city were to accept a cruise ship at one of its publicly run piers, it would have to be a smaller ship whose capacity sticks to what voters wanted.
While Safer Cleaner Ships endorsed the decision, advocates still want the city to stop the megaships bringing in thousands of people at one time to Pier B.
Pier B is located behind the Opal Key Resort and Marina, a sister property, which faces 245 Front St. in the heart of downtown. It sits within squinting distance of Mallory Square, where protesters have gathered just out of view of disembarking passengers.
“The city should not be authorizing more ships and bigger ships at Pier
B,” Haskell, of Safer Cleaner Ships, said. “We need to hold the line and not repeat those mistakes from the past.”
Pier B’s owners did not respond to several requests for interviews.
But in December, Mark Walsh, the president of Pier B Development, who had kept a low profile since Safer Cleaner Ships stepped up in 2020, showed up at a City Commission meeting. He reminded city leaders they’ve had a contract with his family’s business since 1994. For more than 27 years, Pier B has made the city $27 million, he said.
The city shouldn’t try to break that legally binding deal, Walsh said.
As for the environment, Walsh said the reef has been damaged by climate change, overfishing and stony coral tissue disease.
“Cruise ships are not killing the reef,” Walsh said.
MORE SHIPS THAN BEFORE?
In March, the city started negotiations with Pier B’s owners, appearing at first to seek concessions to its existing contract.
Here are a few things both sides came up with:
Pier B won’t take ships on holidays like New Year’s Day, Christmas
Eve, Easter, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, and on an additional 10 days.
They will cap the daily passenger count at 3,700 and only take ships no larger than 1,100 feet long.
If the city raises its per-passenger disembarkation fee to $15 in 2023, they would donate $1 for each passenger to coral reef restoration.
The commission has a final deal on its April 5 meeting agenda and will consider all of the details — including some that would bring larger ships to Key West.
Safer Cleaner Ships plans to protest the proposal at City Hall, calling it a “blatant giveaway to private interests” that would bring more people to the island — 1.3 million a year — than ever before.
Even after fighting for the city to take on the owners of Pier B, Safer Cleaner Ships gave its blessing to the commission’s March decision to at least keep ships away from public docks.
“The name of this game is compromise,” Haskell said at the time.
But by late March, Haskell was frustrated over the city’s offer to make the new deal with Pier B.
“We voted for smaller, fewer ships. This is the opposite.”
The city’s resolution to send most ships to Pier B irked some business leaders.
Ed Swift, president of Historic Tours of America, the company behind the Conch Tour Train that for years was paid by the city to shuttle passengers from the remote publicly run Outer Mole pier to downtown, advised commissioners not to cut cruise ships from the public docks. Swift said that would reduce revenue, money that would have to be replaced by local tax
AAAdollars.
“This ordinance and this resolution are a disaster for our city and will echo throughout the years to come,” Swift said at City Hall on March 10. “Those of you running for office this time, this will reflect in the voters’ opinions.”
A HISTORIC DEBATE
Some in Key West share no love for cruise ships. They see them as environmentally questionable giants that unload hordes of tourists who take up a lot of space without spending on anything more than a souvenir trinket and a $5 T-shirt.
Cruise ships, which include food and entertainment, generally don’t bring the type of money that comes from overnight travelers, who plunk down hundreds or sometimes more than a thousand a night for hotels or vacation rentals and ring up big bills at restaurants and bars.
When a cruise ship docks in Key West, downtown changes as lines of passengers pour out and head to Front and Duval streets.
But famous attractions, like the Hemingway Home and Museum and the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, say the passengers spend plenty and help their bottom line. One business leader called the campaign against cruise ships a matter of discrimination.
Key West attorney Michael Halpern compared plans to reduce cruise ships to his days fighting for civil rights as a public defender and on behalf of the NAACP. Safer Cleaner Ships doesn’t want “lower income” people coming to Key West, he said at a July 13, 2021, city workshop on the issue.
“My issue is the civil rights matter of not wanting people who don’t spend enough money,” Halpern said. “Not one person has offered a plan on how the economically disadvantaged visitors can come to Key West.”
The first cruise ship in Key West since the shutdown arrived on Nov. 27, 2021. Hundreds of people gathered at the waterfront to demand big ships stay away.
Protesters came back again to watch another ship dock.
On the first Saturday in February, a crowd stood at Mallory Square in Key West chanting, “No big ships!” and holding signs that said, “Save our reef,” and “KW voted no.”
Next door at Pier B, a Celebrity Cruises ship was arriving. The ship’s size — with a capacity of 2,184 passengers — was banned at the voting booth two years ago, before state lawmakers overturned the referendums.
CRUISE SHIPS LEAVE THEIR MARK
When cruise ships move in the channel, they stir up silt, leaving long plumes that cloud the water. The measure of the water’s clarity is called turbidity.
“It’s a product of any large ship that enters the harbor and stirs up silt,” said Scott Atwell, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s office in Key West. “There are many studies that acknowledge turbidity’s detriment to corals.”
Some species of coral at Mallory pier grow in a way that lets them adapt to turbid water, but the most important reef-building corals, elkhorn and staghorn, can’t survive in highly turbid water, Atwell said.
While cruise ships stayed away from Key West due to the pandemic, local divers and fishermen said the water looked clearer and cleaner.
Last year, a study by a Florida International University researcher found water quality had indeed improved. The study concluded that “median turbidity in surface waters south of Key West during the shutdown was significantly lower than the median of the previous 25 years.”
In November 2021,
Safer Cleaner Ships tweeted video of the Crystal Serenity causing a mileslong silt plume from the reef to the harbor.
“This silt will harm endangered corals already stressed by rising sea temps and disease,” the group posted.
Turbidity is a concern, Atwell said, but the agency needs more information about the impact of cruise ships.
“We do not know a lot about cruise ship turbidity in Key West, but the College of the Florida Keys has begun studying how much is there, comparing it to when water gets stirred up in high winds and current,” Atwell said.
Atwell said what’s needed is a study focusing on whether turbidity is harming the reef downstream from the cruise ship channel.
WHO PROFITS FROM CRUISE SHIPS IN KEY WEST?
Despite the criticism of cruise passengers not showing the money, in 2018, they spent $73 million in Key West, about 7% of the $1.1 billion the island took in, according to a five-page report released in August 2020 by the Cruise Lines International Association.
The report, released in response to the Safer Cleaner Ships’ referendums, warned that “the drastic reduction in cruise visitor spending would irreparably harm the longterm economic health of the community.”
A study on cruise ship passengers from 2005 reported that the average passenger spent $32.10 in Key West, which with inflation works out to $46.63 today. They spent the most — about $6 — on clothing or souvenirs. A survey of about 200 businesses showed that in tourist spending, they made 12% of their money off cruise ship passengers while 79% came from overnight visitors.
The city also takes in “disembarkation” fees — a per-passenger toll tacked on to all cruises. The current fee is $11.39 a head, according to Doug Bradshaw, the port and marine services director. It doesn’t apply to crew members.
In 2019, the city took in nearly $5 million in disembarkation fees. But there are expenses for the city as well, such as security, a marine police patrol, insurance, repairs and maintenance that cost about $3 million, according to McLauchlin, the city manager.
“We’re required to use the vast majority of those funds to improve the cruise ship industry,” Mayor Johnston said.
So what do cruise passengers think of the tug of war between the city, activists and the privately run pier?
Passengers who were
leaving a Celebrity cruise ship one Saturday in February hadn’t heard of Key West’s cruise ship fight, or whether it was over environment or money.
“This area depends on tourism,” said Mitch Nunes, 66, of Tennessee, stopping on a Key West port of call with his wife, Pam. “There has to be a balance.”
Three friends from Georgetown, Texas — Jerrie Goldston, Judy Duke and Sandy Wratten — were headed from the cruise ship toward downtown to shop for sandals.
“Everything on the ship is ecologically friendly,” Duke said. “The toilet paper just disintegrates.”
“We’re not into that,” Wratten said when asked about cruise ships and their impact on the environment . “We’re too old for that.”
THE FIRST CRUISE SHIPS
In 1969, Key West welcomed its first cruise ship, the Sunward, which then returned once a month.
But Key West’s identity and economic needs would go through sweeping changes in the 1970s as the Navy drastically scaled back its presence.
The Southernmost City pivoted from Navy town to tourism. By 1979, a group of business owners created Fantasy Fest, to attract tourists in October. Fantasy Fest now draws about 70,000 tourists to the island over its 10-day stretch.
Cruise lines, meanwhile, worked to enlarge their footprint.
Through 1984, Key West had a total of 266 port calls. A decade later, the cruise ship industry was all over Key West.
During fiscal year 1999, 415 cruise ships brought a total of 597,009 passengers, according to the city. And the cruise ship business continued to blow up.
“It’s a fan favorite,” said Susan Lomax, a spokeswoman for Celebrity Cruises, owned by Royal Caribbean Group. “One of our most popular, most requested destinations on our Caribbean itineraries.”
The ships are typically in port from 7 or 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., with passengers asked to be back on board by 4.
Key West lands on the cruise port itineraries for good reason. The tropical island feels a million miles away from where passengers come from, with blue waters to sail, combined with historic sites, cigar shops, high-end and low-end clothing stores, and a bunch of bars with live music and frozen drinks. There’s an open container law on the books. But you wouldn’t know it from the bands of people meandering Duval Street swilling booze out of cups.
By the end of the 1990s, the number of passengers almost quadrupled to about 650,000 a year.
A year before the pandemic shut down cruising, of the two million people who visit Key West each year, nearly a million came on a cruise ship.
CRUISE SHIPS RETURN TO PROTESTS
But this isn’t Margaritaville for a group of activists who on Nov. 27, 2021, met at the waterfront at Mallory Square to greet the first cruise ship to arrive in Key West since the March 2020 COVID shutdown. The first ship to return docked at Pier B.
Meanwhile, some businesses, including a Duval Street gallery, sent employees to the pier to hold signs welcoming passengers back to the Southernmost City. Employees at the Opal Key Resort and Marina, which is also owned by Pier B’s Walsh family, did the same.
Around downtown, some shops flew banners thanking cruise ship passengers for visiting. One outside the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum simply said: “Cruisers welcome to Key West.”
Despite the go-ahead, Carnival Cruise Line didn’t return immediately to Key West.
“We spent a lot of time meeting with people in the community,” the cruise line’s president, Christine Duffy, said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “And, you know, maybe it’s not surprising, but there’s just as many people who want the ships as those who don’t.
“You have to try and put all of that in perspective and do the right thing.”
Nearly two years after the pandemic halted cruising, Carnival made its first return call to Key West, on March 1.
“Sometimes these things bubble up and there’s a frenzy of emotion around the topic,” Duffy said. “And so we said, ‘You know what, let’s just give it some time and things will calm down.’ ”
But protests against large ships haven’t stopped.
In February, protesters returned to welcome another by waving flags, signs and chanting “no big ships.” Will Benson, a
Keys fishing guide, who helped form Safer Cleaner Ships, told the crowd to keep fighting against cruise ships, calling them environmental hazards that damage the fragile coral reef.
“You can’t keep doing this and dumping all over a community for greed, for money,” Benson said as hundreds of people gathered on Feb. 5. “We’re going to prove victorious. I know history will prove us right.”
A day later, activists seized on the sight of the Celebrity Apex that had moored past a boundary, jutting into part of the entrance to the Navy’s Truman Harbor.
Naval Air Station Key West alerted the state Department of Environmental Protection, and a Navy spokeswoman said anything that obstructs the harbor — which the Navy controls — “impacts our defense mission capabilities there.”
The mooring happened just after Safer Cleaner Ships led a demonstration next door to the privately run Pier B as a ship that would have been banned under the referendums arrived.
VOTERS WANTED SMALLER SHIPS
Voters thought they had changed cruising rules by themselves.
In 2020, amid the cruise ship industry’s shutdown and before the COVID-19 vaccine was available, a group of locals started the Key West Committee for Safer Cleaner Ships in an effort to put limits on cruise traffic to the island. They crafted three referendums, which passed at the polls by at least 60%.
Voters wanted only a total of 1,500 people coming off the ships daily.
That would include passengers and crew members. And they banned the largest ships from coming altogether by capping the capacity of ships with 1,300 or more people from disembarking.
The third referendum, which won by 85%, gave docking priority to cruise lines that hold the best environmental and health records.
But state lawmakers overturned the voters’ decisions by agreeing to prohibit local ballot initiatives that restrict maritime commerce involving vessel sizes and points of origin.
Activists and the mayor went to Tallahassee to demand that their wishes remain intact. Those fighting to keep Key West’s place as a top cruising destination included the owners of Pier B Development Corp.. They contended that the city shouldn’t be allowed to have a say on how many ships could dock at a privately operated pier.
After the city election to curtail cruising, the Miami Herald uncovered that the cruise industry, which publicly stayed out of the campaign, secretly used a “dark money” scheme to funnel funds to the nonprofit behind the mailers. The Herald also reported in April 2021 that, at the onset of the legislative session, companies owned by Pier B’s Mark Walsh donated almost $1 million to Friends of Ron DeSantis, the political committee operated by the governor.
“Our support of Gov. DeSantis is based upon his overall pro-business governance,” Walsh’s attorney, Barton Smith, told the Miami Herald. “To imply that our support is tied to any specific piece of legislation is absolutely incorrect.”
The City Commission’s March 10 resolution attempts to keep those referendums’ limits in place, the mayor said.
“This is certainly a step in the right direction to respect the voters,” Johnston said.
The 2020 election wasn’t the first time Key West voters went after cruise ships.
In 2013, voters overwhelmingly shot down a proposal to ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study possibly dredging the harbor to make way for larger cruise ships. Led by a Chamber of Commerce campaign that repeatedly claimed it was only a study — “Support the Study” was its motto — the ballot proposal lost by more than 70%.
Many local voters claimed a victory over the cruise ships.
IMPACT ON BUSINESS
Even though cruise ships have returned, the debate continues over the impact passengers have on the island.
One longtime Key West business owner says the local economy doesn’t need the ships to flourish.
“The people bellyaching about this have more money than God,” said Kate Miano, who owns and runs the Gardens Hotel in downtown Key West. “They’re making boatloads of money that they don’t need.”
Miano is worried about the ships’ impact on the reef and waters surrounding the island.
“I love tourists,” Miano said. “That is my livelihood. I like people. I love welcoming them to the island. I just don’t want big cruise ships.”
One attraction that took a hit while cruise ships were halted was the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory, where visitors can watch hundreds of butterflies, more than 50 species, in a glassenclosed garden with flowering plants, birds and two flamingos — Rhett and Scarlett.
But the conservatory, at 1316 Duval St., listed as a must-see in tourist guides, had a gift shop near Pier B and Mallory Square for 26 years.
The gift shop didn’t survive the cruise ship shutdown.
“We had to close in August 2021,” said George Fernandez, co-owner and a founder of the butterfly conservatory.
“I had a good working relationship with almost every single cruise line,” Fernandez said. “You pull the plug, I can’t survive at that location.”
Fernandez has called the cruise ship debate a “dogfight.” Today, he sees diplomacy in action.
“In the beginning there was none,” Fernandez said. “We’re finally coming to some mutual understanding. We can work together.”
Miami Herald staff writer Anna Jean Kaiser contributed to this report.