Key West rejects changing cruise rules at private pier. What does it mean for tourists?

Key West residents opposed to large cruise ships and their hordes of passengers descending on the small island have packed City Hall before to demand changes to reduce their presence.

But this time, they walked away cheering.

In a 5-2 vote Tuesday night, the Key West City Commission rejected a new deal laying out specific rules for the only privately run pier in town, Pier B, which would have allowed larger ships to dock there.

“Nothing changes,” said Mayor Teri Johnston, who was part of the majority vote. “Pier B doesn’t change. They’re still going to bring in a ship a day.”

After Key West’s rejection of a deal with Pier B, the question now is whether the private management will adhere to the city’s restrictions, challenge them in court or return to the bargaining table.

And the number of ships a year that will dock at Pier B, located behind the Opal Key Resort on Front Street downtown, isn’t clear. But the private owners who run the pier cannot expand to welcome ships up to 1,100 feet long. The limit now is 1,005 feet in length.

Longtime city commissioners Clayton Lopez and Billy Wardlow dissented.

Lopez said Wednesday that he knew the proposed deal with Pier B would fail, so he voted for it to keep the owners talking to city leaders.

“When I saw the vote going south, the only thing I could think of is, we have to save an opportunity to talk to these folks again, so we can come up with some sort of compromise we can all live with,” Lopez said.

“We dodged a bullet, but Pier B has more in the chamber,” said Arlo Haskell, a founder of the Key West Committee For Safer Cleaner Ships, the group that led a campaign in 2020 to slash the number of cruise ship passengers coming to Key West.

Voters made it happen by passing three referendums by a range of 61 to 81% but were later overturned by state lawmakers.

Pier B owners have not responded to several requests for comment, including one made Wednesday after the commission’s vote.

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.

“The next step really would be theirs, to come back with a different offer,” Johnston said Wednesday of Pier B’s owners.

Meanwhile, Safer Cleaner Ships claimed victory, tweeting: “City docking assets remain under City control and Pier B must accept status quo. BIG WIN.”

The commission in March unanimously agreed to steer cruise ships away from the two piers the city manages to Pier B, already the busiest port, in an effort to maintain cruise ship limits voters approved almost two years ago. That vote capped the number of passengers and crew members who land each day to 1,500, and banned ships with a capacity of more than 1,300 people.

But state lawmakers intervened, dismissing Key West’s vote with new legislation prohibiting such votes that set rules for maritime commerce.

Voters who thought they had drastically reduced cruise ship traffic were left stunned and angry that their decisions could be tossed out by the state.

Key West commissioners told voters they’d have their backs, promising to preserve the limits they wanted. But the sticking point has always been the privately managed pier run by Pier B Development Corp., which is owned by Mark Walsh and his family.

This story was originally published April 6, 2022 at 4:40 PM.

Gwen Filosa

Miami Herald

Gwen Filosa covers Key West and the Lower Florida Keys for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald and lives in Key West. She was part of the staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune that in 2005 won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Indiana University.