Just when I “get it” about ferry financials, they do something else to mess with my mind.

Last winter, Washington State Ferries reported $40 million in savings while the Legislature upped ferry funding through licensing fees and gave WSF a fuel tax exemption … good. This summer, the feds changed their funding programs to better favor Washington … even better. We riders chipped in with two fare hikes and a 25-cent per ticket surcharge. So you’d think finances would be A-OK, at least for a while.

Nope.

WSF’s 2013-14 budget proposal will cut sailings at Anacortes-Sidney, Clinton, Vashon, Port Townsend, and Bremerton … eek! As this budget still has to churn through the Legislature and another governor, stay tuned to “As the Propeller Turns.”

Being crewed
While Kingston had a ferry-quiet summer, elsewhere 47 sailings were cancelled or delayed for “staffing issues” … that’s code for a no-show. The San Juan Islands and Bremerton both scored 14 cancellations or delays, Point Defiance had eight, Vashon and Port Townsend had five each, Kingston had one. Each boat has a Coast Guard-issued Certificate of Inspection that specifies the ferry’s allowed routes, safety equipment, the maximum passengers and the minimum crew. You can see it posted on the ferry’s bulletin board. Kingston ferries require 13 or 15 crew  depending on the boat.

When a crewmember is AWOL, the boat can’t legally sail, so the dispatcher has to call around for a replacement. With several hundred crewpeople on the ferries, adjustments add up to a lot of changes.

Typically there are 20-30 planned changes each day for vacations, medical and other appointments. On a bad day, there can be five to 10 last-minute changes. Arranging all this takes about 200 phone calls. When there’s advance notice, the calls for a replacement go out by seniority. If it’s a sick call at 2 a.m. for a 6 a.m. sailing, the dispatchers ask anyone they can get to answer the phone.

Some no-shows are inevitable. Putting an extra seaman on each ferry to cover that contingency would cost about $1.5 million per year (2.5 percent fare hike). Then there’s adding a back-up engineer and mate or skipper, costing lots more.   This summer, WSF dropped an extra crew member position on about half of the boats. In August, the Public Employment Relations Commission supported the change.

More thrifty than over-crewing is to have lower crewing requirements for off-peak times. The crew size set by USCG requirements is more than needed just to run the boat. That’s because the Certificate of Inspection includes all the people needed to handle an emergency when the boat is fully loaded. Ninety-nine percent of the time, however, our ferries are way below their maximum passenger capacity, especially on the first sailing of the day when no-shows inevitably occur. The USCG would have to agree to lower Certificate of Inspection requirements and WSF would have to start counting passengers both ways.

Lowering off-peak crew requirements doesn’t mean that there would be less crew assigned onboard. What it would mean is that if a crew member doesn’t show, the skipper will still be able to get the boat underway.

— This column was written by Walt Elliott, chairman of the Kingston Ferry Advisory Committee. He’s also a member of the Kingston Port Commission.