Since 1998, the Alaska SeaLife Center has drawn people to the very end of the Seward Highway. It is in fact at the end of the road— if you just turn south out of Anchorage, the next time you have to turn to get to the center is into the parking lot at the center. While the center has a wide variety of animals, from many-armed sunflower sea stars to moon jellies and giant Pacific octopuses, it’s most famous for its Steller sea lions and collection of sea birds.
But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, there may not be anything there by the end of the summer. The block on travel, particularly from cruise ships, has devastated the center’s visitation, and without a lot of fundraising, it may have to close the doors and send the animals away.
SeaLife Center President and CEO Tara Riemer said the center usually gets about $4 million in revenue, the vast majority of it during the summer. This year, they’re seeing about a quarter of that.
"We have capacity—please come, because the scary piece of this is that we’ve actually realized that if we don’t raise a significant amount of money by the first of October, we are not going to make it," she said. "We are going to have to close permanently. And that’s not an outcome anyone wants, but it’s a reality at this point."
Early on, the center’s leadership saw the pain coming and evaluated how to cut expenses. That’s not really possible at an aquarium, where animals have to be fed and cared for every day and the water has to stay running. On top of that, the animals can be very expensive to feed. The center rescued an adult sea otter nicknamed Zippy—for the colorful ziptie painfully pulled around his paw, which the center removed for him—who could eat about $70 worth of seafood per day.
"We did an online fundraiser, brought in about $15,000, I believe, to help feed Zippy, but he was eating us out of house and home," Riemer said.
The center has about 70 staff and is one of the major year-round employers in Seward, a community of about 2,500. While Riemer said they did receive a Paycheck Protection Program loan from the federal government, which covered paying staff for a few months, it doesn’t cover the remaining gap to keep them running for the year. The size of the organization also disqualifies them for the Alaska CARES Act program through the state, too, she says.
On Monday, the center officially launched a fundraising campaign, seeking to raise about $2 million through a combination of additional memberships, donations, and visitation. Riemer said the center is also conversing with foundations and other available sources to seek funding in the interim. The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services also recently announced a $35 million grant program for nonprofits, though that program is targeted toward nonprofits that provide critical programs for Alaskans, according to a release from the agency.
The drive is about more than just survival this year, too, Riemer said. The center has been looking more toward Alaskans for support in the future, too.
"This obviously is a crisis situation, and it’s hurting a lot of organizations, but one thing that we’re trying to figure out how to do is we have this amount of funding that we need to raise quickly, but how can we figure out a way of becoming more sustainable and less vulnerable to this sort of situation in the future?" she said. "And I think that’s something that nonprofits need to be looking at everywhere, and probably for-profit businesses as well, but how do we figure out how to develop a more sustainable funding base?"
The Seward City Council is scheduled to consider a $500,000 appropriation to help support the center through its CARES funding, cruise vessel passenger tax fund, or some of its general fund dollars at its meeting tonight as well.
Reach Elizabeth Earl at eearl@kdll.org.
