It may be one of those situations — If you build it, they will come.

Improvements scheduled for the dock in Ouzinkie mean the Spruce Island village will likely be added as a stop for the Tustumena as the ferry travels between Port Lions and Kodiak.

The citizen board that advises the Alaska Marine Highway System (AMHS) heard about the Ouzinkie project when its members met in Kodiak Tuesday as part of an outreach effort to communities served by the state ferries.

“A lot of times we get stuck staying in Juneau,” Alaska Marine Transportation Advisory Board chair Mike Korsmo said. “Our focus the past few years has been to try to get the meetings out to those different regions so those regions can have a chance to participate with us directly.”

AMHS general manager John Falvey said the masters of the Tustumena, Bob Crowley and John Merrill, are forming recommendations to pass along when Ouzinkie’s new dock is built so it will better accommodate marine highway system ships.

The board heard a report that a ferry stop to Ouzinkie could be combined with a maintenance layover in Kodiak, causing very little impact on AMHS’s current schedule and requiring no cuts in service elsewhere.

Disruption in the service would also be minimized by the fact that Ouzinkie is directly along the route between Port Lions and Kodiak.

“That’s awesome we can accommodate it within the existing framework and still service another community,” Korsmo said.

It was also estimated that a stop in Ouzinkie would receive a decent amount of ridership, since it is about the same size as the community of Port Lions.

Mike Neussl, the new deputy commissioner of AMHS, said a team at the Alaska Department of Transportation is developing a survey to distribute in Ouzinkie to get community input.

“We’ve got input from the Spruce Island Development Corporation, the city of Ouzinkie and the tribe, and they’ve all been very supportive … but having the community survey piece in the folder, so to speak, would be a good thing to have as well,” Neussl said.

“The scheduling is really what the survey would assess,” he said. “How often we need to go there — what type of demand is there. Everyone wants it. But specifically, how often are you going to ride the ferry (and) how often should we stop there?”

Neussel said he is testing the idea of having a sort of whistle-stop ferry service at Ouzinkie and only docking when there are confirmed reservations to board or exit the ferry there.

“We would have provisions that if there were no scheduled reservations to get on or off the ship, we would bypass Ouzinkie and just go to Port Lions,” Neussel said. “No need to take a risk of pulling in there waiting for an hour seeing if anybody shows up and then leaving with no transactions taking place. So that’s certainly an option.”

Also at the Tuesday meeting, Kodiak Chamber of Commerce community relations director Lindsey Howell asked the advisory board to assist Kodiak’s Crab Festival next year with ferry service scheduling that would accommodate both traveling tourists and rides brought in by Golden Wheel Amusements.

The carnival rides had to leave a day early this year due to a conflict in scheduling with the ferry Kennicott, which also had to leave a day earlier in its schedule.

During a lunch break the board had the opportunity to review Kodiak’s Pier 1 terminal infrastructure with harbormaster Marty Owen and discuss an Alaska Department of Transportation project to expand or replace the terminal.

Mirror writer Wes Hanna can be reached via email at whanna@kodiakdailymirror.com.