RANK | PREVIOUS | COMPANY |
1 | 1 | Tesoro Hawai`i |
2 | 3 | Weinberg Foundation |
3 | 2 | Alexander & Baldwin |
4 | 5 | Monsanto Hawai`i |
5 | 4 | Maui Land & Pineapple Co |
6 | 6 | Hawaiian Telcom |
7 | 8 | Goodfellow Brothers |
8 | 9 | Maui Electric Co. |
9 | 7 | Dowling Co. |
10 | 10 | Wailuku Water Co. |
NO BONES ABOUT IT
Bad news this week for the big developers. Looks like the good ol’ days of just building whatever you wanted on top of ancient Hawaiian burial grounds are long gone. According to the May 24 Honolulu Star-Bulletin, a lot of development and even redevelopment projects are facing “costly delays” because of archeological discoveries made during construction. The standard operating procedure these days is to stop the dozers whenever bones start appearing on site and call in state burial council officials. Remedies range from reburying the bones elsewhere or even redesigning the project to accommodate the graves—like the Ritz-Carlton had to do in Kapalua a few years ago. Still, Native Hawaiian activists are getting increasingly testy about the whole thing. “What if they built a Wal-Mart at Arlington,” William Aila asked in the article. “How would people feel?” Gee, when you put it like that, the whole idea of building atop old burial sites seems, well, sacrilegious—regardless of how well you treat the remains you find.
AG TOURISM!
A&B and ML&P would have dropped even further this week were it not for a May 23 Honolulu Advertiser story on the phenomenon that’s sweeping the state known as “ag tourism.” “When you come to Hawai‘i, it’s not just our beaches, it’s not just our weather,” the paper quotes Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hanneman as saying. “[I]t’s our great agricultural products, it’s our seafood, it’s our restaurants, it’s our chefs, it’s what keeps our island green.” And Maui’s big landowning/ag firms are perfectly placed to get rich off that vision. Maui Land & Pine offers tours of their Honolua pineapple patches and A&B gives regularly scheduled trips through their cane fields and sugar mill. It’s farm-tastic! MTW
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