Remove ImagesMaui County
The Maui 10
Who’s the county’s most powerful player?
November 09, 2006
RANK PREVIOUS COMPANY
1
1
Tesoro Hawai`i
2
2
Maui Land & Pineapple Co.
3
3
Weinberg Foundation
4
7
Dowling Co.
5
4
Makena Resort
6
5
Maui Electric Co.
7
6
Monsanto Hawai`i
8
8
Wailuku Water Co.
9
9
Alexander & Baldwin
10
10
Hawaiian Telcom
DOWLING
Everett Dowling is already the go-to guy if you want to build
multi-million dollar condos at Makena—why not also make him the point
man for getting Kihei High School built? The Maui County Council seems
poised to do exactly that, according to a Nov. 1 Maui News story. In
exchange for buying 72 prime Kihei acres from the county for the
exorbitant price of one dollar, Dowling would build a school capable of
holding 1,000 students and a football field, which he would then lease
back to the state for 30 years. Since he's already built Kamali`i
Elementary in Kihei, the whole thing kinda makes sense—if you go in for
private developers building public schools. Anyway, the whole thing
incidentally translates into a mountain of good pub for Dowling—The
Maui News never even mentioned in its story his super condo project for
the super rich that's super-controversial.
911 IS RIGHT
Just when you thought Hawaiian Telcom had smoothed out its
voluminous billing problems, reduced its customer service wait times
from an eternity to a mere eon and just generally gotten its act
together, last week they suffered "problems" with its 911 emergency
service. According to the Nov. 1 Honolulu Star-Bulletin, on the night
of Oct. 30, far too many Honolulu customers who called 911 expecting to
hear a calm, professional operator trained in handling distress calls
instead heard a recorded message saying "All circuits busy, please stay
on the line." The company—which is still owned by one of the Carlyle
Group, one of world's richest private equity firms—worked really fast
to get the service back up, but at press time still wasn't really sure
why the service went down in the first place. MTW