Remove ImagesMaui County
The Maui 10
Who’s the county’s most powerful player?
September 13, 2007
| RANK | PREVIOUS | COMPANY |
| 1 | 1 | Monsanto Hawai`i |
| 2 | 2 | Dowling Co. |
| 3 | 5 | Maui Land & Pineapple Co. |
| 4 | 3 | Tesoro Hawai`i |
| 5 | 4 | Alexander & Baldwin |
| 6 | 6 | Weinberg Foundation |
| 7 | 7 | Wailuku Water Co. |
| 8 | 10 | Maui Electric Co. |
| 9 | 8 | Goodfellow Brothers |
| 10 | 9 | Hawaiian Telcom |
WOOD NYMPHS?
ML&P moves up a couple notches this week for finally—FINALLY!—getting a Maui County Land Use Committee hearing on its vaunted Pulelehua project in West Maui. Now there's a lot to dislike about Pulelehua—the traffic it will generate and its much too cozy proximity to Kapalua Airport, most notably—but it does a rate positive nod or two. For instance, somehow Maui Land & Pineapple actually managed to get an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) done on the proposal. For those following the incessant whining from Governor Linda Lingle and officials from Hawai`i Superferry, Inc.—also partly funded by ML&P—and the state Department of Transportation, you'd think getting an EIS done was an onerous, anti-business shackle designed by Luddites to make Hawai`i a subsistence economy in which we all grub for worms while scantily-clad wood nymphs dance and soft, naturey music plays in the background. Actually, that doesn't sound half bad…
HOME FALLS
ML&P would have risen a lot higher this week, were it not for the news that in August the median price of a single-family home on Maui plummeted to a mere $644,000—down from $749,500 in August 2006. With prices that low, how do you expect land developers like Maui Land, Dowling Co. and A&B to make any money? Builder Goodfellow Brothers didn't drop because they build a lot of other stuff. MTW