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Maui%20County
The Maui 10
Who’s the county’s most powerful player?

by By Anthony Pignataro

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