An economic renewal in North Kohala
By Hugh Clark
Advertiser Big Island Bureau
KAPA'AU, Hawai'i — When Castle & Cooke pulled the plug on Kohala Sugar Co. in 1973, workers responded to the unexpected announcement in silent shock.
Ken Love • Special to The Honolulu Advertiser
Joe Mattos, then a mid-level harvesting supervisor, had been working since 1949 on the plantation where his father had toiled before him. He recalls an eerie feeling as he and his friends were told they were nearing the end of the world as they had known it.
North Kohala businessman Jim Channon finishes painting a sign for the Landing, a new spot for tea and massages. Channon's restored buildings have become magnets for visitors.
Mattos, now retired, says North Kohala is a different place today.
Although still considered remote because of its location and limited transportation options, North Kohala has emerged as a popular place for tourists on day visits from their luxury resorts in South Kohala.
The district's old, paint-blistered wooden buildings have been renovated and now house art galleries, boutiques and restaurants. New homes have been built and older ones fixed up.
Though some see the infusion of newcomers as threatening the old lifestyle, business owners such as Frank Morgan and retired AT&T executive Bob Martin disagree.
"This is a nice blend of people with a good sense of community and giving back," said Morgan, who is active in the North Kohala Merchants Association that sponsors local events.
Martin helped launch several North Kohala businesses, including a coffee and ice cream store, a dress and gift shop, and a silk painting operation. He also works as a paid business consultant and gives his time as a volunteer teaching a class on business start-ups that covers everything from labor laws to taxes.
Big Island Mayor Harry Kim is impressed with the community leadership in North Kohala. He visited there twice in his first three months in office and has determined the community has unified concerns and hopes.
"They've found a nice niche up there since sugar. The buildings are rejuvenated. I'd say it's come into its own," Kim said.
Tax base growing
| • | North Kohala at a glance
Population: 6,038 Size: 133 square miles, smallest of nine Big Island districts History: Supported a large Hawaiian population prior to Western contact; long recognized as a center of agricultural production in the Hawaiian Islands, with focus on traditional food crops of taro and sweet potatoes. The coming of missionaries and sugar planters in late 19th century resulted in a plantation-based economy and an influx of immigrants from China, Japan, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Scotland, Spain and elsewhere. Town centers: Former plantation towns of Hawi and Kapa'au, which thrived as lively sugar plantation towns, are now home to arts and crafts communities. Economy: Primarily sugar for most of the last century following founding of Kohala Sugar Co. in 1882. In 1970, Kohala Mill produced 44,569 tons of sugar. Closure of the plantation and mills was announced in 1973. With sugar's demise, North Kohala was transformed into a bedroom community for workers at South Kohala resorts. State and county efforts to diversify the economy met with limited success. Points of interest: Known as the birthplace of Kamehameha the Great around 1758, the original statue of the famed ali'i stands in Kapa'au; four heiau, including a sacrificial heiau at Mo'okini, which is regarded as the oldest pre-contact temple; Lapakahi State Historical Park, a restored ancient fishing village; the 20-mile Kohala Ditch, built in 1905 to irrigate sugar lands and considered an engineering feat; Pololu Valley Lookout at the end of Highway 270. |
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With a tax base that is growing as these affluent malihini establish second or retirement homes along the coastline facing Maui, many say North Kohala has stabilized for the long run.
Acting Police Capt. Delphine Soares, who has spent most of his 30-year career in his home district, says he has noticed a rise in assaults, thefts, domestic violence and drug use, particularly crystal methamphetamine. But others say the problems are worse most everywhere else.
Kohala High School Principal Catherine Bratt still considers it a good place to raise her three children. From a community of about 5,000, enrollment at the school is about 580 students in grades 7-12, more now than in sugar's heyday.
Families care for their kids, Bratt said, though more than 50 percent of her students are getting federal lunch support.
Kohala was the first of the Big Island's sugar plantations to fall. Puna Sugar was next in 1984 followed by the Hilo Coast shutdown by C. Brewer in 1992, Hamakua Sugar's federal court-ordered bankruptcy in 1993, and then the Ka'u closure in 1996.
The decision by Castle & Cooke to close the Kohala plantation nearly 30 years ago seemed sudden at the time, but it was not entirely a surprise, said Hiroshi "Scrub" Tanaka of Hilo.
The longtime Big Island political strategist, who worked closely with the late Gov. John Burns, said Burns and his team had decided in the 1960s to extend the coastal route to North Kohala by adding 11 miles from the dusty port of Mahukona to Kawaihae.
Without the road, residents headed outside the district used a tiny airfield at 'Upolu Point, which once offered Hawaiian Airlines service, or drove to Waimea and then on to Hilo or Kawaihae.
The Akoni Pule Highway would become North Kohala's lifeline after sugar died, opening up job opportunities at the burgeoning South Kohala resorts that now employ many of the children of former sugar workers. Without that link, many wonder if North Kohala would have survived.
New life injected
Ken Love • Special to The Honolulu Advertiser
Not everyone appreciates the changes of the past quarter century since the last sugar crop was processed in 1975. Ironically, that was one of the most profitable years for Castle & Cooke, as sugar prices peaked. At the time, some questioned whether the closure might be premature.
Much of North Kohala maintains its rich paniolo heritage.
Castle & Cooke later would sell more than 20,000 acres — more than it was farming — to Chalon, headed by Japanese investor Shoichi Kamon, who named his company after a town in France.
With about 18,000 acres in North Kohala, Chalon remains the largest landowner in the district today, even though over the past decade it has sold off parcels ranging in size from an acre to 500 acres.
Chalon still is intent on developing some parts of a resort in Mahukona that once was to include a 300-room low-rise hotel, a golf course straddling both sides of the Akoni Pule Highway and several hundred homesites.
The hotel has been put off for now but the golf course is still being planned, all on the mauka side of the road. The homesites have been reduced to about 45 two- to five-acre lots.
"That's to appeal to the megarich," who prefer larger properties and more privacy, said Michael Gomes, Chalon's vice president, who has been with the project since 1990.
For now, Chalon is a land management company with just eight full-time employees and some occasional hires to operate heavy equipment to conduct grading at Mahukona, at one time an obscure sugar port and railway station.
Immediate projects include extending a waterline to the site, several miles south of the developed portion of South Kohala, and extending the Kohala Ditch to provide water to sustain the golf course.
Chalon also manages land owned by Kamehameha Schools and has leases with macadamia nut growers.
Gomes, who worked for Kohala Sugar for eight summers while his late father was an assistant manager, is proud of the way Chalon has stayed the course over hard economic times in both Kohala and Japan, and maintained the historic ditch trail that extends back into the rainy valleys southeast of Kohala.
He believes Chalon has helped boost tourism to the district by accommodating activity firms that offer kayaking along the ditch, bicycle treks, all-terrain-vehicle tours and mule rides down the steep Pololu Valley trail.
Not all efforts succeeded
Compared with the other areas that lost sugar — Hamakua, North Hilo and Ka'u — North Kohala has bounced back strongly. But, efforts to establish new industry in the wake of sugar's demise were controversial and not entirely successful.
The state and county formed the North Kohala Task Force, run by George Ariyoshi before he succeeded Burns as governor, to offer loans to back the start-ups of five companies. Just one — Kohala Nursery — remains in business today.
The nursery is the district's biggest private employer, with 25 to 30 workers, and has repaid its government loans, unlike the other four: Pacific Hay, growing feed for cattle; Hawai'i Biogenics, a cattle feedlot; Kohala Plastics; and Orchids Pacific.
Critics in the 1980s called the task force a government fiasco; others said it bought time for the unemployed to find new jobs.
After he lost his plantation job, Joe Mattos joined a state-sponsored work crew that established Lapakahi State Park midway down the coast, renewing a centuries-old ancient Hawaiian fishing village. Later, he went to work for a commercial nursery at Mauna Lani in South Kohala before retiring.
Born in North Kohala in 1930 of an immigrant Filipino father and a Portuguese mother, Mattos knows every building along the state highway from the edge of Kokoiki to the end of the road at Pololu Valley. He knows most newcomers and just about all of the old-timers. He coached their kids and grandkids at Kohala High School until the end of this season, when he retired for a third "and last time," he said.
Mattos volunteers at St. Augustine Episcopal Church, established in 1884, where he was married and where his son and wife lay buried.
"I never wanted to live anywhere else. This is my home," Mattos said.
It's still 'a frontier town'
Frank Morgan, owner of a large used-book store, is one of those newer residents. As a leader in the 60-member North Kohala Merchants Association, Morgan helps raise money for community causes and plot the district's future.
He worked in the news departments of the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, followed by years of public relations work for high-tech businesses. After repeat visits to the Big Island that got longer and longer with each stay, Morgan moved from Boston to Hawi six years ago.
He and his wife, Jan, acquired the inventory of the former Tusitala bookstore on O'ahu three years ago and launched their business. The store and its 25,000-volume inventory is located in the former Nanbu Hotel. Other tenants include a doctor of Oriental medicine from China and a family bakery that sells its pies in Hilo supermarkets.
Though Morgan calls his enterprise a "mom-and-pop bookstore featuring Oceania and Hawaiiana," he sells around the globe through the Internet to collectors and readers as far away as Sri Lanka.
He said Internet sales account for 30 percent to 40 percent of his business.
Morgan is not as concerned by North Kohala's economic future as he is about possible overgrowth. He recognizes North Kohala's remoteness can be challenging, but that it's also a part of its allure.
"This is a frontier town where the best survive because they are quick, smart and entrepreneurial," he said.
