Developers eye West Kaua'i
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Kaua'i Bureau
WAIMEA, Kaua'i — Unprecedented change is coming to quiet, stately West Kaua'i, a region of ancient trees and sugar fields and quiet communities.
Jan Tenbruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser
Tourism, high-tech industry and diversified agriculture gradually are making themselves felt in an economy that only a few years ago was almost entirely based on sugar.
The old Robinson family home at Kapalawai is to be developed into a resort with 250 cottages.
Abandoned sugar lands and surrounding acreage are growing products from shrimp to seed corn to hogs. Seed corn companies have established research stations that expand the agricultural economy of the region.
Kekaha Sugar Co. and Olokele Sugar Co. have closed, but much of their sugar acreage has been adopted by surviving grower Gay & Robinson in a desperate effort to survive. Once the smallest of the three and the only one without its own sugar mill, G&R is working to reach sufficient size to enjoy economies of scale.
Even with the additional acreage, G&R's 11,700 acres is less than a third the size of the state's only other sugar planation, 37,000-acre HC&S on Maui.
The Robinson family, which owns the plantation, once was known for its love of privacy — some would say secrecy. That's changing too.
The firm has expanded its sugar operation to include a small museum in Kaumakani and tours of the plantation and the Olokele Mill. And they are planning to develop the old family estate at Kapalawai into a low-density resort.
County Planning Director Dee Crowell, a lifelong Waimea resident, said the recently approved county general plan "recognized that some resorts would happen out there, but the intent was to have it low density and small scale."
With developer Lewis Geyser, the Robinsons have received state and county zoning approvals for 250 cottages to be built on the 160 acres of lawns around the old family house, more than a century old.
The project still needs a special management area use permit, and if that is approved by summer, as expected, the resort could be open by 2004, said attorney Michael Belles.
It will be the biggest resort on the west side. For the time being.
Another plantation family, the Fayes, established the tradition of low-density building with its Waimea Plantation Cottages on the western edge of Waimea town: restored plantation houses furnished in period style on lawns fronting the beach.
There are 47 units now, but the family's Kikiaola Land Co. recently received zoning permits for as many as 250 units.
Roland Sagum, Kikiaola planning and development manager, said some of those units would be in multi-family structures, but each still would be designed to look like a plantation-era home, in keeping with the project's style.
The Kikiaola project is expected to take several years to develop, partly because of a lack of ready cash, but especially to prevent too sudden an impact on the community, Sagum said.
"This is a family company, and the family has always tried to involve the community in its projects," he said.
Planning director Crowell said there is good reason to be more cautious with the Kikiaola project than with Kapalawai. "They're closer to the town," he said.
Kikiaola also plans a museum and shop complex at the site of the old Waimea Sugar Mill, boating-related improvements near the Kikiaola Small Boat Harbor, and a residential and commercial complex in the old sugar field between the Kaua'i Veterans Memorial Hospital and Kaumuali'i Highway.
In the same area, under the shade of the Waimea gold trees, the Kaua'i Economic Development Board developed the 7,000-square-foot West Kaua'i Technology Center. It is now planning a second phase, to cover 14,000 square feet.
Using the same color scheme and architecture, the building will house offices for mostly defense contractors that work with the Pacific Missile Range Facility and Office of Naval Research, said the acting chair of the development board, Gary Baldwin.
One welcome aspect of the high-tech influx is that the firms have been hiring mostly local residents or bringing technology-trained former residents home, which Baldwin terms "repatriating."
Crowell said it's the kind of practice that makes the change less disruptive than it might be.
"It's an exciting time for the west side, but I don't see it changing overnight," he said.
