Midway firm ends airport services
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Staff Writer
Midway Phoenix officials cite serious differences in policy and management issues with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in their decision to withdraw from providing airport management and ecotourist services at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge.
They have canceled their contract with Aloha Airlines to provide weekly service to Midway, are no longer taking reservations and are preparing to shut down the airport, power plants and other facilities by the end of February.
Midway Phoenix officials said no tourists are stranded on the island. The Fish and Wildlife Service has two staffers and several volunteers, and is considering chartering a flight to get the volunteers out.
The surprise decision was made Saturday by company president Mark Thompson and announced to Midway workers Sunday and yesterday after more than five years of managing the remote atoll, 1,200 miles northeast of the main Hawaiian islands. The company's 150 on-island employees will lose their jobs, and a number of suppliers, tour booking firms and others associated with the companies already are preparing for cutbacks.
Other victims: The Fish and Wildlife Service no longer will be able to catch the convenient scheduled flights to get personnel, volunteers and equipment to the island. The Coast Guard no longer will have a mid-ocean refueling stop for law enforcement and rescue operations. Overseas commercial air carriers will not have an emergency mid-Pacific landing spot, required by law for certain aircraft.
Neither the Fish and Wildlife Service nor Midway Phoenix has made an official public announcement of the withdrawal, but people close to the operation say the decision was made over the weekend.
"We don't have anything in writing yet, but we understand they have verbally told one of the people in the (Secretary of the Interior's) office," said Barbara Maxfield of the Fish and Wildlife Service Honolulu office.
Midway Phoenix Executive Vice President Bob Tracey said the main reason the company is stepping out is the difficulty of working with Fish and Wildlife Service management.
"We don't feel that Fish and Wildlife has exercised the flexibility to make this work," Tracey said.
Asked for examples, he said the agency restricted access to many of the beaches, often with little notice. It refused to allow the company to provide guests with kayaks, which Tracey said are permitted at other wildlife refuges and would not have threatened wildlife at Midway. The agency killed ironwood trees and left the unsightly wooded areas standing. Such actions left guests with little to do and made the island unnecessarily unsightly, he said.
"It made it unattainable to make money out there. We were really disappointed in their performance," Tracey said. "It's hard for us to take a $15 million beating, rapidly approaching $20 million."
The Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't feel the differenceshave been that serious, said Rob Shallenberger, deputy project leader for the Hawaiian and Pacific Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex.
Shallenberger said the beaches designated off-limits to humans have been off-limits since the beginning. He said a kayak operation is allowed, but with conditions including that the trips be supervised.
"We approved it with conditions, and they didn't like the conditions."
Shallenberger said the agency killed off the ironwood trees on Eastern Island, but not elsewhere.
He said the Fish and Wildlife Service still has not received an official letter of notification that Midway Phoenix is leaving, and hopes the move can be averted.
Tracey said it might be able to keep a contractor on the atoll if there were some type of government stipend.
Aloha Airlines, which has run weekly flights from Honolulu to Midway since April 29, 1998, received notice yesterday morning that Midway Phoenix was stopping the flights.
Midway Phoenix has ordered its staffers to begin shutting down all equipment. Aloha has been asked to run a flight to take Midway Phoenix employees off the island on March 2.
Rick Gaffney, owner of Destination Pacific, which books fishing and diving tours at Midway, said Midway Phoenix has stopped taking bookings. "We were going to begin birdwatching tours this year. Midway is our primary destination, so the impact on us will be substantial," he said.
Midway is northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands, near the end of the Hawaiian Archipelago. Only Kure Atoll, a state wildlife refuge, is farther from the main islands.
Midway Phoenix was the successful bidder for a contract to run the atoll after the Navy turned it over to the Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency was charged with managing the giant bird, sea turtle and Hawaiian monk seal nesting beaches there, but without the money needed to manage such a distant facility.
It arranged for the contractor to keep the old military airfield open, keep power and communications running, and convert old barracks into visitor lodging. But the island — although it has been an excellent fishing, diving and birdwatching site and visited by World War II history buffs — has not generated the volume of visitor traffic that Fish and Wildlife Service and Midway Phoenix had anticipated.
Correction: Midway Atoll is northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands. A previous version of this story had incorrect information.
