Kurren, 52, said she will be looking for other opportunities in Hawai'i when she leaves Tesoro at the end of this month. "I'd sure love to go somewhere else," Kurren said.

Tesoro, which operates six oil refineries in the western U.S., has been trimming its work force and selling assets as part of an effort to cut debt by $500 million this year. The asset sale include the land under five of Tesoro's 35 Hawai'i stations.

The company will not replace Kurren and will not have a single manager who heads the Hawai'i operation. Instead the Hawai'i business will be divided into functional groups each with a manager in San Antonio, Kurren said.

Tesoro said it has cut 214 jobs, or about 5 percent of its work force companywide, since September. Some of the jobs were phased out under the voluntary early retirement program. Kurren said of 20 Tesoro employees eligible for early retirement in Hawai'i, 15 opted to leave. Tesoro has about 600 employees in Hawai'i and 4,000 nationwide.

Tesoro has decided to organize management along functional lines instead of geographic lines, Kurren said. When Tesoro bought BHP Hawai'i in 1998, it had only one other refinery, in Alaska. At that time it made sense for Hawai'i to continue to run its own back office support for the refinery, Kurren said.

Now Tesoro has six refineries and most of the support work is centralized in San Antonio.

"Tesoro has a different way of operating that is appropriate to its current circumstances," Kurren said.

Kurren, a Punahou and Stanford University graduate, joined BHP Hawaii as counsel in 1984. She negotiated the real-estate purchases for many Tesoro stations in the state.

In addition to her duties at Tesoro, Kurren chairs the American Red Cross Hawai'i State Chapter and is on the boards of the University of Hawai'i Foundation and Hawai'i Pacific Health. She served on the 10-member House Select Committee on War Preparedness earlier this year and was featured in the book, "Japanese Women of Hawaii: A Legacy of Strength and Leadership."