KAHUKU — As The Estate of James Campbell draws to a close, its trustees have acknowledged a historic tie to the Kahuku community by creating a fund of up to $1 million from property sales to benefit the area from Turtle Bay to Malaekahana.

The formation of the Kahuku Community Fund was announced this month at a Kahuku ceremony in which Campbell Estate awarded $68,000 to various organizations: including $20,000 the Kahuku High & Intermediate Schools; $20,000 to the Kahuku Hospital; and $20,000 to the North Shore Career Training Corp, said Theresia McMurdo, spokeswoman for the estate.

The estate also awarded $5,000 to Kahuku Elementary School for math workbooks and $1,000 each to the Kahuku Community Association, Kahuku Village Association and Rainbow Schools.

"We expect there will be at least $100,000 in the fund by the end of this year, and as the disposition occurs, we will be adding to that fund, hopefully up to $1 million," McMurdo said.

Campbell Estate, one of the largest private landowners in Hawai'i, was established after Scottish carpenter turned land developer James Campbell died in 1900 leaving $3 million in real estate. Today the estate is worth $2.2 billion with holdings across the United States.

The private estate will dissolve in 2007 and be transformed into the James Campbell Co. LLC, a private, for-profit, real estate company. The estate has been diversifying its holdings since the 1970s and the sale of its Kahuku land is part of the plan to diversify, she said.

Campbell purchased some 15,000 acres in Kahuku in 1800 but there are only 3,600 acres left, including land under the hospital and land across from Turtle Bay Resort, McMurdo said.

"Our presence in Kahuku will get even smaller and we felt it was important because of our historic ties ... that the community receive some kind of tangible benefit," she said.

The Hawai'i Community Foundation will administer the fund, but an advisory board of Kahuku residents will decide how to spend it, McMurdo said. Five people will make up the board: two from the Ko'olauloa Neighborhood Board; two from the Kahuku Community Association; and one from the Kahuku Village Association.

Don Hurlbut, a Kahuku representative on the neighborhood board and president of the Kahuku Community Association, said he will most likely be on that board. When it is officially formed, the board is expected to meet with Campbell representatives to learn more about the criteria for the fund, Hurlbut said.

People in the community have begun to let their wishes be known, but Hurlbut said it would be difficult now to say how any money would be spent.

He said he appreciates the money and one of the first things he wants done is to set up policy and guidelines about how to spend it.

"There needs to be accountability," Hurlbut said. "This is one of the things I will recommend."

In the past the estate has purchased musical instruments and band uniforms for the high school, built a gazebo in the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge, supported community Christmas parties and donated money to schools for books and equipment.

Most likely these groups will be making request for money again, Hurlbut said. An organization like the North Shore Career Training Center was accustomed to receiving $20,000 a year from the estate, he said.

The needs are great, Hurlbut said, and even $1 million won't go that far. "I want to put it in an endowment so we would work with the income but the interest rates are not there," he said.

One suggestion was that Campbell give the community land instead of money because then it could be leased to farmers and there would be an income, but it's not likely that the community will receive any land, Hurlbut said.

Kahuku High School has been a regular beneficiary of the estate's largess, said school principal Lisa DeLong. The $20,000 the school received last week will go for a new scoreboard for the football field, she said. The James and Abigail Campbell Foundation also has awarded thousands of dollars in college scholarships to Kahuku students each year.

The estate and foundations' contributions to the school does more than support education, DeLong said. It sets a model of giving that student take with them for life so that when they are older they in turn will help others.

"(The fund) is an investment in the community," DeLong said.