Fight over; we will heal — resident of Molokai

By CHRIS HAMILTON Staff Writer
KAUNAKAKAI — Officially, Mildred “Millie” Hirose’s last day on the job as a Molokai Lodge housekeeper was May 22, six weeks after the 60,000-acre ranch ceased all operations after losing a bitter public fight with residents over an ambitious luxury residential development project.

After 11 years at the Molokai Ranch resort, Hirose, 58, was among 120 residents on this island of 7,500 suddenly out of work.

“It’s been hard just staying home, being bored and keeping away from the stores,” Hirose said last week while sitting outside the Manila camp home she shares with her retired husband, Harry, and 21-year-old daughter, Jennifer.

“I wish I were working,” she said. “I need to because of the medical insurance and the money. . . . In my sleep, I just worry about how I’m going to pay for everything.”

Despite the ranch’s unexpected closure, overall unemployment rates on Molokai actually went down from 7 percent in January to 5.1 percent at the end of May, said James Hardway, special assistant to the director of the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations. He attributed the decline to a seasonal increase in agricultural jobs.

Molokai residents said that Monsanto Co. has been hiring workers lately to help harvest its corn seed crops.

However, that doesn’t make life any easier in the long term for most erstwhile ranch workers, 58 of whom have applied for unemployment assistance.

Hirose is among the perhaps dozens of her former colleagues who are seeking full-time employment with benefits on Maui. She and her husband can’t afford the $500 monthly premium for health insurance. Hirose is counting on a new job at Maui Memorial Medical Center and plans to live with her son, who has an apartment in Kahului.

With rising prices of food and fuel, she said she worries about how they will manage to maintain two residences, pay for transportation on Maui and regular trips back home on the ferry. As a result, Hirose said lately she’s caught herself being grouchy and bossy with her family.

“It hurts,” she said.

The din over the Laau development that once spread across Molokai has shifted into resignation between the supporters of the plan to

build 200 multimillion-dollar homes on the slopes above Laau Point by Molokai Properties Ltd. and residents who declared the area a sacred site and essential to a subsistence way of life.

No one is gloating over Molokai Properties’ failure to win state Land Use Commission approval for its plans. The company has not said it’s given up.

Most Laau opponents interviewed simply said they were very pleased with the outcome so far but didn’t want their names published because they don’t want to offend former ranch employees, many of whom are family members.

It is not uncommon to hear people say they are glad that they will “Keep Molokai Molokai” or that the rural island will not become an overdeveloped and bustling playground for the rich, as has been happening on Maui and Oahu, anytime soon.

Hirose was among those who expressed mild resentment toward anti-Laau development leader Walter Ritte Jr., calling him “King Walter,” but she left it at that.

“That’s the funny thing about Molokai, after everyone went through the shock of the closing, you would expect people to be real upset and

place the blame on someone,” said Abel Kahoohanohano, Molokai business agent for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represented ranch workers.

“But they are very good-natured. There’s an attitude that there’s nothing we can do about it, so we’ll have to move on.”

Many direct their frustration toward Molokai Properties, seeing the ranch shutdown and recent threat to abandon utilities as retaliation. The company is owned by Singapore-based GuocoLeisure Ltd., a multinational corporation with billions in assets and luxury resort properties around the Pacific and in England.

Molokai Properties President and CEO Peter Nicholas has not responded to media inquiries.

In the lodge’s final days, Molokai Properties kept its staff busy boarding up windows and covering surfaces in sheets. The company held a public auction to sell off the lodge’s furniture, artwork, and even the food stocks and towels. Some former employees said they were initially told that they would get first crack at the inventory, but it was instead all sold at once.

Several Molokai residents said one particularly sad scene involved 40-year ranch cowboy and foreman Jimmy Duvauchelle and his family bidding on horses they had bred and trained. They were able to purchase only a handful of them, residents said.

Duvauchelle, one of the island’s most respected kupuna, was a proponent of the controversial plan for allowing the Laau development to keep the ranch and resort operations going and with grants of more than 50,000 acres of ranch land to a land trust and for conservations easements.

He was able to work out a deal to lease pasture and purchase the ranch’s 500 head of beef cattle. However, the company shuttered its popular rodeo arena in Maunaloa, along with the company town’s movie theater, restaurants, golf course, gift shop and gas station. Only the grocery store and the Big Wind Kite Factory, which does most of its business online, remain open.

“I think for the most part it helps people open their eyes to the true heart of Guoco and Molokai Ranch,” said Loretta Ritte, wife of Save Laau leader Walter Ritte. “I think people are just moving on and doing what they can. I’m sure people are still hurting, but all and all because we come from a small island, we will heal.”

She said what she really hopes, now that the fight is apparently over, is that the island’s residents can come together and embrace a new grass-roots community plan, called “Molokai: Future of a Hawaiian Island.” It emphasizes education, environmental and cultural issues as well as preserving agricultural and subsistence lifestyles over tourism and development.

Gov. Linda Lingle created a special task force to assist ranch employees and other Molokai residents in finding new options. State and county agencies have held job fairs and brought in specialists to assist them in navigating public welfare, health care and other programs. The task force’s chairman is Abbey Mayer, who is also the state planning director and was integral in setting up the failed Community Based Molokai Ranch Master Plan for Laau.

Mayer said the task force is trying to address those who fall between the gaps when it comes to state aid as well as assessing skills in order to connect individuals with work and job training. In another four to six months, the task force will begin to examine long-term solutions for Molokai, he said.

Former ranch employee Tessa Reich found work at the Puu O Hoku Ranch as a horseback guide, said her husband, Joe, who is a charter fisherman. They have helped make ends meet at home by going further “off the grid.” Years ago, they began moving to solar and wind power, drilled their own well and set up a septic system, he said.

“We consider ourselves lucky, but now I guess it is time to get the garden pumped up,” Joe Reich said. “We’ll get by.”

Honorato Ramos, 67, was a landscaper at the lodge for 10 years. He said he was forced into retirement by the ranch’s closing. He collects Social Security and unemployment and is eligible for government health coverage. He really still wants to work, though, he said.

“I look around, but no one is hiring,” Ramos said. “It’s not so good.”

For ’tweeners like former lodge employee Remedios Takase, 54, her unemployment and a part-time job raise the family income high enough that they can’t qualify for state assistance. She and Hirose, who are friends, said local religious charities have helped pick up some of the slack.

“There’s not lots of hope,” Takase said. “You can survive if you plant your own food in your garden. But paying the bills, the water, the lights, that’s the hard part.”