Five years change Maui

Sunday's and today's edition of The Maui News featured a meticulously researched look at Maui Land & Pineapple Co., the last major corporation based on the island, and how majority stockholder Steve Case and his hand-picked CEO David Cole have been running the company since 2003.

The two Honolulu-born men came back to the islands as dot-com wizards of a sort. Case was a co-founder of Internet pioneer America Online, and Cole was an executive with AOL from 1994 to 1997 - wheeler-dealers in the information age. Perhaps there was a yearning to own something more substantial than a business based on invisible electrons and the stock gains that allowed Case to buy control of 28,600 acres of Maui and 22,000 acres of Kauai.

Case brought in Cole and Cole brought in high-pressure, quick reacting management to a company used to low-key family ownership. Maui Pineapple Co. was largely the creation of J. Walter Cameron, the son-in-law of Maui Agricultural Co. Manager Harry Alexander Baldwin. Maui Pineapple Co. became Maui Land & Pineapple Co. under Cameron's son, Colin, who created Kapalua.

In the last five years, Maui Land & Pineapple Co. has sold 4,000 acres, reduced pineapple cultivation from 6,740 acres to about 2,000 acres, closed the cannery, invested millions in overhauling Kapalua and laid off more than 800 workers.

Critics - and there are many from the days when the Cameron family was in charge - say Cole is impulsive, and he admits to making costly mistakes. Everyone can agree the last vestiges of Maui's plantation era, with its feudal faults and what many would call "heart," has disappeared.

Real estate has always been the basis of business in the islands. Once it was a matter of acquiring power through the ownership of land. Today money is made by selling land, exactly what Case and Cole are doing to make up for multi-million-dollar losses in farming and resort operations. The eventual development of the old pine fields will play a major role in the future of Maui, just as the creation of Maui Land & Pineapple Co. did in Maui's past.

As has been said, the only constant is change.