HC&S’ plantation equipment to be auctioned

More than 450 pieces of equipment and machinery from Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., including Tournahaulers, CAT and John Deere equipment and Ford and Toyota trucks, will be auctioned off online and at the Puunene Mill site next month

Alexander & Baldwin, the parent company of HC&S, said this week that auction house Global Partners is auctioning equipment left over from sugar operations, which ended this month.

Global Partners' website lists the live webcast auction on Jan. 18 and 19, beginning at 10 a.m. HST. There will be two inspection days, Jan. 16 and 17, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. A Global Partners official said that the auction and inspection are open to the public but prospective bidders must register either onsite or online for the web auction.

Items will sold "as-is, where-is," according to the website, and all sales are final.

More than 180 photos of red HC&S pickup trucks, bulldozers, Tournahaulers, machine shop equipment, excavators and other equipment and vehicles are featured on the website. No starting prices were listed as of Thursday morning.

The auction page can be found at gaauction.com/events/hcs.

The auction comes about a month after the Puunene Mill went dark and its smokestacks shut off, ending the 145-year business on Maui and the last remaining sugar plantation in the state.

The complex continues to use electricity for safety, security and other needs, but it stopped producing its own power Dec. 16 and began buying power from Maui Electric Co.

Leftover fiber from the sugar cane, a renewable energy source called bagasse, used to be sent to the mill's power plant to be used as fuel. But, without sugar cane, that is no longer done.

As areas of the mill no longer needed power, they were isolated and have become dark, the company said.

Currently, 350 HC&S employees remain on the payroll, with their last day of work today. But much of the work wound down last week.

And since last week, A&B said that 200 employees have found new jobs. In addition, 99 employees have retired and 13 have relocated away from Maui. At the beginning of 2016, HC&S had 675 workers.

In January, A&B announced its plan to end of sugar operations, citing $30 million in losses in 2015 with projections of more significant losses.

The company will turn to diversified agriculture for its 36,000 acres of former sugar cane land.

For about a year, A&B has been testing different grasses on 175 acres with a herd of just over 100 cattle from Ulupalakua Ranch. The cattle are moved to new grazing sites daily.

Some sugar cane fields were not harvested, although A&B could not say how many. Those fields will be chopped and mulched to leave a protective layer of vegetative matter on the surface to minimize erosion. The work will be done by the remaining employees, which company officials have said will number around 20.

A&B said it has no plans to farm sugar cane as part of its diversification efforts, although there have been "some expressions of interest" from a few parties to grow sugar cane on a small scale. A&B said it would be involved with any future sugar cane farming only as a landlord.

• Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com.