"It's still going down. Construction is still declining," said Leroy Laney, chief economist at First Hawaiian Bank. "We're still losing construction jobs. In 1995 we lost over 5 percent," he said.

Laney said the slump has been particularly long and not many businesses can weather a setback that lasts that long. Construction is cyclical, he said, but the traditional cycle is more like four or five years on the rise and two years of decline.

"This is a big shakeout in the industry," Laney said. Still, he added, it came after a long boom period of seven years or so.

Some local construction business leaders say there are signs that the industry will pick up next year but, even then, it won't look anything like it did in the boom years of the late 1980s.

The industry's four-year recession forced businesses to be leaner and meaner, with contractors bidding as close as they can to their bottom line just to get work. That means using as few employees as possible and cutting the administrative and office overhead side of the business to the bone to keep costs at rock bottom.

"Something's going to happen, whether it's renovation work around the convention center or new construction. We've still got to get in the lowest bid that's possible," said James C. Ramirez, senior vice president at Fletcher Pacific Construction.

Fletcher isn't doing too badly right now because it recently won two school construction jobs for the state government, worth a total of about $45 million, and a high-rise condominium project, One Archer Lane, for more than $50 million.

"But we have to go in with our eyes open so we know what we're getting into. On the two school jobs, we were pretty low (in bidding)," Ramirez said.

Hawaiian Dredging & Construction Co. won some important contracts over the last year or two and says it is weathering the storm after a long, hard period.

But it isn't easy, said William Wilson, company president.

"You have to make the changes that are necessary," he said. That has meant cutting administrative staff and some workers in the field, and tight but careful bidding on jobs.

"You have to bid or negotiate every job with expectations of doing things faster or better than you've done before," Wilson said.

His company, like the one Ramirez works for, is big enough and flexible enough to have made it through the rough times.

Many smaller contractors didn't make it, and the smaller businesses that have survived the slump don't expect to be making money any time soon.

"It's really affected us. Our workload has reduced exactly in half," said Albert Hamamoto, executive vice president of Ralph S. Inouye Co. That has been true for the last three years, and the com mercial-industrial specialist company has seen its staff fall from a peak of about 100 to around 30.

Hamamoto doesn't see it getting any better this year.

"There's no hotels, there's no apartments," he said. Bidding too low, just to get work in such a competitive environment, and ending up with costs higher than the bids has caused contractors to fail, he said.

The prolonged slump has taken its toll, economists say. But they note that it came after a long boom period and despite the losses, the industry is still bigger than it was a decade ago in real dollar volume, adjusted for inflation.

However, many workers who were busy during the boom times cannot now find work. The numbers detail a bleak story:

--State unemployment figures show the industry lost 400 jobs in February after losing 700 in January. February was the fourth month in a row in which construction jobs decreased.

--The state Department of Labor says there are about 25,000 jobs in construction now, down from 34,000 in the peak year of 1991.

--Government agencies selected contractors for less than $800 million worth of work last year, down about 27 percent from the previous year.

--Building permits, which represent new contracts being awarded for future work, are also down. Total private-sector building permits in Hawaii issued last year came to just under $1.6 billion, down 8.5 percent from 1994. The total has not been that low since 1988.

--In the 1991 peak, the value of completed construction projects in Hawaii was running at about $4.5 billion annually. Last year it was at about $3.2 billion. Paul Brewbaker, chief economist at Bank of Hawaii who researched those figures for the bank's annual economic report, says he expects construction to remain at the $3.2 billion level this year.

Noting that bank economists are predicting the start of a turnaround next year, Nottage said

they have access to a lot more sophisticated information than he does, particularly regarding future trends.

At his level, though, he doesn't see any improvement coming next year.

"My gut feeling is that this isn't going to be any better," he said, from talking to architects and others who should be preparing upcoming jobs.

Brewbaker said he expects island construction to come out of its cyclical trough next year, but he cautioned that with state and county governments still in a financial bind, the private sector is going to have to lead the way.

First Hawaiian's Laney said that even though there are some highly visible projects ongoing now - such as the H-3 freeway, the Hawaii Convention Center and the nearly finished First Hawaiian Tower - the late 1980s boom was in hotels and resorts and there is not much of that work now.

"We still have something of a glut there. You're not going to see a lot of new rooms," he said.

One saving aspect for the industry, however, may come from refurbishing older hotels, particularly those near the convention center, Laney said.

"Business travelers (attending conventions) don't want to stay in a dump, but they don't need beachfront rooms either."

Hawaiian Dredging & Construction's Wilson said he agrees with economists that construction is likely to rebound next year but doesn't expect it to get back to where it was in the late 1980s.

"I don't think anyone's suggesting that it's going back to where it was," he said.

Wilson said the boom of the last decade and into the start of this decade was fueled by projects that didn't turn out to be economically feasible, mostly the massive resort projects funded by Japanese investors during their boom years.

Future projects will be only those that are clearly economical, Wilson said. His company

succeeded in getting the recently completed renovation job at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on the Big Island and has a $100 million-plus contract to redo the Sheraton Maui.

Construction union leader Walter Kupau said the state government could do more to help get construction restarted but mentioned community attitude, too.

"First of all, the community has an anti-business attitude toward developers. Everybody's anti-this or anti-that," said Kupau, financial secretary and treasurer of Hawaii Carpenters Union Local 745.

The union has 1,800-plus unemployed on Oahu, an additional 500 to 600 out of work on Kauai since the end of Hurricane Iniki reconstruction work, and others finding no work around the state, said the leader of the 8,000-member union.

Kupau said that in the last three months of 1995, needy members withdrew more than $8 million from a union annuity fund. Many have left the state, he said.