IN the world of business, Chris Hemmeter has failed -- at least temporarily. He has filed for personal bankruptcy with debts reportedly at $87 million and assets of only $720,000. Hemmeter’s cards
were on the tableHis is the kind of record that is easy for cynics to knock -- a big failure in building what is now the Hilton Waikoloa Village on the Big Island, which resold for about 25 cents on the dollar on $350 million invested, an even bigger failure in trying to build the world's biggest and grandest casino in New Orleans.
He was the dreamer behind these and a dozen other projects that no one would have dared attempt until he did. Some, like the Hyatt Regency Maui, which seemed like Disneyland West when it was created, continue as great successes.
The failed Waikoloa Village, which out-Disneyed the Hyatt Regency Maui, remains the biggest private employer on the Big Island.
He charmed me years ago by detailing how ex-President Jimmy Carter came to him after visiting the Hyatt Regency Maui and staying at his home in Kahala to ask him to design the Carter presidential library, museum and world peace center in Atlanta atop the hill where Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman watched the city burn.
Hemmeter proposed that much of the center should be sunk into the hill to avoid being environmentally insensitive. Its surface structures would be rounded and graceful with ponds, flowers and an entryway flying the flags of the United Nations.
Too good to be real, I thought. But a few years later my wife and I visited Atlanta and there it was, just as conceived, with a small plaque thanking Hemmeter. Jimmy Carter's worldwide peace work is based there.
That made me the Hemmeter believer I still am. He has been called a con man because of his dreams. But his cards have always been on the table, not below. Even his criticized "romancing" of Louisiana officials by flying them to Colorado and Hawaii to see his earlier projects was totally in the open.
Both Carter and Hemmeter attracted hostility from Atlanta design firms because Carter spurned their designs and chose Hemmeter's instead of their proposed masses of concrete.Writing in Honolulu magazine about Hemmeter's New Orleans casino fiasco, Editor John Heckathorn says a part of the problem was resentment by New Orleans big wheels of Hemmeter as an outsider coming in and threatening to walk off with a pot full of money.
Hemmeter played the game and lost but he played it fair and square, so far as I know. He had several anchors for his dream balloons when he was in Hawaii. Diane Plotts, still active in Honolulu, was his financial right arm from the time he started into business developing restaurants in the Ilikai Hotel.
"If we couldn't do it honestly, we didn't do it," she says.
OTHERS back her up. She joined his Hemmeter Enterprises board in New Orleans as an outside director, charged with being a watchdog. It was the same as here , she said. If a deal wasn't clean it wasn't done. A partner was indicted for taking a kickback but they didn't know it until afterwards.
New Orleans corruption makes wheeling and dealing in Hawaii look like child's play, she said, but Hemmeter stayed apart from it.
It's worth remembering that taking chances is what free enterprise is all about. Entrepreneurs invest in the hope of profiting. Hemmeter and his investors took big chances on his dream conceptions. Some won. Some lost. But Hemmeter stayed honest.
Plotts joins other Hawaii admirers of Hemmeter who think at age 58 a comeback is still in the cards for him.