Former Aloha head
hopes to make trash
firm take flight

Waste Management taps
A. Maurice Myers to turn
around company

From staff and wire reports

A. Maurice Myers, former head of Aloha Airlines, today was named to the top management post at Houston-based Waste Management Inc., the nation's largest trash company with 68,000 employees and more than $12 billion in annual revenues.

Myers, 59, was chairman, president and chief executive officer of Yellow Corp., the largest U.S. less-than-truckload freight carrier. He joins Waste Management tomorrow as chairman, CEO and president as it attempts to fix its accounting system, improve customer service and boost its stock price. He succeeds Chairman Ralph Whitworth and President Robert Miller, interim CEO.

Waste Management said a recent audit will force it to take charges in excess of $1 billion. The company has issued four profit warnings since July, when it said it overestimated trash revenue and incorrectly accounted for costs of closing landfills and other items.

Myers joined Aloha in August 1983 and was president and CEO of the parent Aloha Airgroup Inc. when he left in December 1993. He spent two years as president and chief operating officer of Tempe, Ariz.-based America West Airlines Inc. and joined Overland Park, Kan.-based Yellow Corp., a nationwide trucking business in April 1996. He has been a director of Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. since 1991 and in September was named to the board of directors of Honolulu-based Cheap Tickets Inc.

Waste Management operates three landfills in Hawaii. They are the Kekaha Landfill on Kauai, Waimanalo Gulch on Oahu and the West Hawaii Sanitary Landfill at Waikoloa on the Big Island.