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Kaluakoi closing
for 2 months

The owner of one of Molokai's
biggest employers says it
is pursuing a sale

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By Tim Ruel and Christine Donnelly
Star-Bulletin

The Kaluakoi Resort, one of Molokai's major employers, said today it is temporarily closing and laying off 99 employees while it tries to complete the stalled sale of the hotel and golf course.

The Kaluakoi's owners filed a notice yesterday with the state Department of Labor & Industrial Relations, saying hotel operations will cease Jan. 3 for up to 59 days.

The 99 employees, who make up nearly 90 percent of the Kaluakoi's work force of 111, will be temporarily laid off during that period. The remaining 12 workers will continue operation of the property's public and sewage utilities, the owners said.

"The reason it's closing temporarily is just to save money," spokesman Li Wang said today.

The 99 people represent nearly 5 percent of Molokai's 2,000 total jobs, according to the Labor Department.

The Friendly Isle's employment is already the worst in the state at 9.2 percent in November, though it has fallen from 14.7 percent in November 1999.

"It came as a complete surprise. I just found out (yesterday) as I came into work," said Keola Pidot, 22, a front desk employee who has been with the hotel since June.

Pidot said he would look for work on another island because jobs on Molokai were hard to find.

The news of the layoffs had "sort of filtered around from person to person," Pidot said last night.

In a statement today, company Executive Vice President Buddy Reed Jr. said the owners are still trying to close on the sale of the hotel to an unidentified buyer.

The resort is owned by Kukui (Molokai) Inc. and Kukui Resort Inc., subsidiaries of the Japanese company Tokyo Kosan Ltd.

In October, the owners had notified the Labor Department that they had a buyer for the resort in a deal that had been expected to close last month. The resort's employees would have been laid off when that deal closed, with the option of reapplying for jobs with the new owner.

Spokesman Wang could not say whether the original buyer was still negotiating for the hotel or if a new buyer had surfaced. He also said he did not know what would happen to the hotel or the 99 laid-off employees if a sale was not completed.

The western Molokai resort, which opened in 1977, includes the 18-hole Kaluakoi Golf Course and about 140 hotel rooms. Kukui bought it in the boom years of the late 1980s but put it up for sale more than a year ago, after economic decline in Japan and Hawaii.

Wang said the company is looking at ways to help laid-off employees.