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Isle rancher Waimanalo rancher Ron Watson has two plans for this weekend: a horse show on Oahu, and a trip to Baotou, China, to push a $130 million monorail project.
going full speed
with monorail projects
The Waimanalo horse trainer
is in final talks for his first U.S.
contract and also has reached
pacts with seven cities in ChinaBy Tim Ruel
Star-Bulletin
Watson, who was part of a group that failed to sell a fixed-rail system to Honolulu a few years ago, is finding a variety of markets for mass transit.
His company, Transco Holdings Inc., is in final negotiations for its first U.S. contract, to build a $150 million system in the bustling Ozark Mountain town of Branson, Mo., a tourism hot spot built around live entertainment.
Transco, Watson said, has also a reached contracts and agreements in seven cities in China, including the 7.5-mile project for Baotou, a city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
The Hawaii-based company also has a letter of intent signed in El Salvador in Central America. Its most ambitious project, however, appears to be an $800 million plan to build a 36-mile stretch of dual-rail transport in Bangladesh.
Watson, who moved to Hawaii from Texas 25 years ago, estimates he now spends 90 percent of his business time outside the state. Transco has offices in several international cities, including London and Beijing, and seven employees, said Watson, who owns most of the company's shares and is the company's chairman.
Watson's base is his seven-acre Waimanalo ranch, where he said he keeps sane by training horses for cutting, an increasingly popular Western sport of herding lone calves. It's no hobby for Watson, who competes regularly in Fort Worth, Texas. He is also president of the Hawaii Cutting Horse Association. Watson joked that he finds only a little time to design his worldwide monorails "in between shows."
"You have to really manage your time more than anything else, and if you can do that, it works out very well."
Watson, 56, previously worked for residential developer Thomas Gentry, who died in 1998, and for Fort Worth-based Transcontinental Development Co. His past projects include working on Chris Hemmeter's $350 million Hilton Waikoloa Village, which later sold for 25 cents on the dollar, and on the design of an international Olympic training center for Hawaii, which was never built.
Watson then got into monorails 11 years ago as a way to build his development business. But he didn't have much luck at first.
His company spent $4 million developing a fixed-rail system for Honolulu, only to watch the City Council abandon plans in 1992 for the estimated $1.9 billion project.
Five years later, Watson proposed connecting Waikiki with Aloha Tower and the Hawaii Convention Center, an idea that also never made it.
"I'm still licking my wounds over Honolulu. I'll never do that again," said Watson, who noted that he now has no business in the state.
Watson had also proposed monorail plans in 1998 for Las Vegas, but lost out to another developer, he said. Since then, he's learned to be more selective. "We have basically been very, very cautious about where we spend our time."
So far, Transco has no other U.S. projects except for Branson, which has built a tourism industry around its concert halls.
Watson said the Missouri town draws as many tourists each year as Hawaii. "People who go to Branson see an average of three shows a day. The traffic is so bad, by the time they get back to their hotel . . . it's too late to do anything else."
He noted his company typically does business with governments that can offer sweetened deals, such as property tax holidays or expedited permitting. In that regard, China has been helpful, he said.
Still, Watson said, even with the support of a local market, most monorail deals end up derailed, with either politics or finances killing the deal.
In Branson, a consulting firm that recently reviewed Transco's plans for the city concluded that the company had underestimated both time and the total investment it would take to build the 8-mile system.
Watson said he only gave time -- two years -- for the project's actual construction, excluding design and other necessary components, because that's what was called for in the initial request for proposals.
He added that Transco has an impetus to cut costs because its business plan is to pay for projects with its own financing, then recoup the debt by running the rail.
Once a rail paid for itself through passenger revenue, the company would then sell, he said.
Meanwhile, Transco is hoping to seal another seven projects in China over the next few months, Watson said. "We've found that Hawaii . . . has been an ideal location to work with mainland China."