Billionaire’s Plans For Hawaiian Island - Larry Ellison hasn’t said much, but some think he could make Lanai a hub for one of his passions. Tiny Hawaiian Island Will See if New Owner Tilts at Windmills, Lanai should be the very picture of tropical tranquillity, the kind of Pacific island where Gilligan set ground. Just 3,135 people live on its 141 square miles. There are no traffic lights, movie theaters or bakeries. There is just one gas station and three main roads. It is ringed with vast and empty beaches, accessible only by four-wheel drive. A visitor can roam its hills for hours without encountering another living being.
Yet for all its seeming serenity, Lanai – a privately owned island in easy sight of Maui’s western shore – is torn these days by economic and cultural conflict, struggling with its identity and an uncertain future after its reclusive residents learned that their island had been sold to the reclusive billionaire owner of a software company.
Since James Drummond Dole bought Lanai from a rancher 90 years ago, the island has undergone a series of wrenching economic transformations. Under Dole, it became the world’s largest pineapple plantation, known as Pineapple Island, with bristling fields and a colony of workers. When Dole moved its operations overseas in the late 1980s, Lanai turned to tourism, opening two high-end resorts where rooms go for as much as $1,100 a night, providing a new source of employment for this community.
But when those resorts struggled with the recent economic downturn and the challenge of bringing tourists to a remote island with single-propeller air service, the island’s owner proposed building a field of 45-story turbine windmills, across bluffs and beaches covering over a quarter of the island, to produce energy to sell to Oahu. The plan polarized residents, dividing those who saw the turbines as the economic salvation of their struggling island from those who treasured its wild and undeveloped isolation.
“It’s awful, just awful,” said Robin Kaye, one of the opponents, sweeping his arm across the land where the windmills would rise, a tumble of otherworldly rock formations framed by views across the Pacific to Maui and Molokai. “There are families who won’t talk to each other anymore. It has really ripped us up.”
Yet for all its seeming serenity, Lanai – a privately owned island in easy sight of Maui’s western shore – is torn these days by economic and cultural conflict, struggling with its identity and an uncertain future after its reclusive residents learned that their island had been sold to the reclusive billionaire owner of a software company.
Since James Drummond Dole bought Lanai from a rancher 90 years ago, the island has undergone a series of wrenching economic transformations. Under Dole, it became the world’s largest pineapple plantation, known as Pineapple Island, with bristling fields and a colony of workers. When Dole moved its operations overseas in the late 1980s, Lanai turned to tourism, opening two high-end resorts where rooms go for as much as $1,100 a night, providing a new source of employment for this community.
But when those resorts struggled with the recent economic downturn and the challenge of bringing tourists to a remote island with single-propeller air service, the island’s owner proposed building a field of 45-story turbine windmills, across bluffs and beaches covering over a quarter of the island, to produce energy to sell to Oahu. The plan polarized residents, dividing those who saw the turbines as the economic salvation of their struggling island from those who treasured its wild and undeveloped isolation.
“It’s awful, just awful,” said Robin Kaye, one of the opponents, sweeping his arm across the land where the windmills would rise, a tumble of otherworldly rock formations framed by views across the Pacific to Maui and Molokai. “There are families who won’t talk to each other anymore. It has really ripped us up.”
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