Howzit Howard

What ' s going on in Waikiki

The announcement by its management that the Royal Hawaiian Hotel will close for renovations next year is a partial surprise, but not unexpected altogether, and there appears to be a good chance that labor and management will be able to work collaboratively to save the jobs affected. In the last contract talks, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., the company behind the Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis and W brands, told Local 5 is had major renovation plans that would take rooms out of service and force furloughs. I don't know what was said in closed-door negotiating sessions, but the public discussion focused mainly on plans to reinvent the Princess Kaiulani hotel. Keith Vieira, senior vice president of Starwood for Hawaii and the South Pacific, who appeared on KGMB9 this morning to discuss the plan, hinted that the original idea may have been to close some rooms, then others, so the hotel did not have to close altogether at any point. But doing all the work at once can be cheaper and faster. That matters if the project costs millions and if the company is going to keep paying health insurance while employees are furloughed. And it may. Vieira did not say so, but he did acknowledge that management and the union plan to try to work some kind of way to keep the employees whole. He specified that he doesn't want to lose any employees and admitted that many of them may be considered desireable hires by rival hotels. Local 5 says its priorities are (1) no break in medical coverage, and (2) preserving seniority. Vieira is a hard-headed businessman but he is also a guy who worked his way up through the ranks, so he's not the sort who can't imagine what it's like to be on the rank-and-file end of such a matter. And if he forgets, Local 5 will be happy to remind him. But the best hope for the employees is the economic reality that it's hard at any time to find people with the high octane aloha to serve guests in a high-end hotel, and harder still at a time of 2.6% unemployment. Many, perhaps most of the employees may find that they are never idle at all: Starwood wants to transfer them to other properties. Starwood holds the management contracts for all of the Waikiki hotels owned by Kyo-ya Corp.: the Royal Hawaiian, the Moana Surfrider, the Sheraton Waikiki, the Princess Kaiulani and the W (up the road on the Gold Coast side of Diamond Head.) If there aren't enough openings at these properties, Starwood also manages resort hotels on Kauai, Maui and the Big Island. The project is scheduled to begin next June and take just a few months. Warning to furloughed employees: construction schedules have a way of slipping in the best of times, and some kinds of construction foremen are in short supply at the moment. But it is fair to assume Starwood will seek a fast turnaround because every day the Royal is dark means a lot of lost revenue and the possibility that some regular customers will discover and enjoy a rival property. In other news... The Italian Film Festival is on. (I inadvertently called it the Hawaii International Film Festival on the air this morning.) Check newspaper for local listing but tonight's screening is at the Doris Duke Theatre. The bankruptcy judge in the Hawaiian suit against Go has ruled that Go parent Mesa did indeed destroy a business plan that Hawaiian lawyers were entitled to see. KGMB9 lets me continue to do "Everybody's Business" on PBS Hawaii, which airs Fridays at 7:30 p.m., and this week's show will focus on the housing crisis. I also still play classical music on Hawaii Public Radio on Saturday mornings 5am-7am. This labor of love is called "Howard's Day Off." Set your alarm now!

Sugar land, the sweet and sour

The U.S. Department of Agriculture this week issued its final report on 2007 sugarcane production. Hawaii production rose from 1,681,000 tons in 2006 to 1,778,000 tons in 2007. Sounds good, right? But Hawaii is only the fourth largest sugarcane producing state. Read this:

1. Florida: 14,612,000 tons.
2. Louisana: 12,180,000 tons.
3. Texas: 1,841,000 tons.
4. Hawaii: 1,778,000 tons.

Not only is Hawaii responsible for less than 1/15th of the nation's 30.4 million ton sugarcane production, but there is sugar beet production in many other states. Sugar, like pineapple, stopped being a major economic driver for Hawaii when production shifted to places with cheaper labor, chiefly Central America. What's left of sugar in Hawaii is the small Gay & Robinson operation on Kauai and Alexander & Baldwin's Hawaii Commercial & Sugar division on Maui.  HC&S is the exclusive source of the contents of "Sugar in the Raw." That's turbinado sugar, which is only lightly refined so you still get a faint taste of molasses. Sales rose after the packets were reprinted to say that the product was made in Maui. It's instructive and pleasing that HC&S was able to hit upon a way to maintain some sugar production and make an occasional profit. But don't think this means Hawaii specialty agriculture is secure. All agriculture in Hawaii is endangered -- not by cheap labor in Central America; premium branding has essentially solved that problem -- but by the high value of the land if it is developed instead of farmed. Mainland stock advisors have written favorable reports on Alexander & Baldwin Inc. (Nasdaq: ALEX) based not on its sugar and coffee divisions or even on its Matson shipping subsidiary but on the future development potential of its agriculture properties. Alexander & Baldwin management felt obliged recently to tell mainland investors on a conference call that they intended to accelerate their efforts to capture the value of some marginal farming lands by selling them to others who will want to build on them. The real news in the announcement, I've decided, was in how limited A&B's plans were. Its executives confined their comments to land which, while zoned for agriculture, isn't really very good for farming, and they said they wanted to position the land so that it was used by wealthy people who want to build estates in remote areas, which will have less impact on scenery and resources than 1,000 houses. But the long-term issue remains: with the population growing worldwide as well as here, and with the beauty and comfort of Hawaii widely known worldwide, there is and will continue to be enormous pressure to develop more land. We all need to watch this. The beauty of Hawaii, and for that matter the value of land that has already been developed, depends on leaving plenty of remaining land undeveloped altogether, or confined to farming, which is the next best thing. There is no way to keep farmland in farming except to require it by law -- zoning law is the closest any local government comes to having police powers -- or to create such powerful financial incentives to farm the land that no one in his right mind would consider putting houses on it.

go! figure: the porn defense

The interisland airline war just got weird. Mesa Air, parent of go!, is in court, accused by its legacy rivals of improperly using proprietary data and documents it gleaned when it came forward as a prospective buyer during the bankruptcies of Hawaiian Airlines and Aloha Airlines. Until this week the matter turned on mostly dry legal issues. Now Mesa has isolated one of its senior executives, its chief financial officer, first putting him on leave and then claiming in court that computer files pertinent to the case were accidentally deleted by him while he was deleting porn. Allegations of unlawful preservation by Mesa of confidential files from Hawaiian have centered on this executive. Hawaiian lawyers said he deleted files they had a right to see as they prepared their case. The pornography erasure defense -- "he wasn't doing questionable thing A, he was doing questionable thing B" -- was met with disbelief by Hawaiian lawyers. But as near I can tell, Mesa lawyers didn't snicker or anything. I'll leave it to the court to try to figure out what the truth is. But I can tell you this: displaying pornographic images on your workplace computer is basically illegal, because it is against the law to create "a toxic workplace," and people have lost their jobs over it. Anything you say, do, or display at the office that offends co-workers can be a serious offense. Some have apologized for their transgression, expecting to be rebuked, only to be fired by an employer that wants to innoculate itself from a lawsuit. Ironically it may be better for Mesa stock if the market disbelieves the story and thinks it's a legal expedient. Otherwise, Mesa's finances may be managed by someone who surfs porn at work and isn't good with computers.

Do you get too little sleep?

A British study of 10,000 people over 17 years found that their heart disease death rates doubled when they went from seven hours of a sleep a night to less than five. The researchers dialed out all kinds of other factors that could have affected the outcome. Still, here are some observations beyond what I said about this on the air Tuesday:

• The 10,000 were all government workers. Maybe government workers are different from other people. I mean, apart from having more job security.
• The 10,000 were all Brits. Maybe they have some "pre-existing condition" that predisposes them to having a heart attack from fatigue (upper lip rigidity, maybe.)

Since my profession has required me to wake up between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. for 30 of the past 37 years, it won't surprise you that I am keenly interested in sleep research. An Army study in the 1980s was particularly intriguing. It found that soldiers tested after two nights of limited sleep actually did better than usual. But after three nights of only a few hours of sleep, they started to make a lot of mistakes. It's also interesting that one study after another has concluded that you can't "catch up" on sleep. What makes this so fascinating is that we all have known the pleasure of sleeping in on a day off after a sleep-deprived week. If it doesn't help, why does it feel so good? The answer might be one of the following:

• The researchers are wrong and should get more rest.
• It has something to do with how they define benefit. Maybe you benefit psychologically by having more dreams, but not physically from the extra sleep hours. 

I'm the only on-air "cast member" of Sunrise who has routinely worked earlybird shifts before. My advise to the others is to schedule a two hour to three hour nap every afternoon and then get four to five hours at night. The human body can and does get used to sleeping in two increments. And you benefit psychologically from being up and about between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. when your loved ones are home from work or school. I don't know how much credence my colleagues give advice from someone with deep bags under his eyes. But I've had them since my twenties, when a doctor actually accused me of lying about my drinking. (I told him I sometimes went weeks without drinking because I didn't care for it as much as most people do. It was, and is, the truth, but he didn't believe me, and cited the bags under my eyes.) Anyway, that's my advice. Sleep on it.

U.S. tourism slows

Tourism pumps trillions of dollars a year into the U.S. economy. But the nationwide visitor industry is growing at less than a quarter of the overall pace of U.S. economic expansion, according to a Monday report from Washington, D.C. The U.S. Commerce Department, using figures from the second quarter, reckons that the U.S. economy is growing at an annual pace of 4% but the tourism sector is growing only 0.9%, despite more tourism hiring in the previous quarter. Airline business overall has actually been shrinking, especially international business. There are several reasons for this:

• Americans have been losing the fear of overseas travel that erupted after 9/11, so more of us have been vacationing outside the United States.
• Some Europeans who disapprove of the Iraq intervention are disinclined to visit America just now.
• Discount carriers in Europe have made it cheap for Europeans to take European vacations. 
• With the yen strong, the Japanese have been taking more European vacations. But lately the yen has also strengthened against the dollar, making Hawaii vacations cheaper. Sure enough, Japanese arrivals bottomed out in July.

Hawaii tourism remains at or near historic highs, despite massive increases in hotel room rates. But those rate increases appear to be squeezing restaurateurs and tour companies, since Hawaii visitor spending is up much less than the increase in hotel room charges. In other news... A magazine for new mothers has an article called, "Pimp Your Stroller." I am not making this up. Marcel Marceau died and we said nothing about it. Your assignment: Figure out how a mime would think outside the box. Malcolm Forbes once wrote a book collecting famous alleged last words. The book's title: "They Went Thataway." The best entry in the book: "Either that wallpaper goes or I do."

Look out below!

No, that's not as classy a slogan as "E Pluribus Unum," but the dollar has weakened so much this week that it might as well be "Vidi plungibus." The yen also weakened Friday but the trend for the summer as a whole has been one of appreciation, and the yen now stands at 115 to the dollar. Economists think it will strengthen more, but even if it stabilizes here it means Japanese visitors will find their money travels 10% further in Hawaii than it did in the spring. The euro bought $1.40 Friday, the most ever, so this might not be the optimal year to see Venice, but it's a good year for Germans and Britons to visit Waikiki, and we might also see a bottoming out of the declining Canadian arrivals now that the Canadian dollar has finally achieved parity with the U.S. dollar. By the way, gold has blown way past $700 to a 28-year high. Gold prices rise when investors get nervous about other investments like stocks -- and bundles of mortgage notes, which once were considered a safe investment until all those subprime borrowers began defaulting. "Sunrise" has now been on one week. What a wild ride it's been -- remember, most of my previous television work has been done from an otherwise empty newspaper office. Your in-person, email and phone comments -- I reckon I've spoken to more than 100 people about the new show -- have been very kind. Steve and Grace and Jeff and Ramsay and I hope to polish this show into a service that helps you get your morning started, sending you to work or school informed, in a good mood, and generally ready for the day.

Musculature in the Closet

Steve has taken some ribbing this week for his high school appearance in a borderline beefcake calendar. It could have been worse. In any number of ways. Thank goodness you didn't see the bare-chested commercial for a non-existent brand of jeans that I did in my thirties (I was trim but not hard-bodied by any stretch.) Grace Lee did show me wearing a tux in a bowling alley, back in Washington, D.C., when some friends and I would stage sporting events, do facetious play-by-play with fake commercials and news bulletins, and adjourn to a restaurant where the participants, including some fairly well-known broadcasters, could watch the event and hear what we said about them. From a golf tournament: "I'm not sure what his handicap is. I think it's palsy." From another golf event: "He has an excellent lie. He tells it as often as he can." From a news bulletin about a possible change in Soviet leadership: "But I do not think the premier's condition is that serious: Radio Moscow is playing banjo music." Baby pictures can be embarrassing. I'm truly fortunate that I possess some reasonably nice ones. My son Sean, who is a respected film and video editor in Hollywood, appears on one of my old videotapes of a bowling tournament, maybe 10 years old, saying, "Gentlemen, start your bowling balls!" My daughter, a gifted high-tech recruiter in the Washington, D.C., area, can be heard at the age of five on one of my old audio tapes babbling newscast-talk after hearing the Mutual Broadcasting System news theme. (She keeps talking about "President John Reagan.") All week long, my first full-time foray into commercial television news has left me wondering what the blooper reel will look like a few years from now. My strategy is to encourage Jeff and Steve to do wilder things than I do.

On the beach

Kyo-Ya Corp., owner of the four Sheraton/Westin hotels in Waikiki, wants to bring back the missing beach in front of the Sheraton Waikiki. The company has an idea of how to do it but has taken some pains not to simply announce it, because a lot of attempts to re-engineer Waikiki and other shorelines have failed in the past, and a lot of people are skeptical when someone says he can build something that will prevent the ocean from taking back the new sand and depositing it on the reef. Surfers, whose opinion is informed by plenty of knowledge of how the waves break, have not taken an official view yet, though some of them wish engineers would stop trying to control nature. Supporters of making a fresh attempt to rebuild the beach say some structures do soften the wave action and the resulting erosion. Waikiki is a concave beach -- it curves inward -- and the Sheraton Waikiki sits at the most inward point, with virtually no beach at all. There used to be a beach there but waves pulled the sand away. What Kyo-ya is thinking about, apart from pumping a lot of sand from the reef back onto land, is building three "groins," basically Y-shaped rock wharves, similar if not identical to what was build at the tip of Magic Island. Nina Wu wrote a really good article about this in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. (There are some excellent reporters working for the Bulletin, for the Honolulu Advertiser, and for my alma mater Pacific Business News, and I'll mention them here from time to time.) Many of us tend to oppose any attempt to do a shorefront buildout -- it feels like the right position to take, environmentally speaking -- even though it is decades too late to do anything "natural" in Waikiki. On the other hand, engineers always seem convinced that their next idea is foolproof, and this has often proven not to be the case when it comes to diversion of currents. To avoid getting too deep into the local situation I'll give you a mainland example. The Army Corps of Engineers spent generations shoring up the banks of the Mississippi River to prevent flooding. The result is a river that flows so fast and strong that when it does flood, the floods are inevitably devastating, way worse than before; and the rich sediment that used to nurture adjacent farms now flows all the way into the Gulf of Mexico. In other news... The organizers of Tuesday's JobQuest job fair estimate that 3,500 people came to the fair seeking jobs. Another 500 worked at the employer exhibits. I spent more than two hours at the fair and noticed something interesting: people were a lot better dressed than at previous fairs. Also, for some reason a lot of employers were looking for accountants. The Fed cut interest rates twice as much as expected and created a global stock rally. But one expert told CBS interest rate cuts are like potato chips -- you need more than one. This gives a whole new meaning to crunching the numbers.

Visitors: over 6 million served

By my count, which extrapolates the state's arrivals estimates, we're hitting 6 million 2007 visitors this week, probably today.  Total arrivals hit 6 million earlier this month, but the state figures that about 15% of arrivals are returning locals, so 6,150,000 arrivals equals 6 million visitors, to the extent that the state is right in its assumptions and estimates. So far this year, arrivals are just a few thousand higher than last year, but Japanese arrivals, which were down noticeably until the end of June, seem to have bottomed out, possibly because the yen has strengthened a lot against the dollar, making yen travel farther in Waikiki.