Spending on Lanai Airport upgrades nears $28M

Duane Shimogawa

Reporter-Pacific Business News

Lanai majority owner Larry Ellison is getting quite a bit of help from the state and federal government to the tune of nearly $28 million for improvements to Lanai Airport, the sole airport on the Pineapple Island.

The state-owned airport is part of the 2 percent of the island that the billionaire CEO of Oracle Corp. doesn’t own.

The airport, which has a 5,000-foot-long runway, about 1,900 feet shorter than Kahului Airport on Maui, is scheduled to undergo $27 million in runway safety improvements.

Caroline Sluyter, spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation, told PBN that 90 percent of the $27 million is coming from federal funding.

The state has prepared, under the National Environmental Policy Act, a draft environmental assessment for the safety improvements.

Additionally, the state, with some help from the Federal Aviation Administration, is spending $900,000 for improvements to Lanai Airport, including a renovation of the terminal and an update to the airport’s master plan and noise program.

Meantime, Ellison’s Lanai Resorts LLC is currently in discussions with the state DOT regarding numerous improvements at Lanai Airport, Sluyter told PBN.

She pointed out that details of these improvements aren’t available at this time.

Ellison, who purchased 98 percent of Lanai about a year ago for a reportedly $300 million, has made known, through Lanai Resorts, that access to the island is a key issue that will be addressed.

Major steps in this initiative include acquiring Island Air in February and also buying another interisland airline — go! — which is expected to be officially announced on Friday.

Larry Ellison's Fantasy Island

By JULIAN GUTHRIE

Lanai, Hawaii

Marco Garcia for The Wall Street Journal

Larry Ellison stood on the white sand of a deserted beach, bordered by palm trees laden with coconuts. It didn't feel real that he could own the island of Lanai, he reflected.

It had been his far-fetched dream since he was in his 20s, when he first flew over one of the smallest of Hawaii's inhabited islands in a Cessna 172 and was captivated by the thousands of acres of pineapple fields.


In June 2012, Mr. Ellison, the co-founder and chief executive of technology giant Oracle, ORCL -0.73% bought Lanai for $300 million from American businessman David Murdock. Now he owns nearly everything on the island, including many of the candy-colored plantation-style homes and apartments, one of the two grocery stores, the two Four Seasons hotels and golf courses, the community center and pool, water company, movie theater, half the roads and some 88,000 acres of land. (2% of the island is owned by the government or by longtime Lanai families.)

For the first time, Mr. Ellison has publicly detailed his ambitious and costly plans for the 141-square-mile island. They include building an ultraluxury hotel on the pristine, white-sand beach facing Molokai and Maui and returning commercial agriculture to the clear-cut acres. He also plans to endow a sustainability laboratory that will help make the island "the first economically viable 100%-green community." And one of his biggest tasks: winning over the island's small, but wary, local population, one whose economic future is heavily dependent on his decisions.

"We want to make the island better for everyone, especially the people who live there," Mr. Ellison said in a recent interview after returning from Lanai, where he bought a home formerly owned by the comedian George Lopez. "We have the right climate and soil to grow the very best gourmet mangos and pineapples on the planet and export them year-round to Asia and North America. We can grow and export flowers and make perfume the old-fashioned way—directly from the flowers, like they do in Grasse, France. We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we're going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water."

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