Lanai makeover includes caveat

The island of Lanai has become Hawaii’s laboratory of environmental innovation, thanks to the intervention of a billionaire landowner set on engineering his vision of a sustainable future.

The scope of change is staggering, and the strain is showing, as Honolulu Star-Advertiser business reporter Andrew Gomes and photographer Dennis Oda documented in the three-part series "Reinventing Lanai."

Still, if Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who paid $300 million two years ago to acquire 98 percent of the island, succeeds in achieving even a fragment of his utopian ideal, life on the island will advance in ways that should influence business and government policies statewide.

Most promising is Ellison’s investment to diversify Lanai’s economy beyond luxury tourism, which will require an equally intensive effort to improve education among island residents at all levels. Indeed, a university-affiliated research center is among the future enterprises Ellison’s management firm Pulama Lana‘i envisions, along with film studios, a professional tennis academy, renewable energy firms and diversified commercial agriculture operations that are wholly organic.

It might all seem so pie-in-the-sky, except that this is Ellison at the helm. The world’s fifth-richest man built the software giant Oracle Corp. from the ground up, and is known to spare no expense for pet projects. Lanai clearly falls into that category.

The great caution is that everyday island residents not be steamrolled in the energetic effort, which has begun on a more conventional footing, with upgrades to the islands existing hotels and resorts.

An initial desalination plant to support Ellison’s longer-term goals also is being developed now. Although not uncontrover-sial, it is one example of the sustainability initiatives that, if successful, could ultimately serve as a model for Hawaii’s other islands.

Increasing Lanai’s supply of potable water seems essential, if predictions that the island’s permanent population will double from 3,000 to 6,000 residents over the next 20 years are correct. In the face of such forecasts, the influential group Lanaians for Sensible Growth is wise to apply the same wary eye to Ellison’s grand plans as it did to former landowner David Murdock’s. That’s not being obstructionist, it’s being careful.

Preserving a cherished island lifestyle for those who have thrived on the island for generations should be as high a priority as making Lanai a magnet for Ellison’s billionaire buddies.

It’s difficult to imagine how the island can comfortably manage such rapid growth, especially given that the flood of construction workers needed for the current renovations is already taxing the island’s housing supply, driving up rents beyond what many hotel workers can reasonably afford.

But if native Lanaians returning to the island of their birth make up a large share of the future population growth, that would surely represent progress for a close-knit community that now has too few educational opportunities and too few high-paying jobs to stem the brain drain that has long vexed the island.

During the Murdock era, Lanai’s working folk relied largely on two newly built luxury resorts for employment, service-sector jobs with generally limited upward mobility. Their forebears toiled in the pineapple fields, during those pre-tourism decades when commercial monocropping dominated the island.

Ellison’s vision offers the more hopeful prospect that Lanai’s youngest generation could grow up amid a diversified economy that demands better educated, more highly skilled workers and pays them well.

Of all Lanai’s recent incarnations, that seems the most sustainable course for the long term.