Washing cars, trimming hedges and picking macadamia nuts weren’t part of the job description when Gina Enzweiler became the floral director for luxury hotel operator Four Seasons on Lanai. But she’s getting paid for such work this year.

Enzweiler is one of 675 employees at the Manele Bay Hotel and The Lodge at Koele who have been kept on the payroll while the hotels are being renovated. Pulama Lanai, the company managing 98 percent of the island owned by billionaire Larry Ellison, has created “task force” crews and deployed them throughout the island.

“We are doing some amazing stuff,” said Enzweiler, whose crew largely helps seniors with common chores such as washing window screens and less common chores such as removing 5,000 pounds of golf balls from the yard of a retired golf course worker. “Our motto is: How can we help?”

Other crews help protect natural resources, maintain landscaping and preserve historic and cultural sites.

In a way, Pulama has created a small privatized version of the 1930s Public Works program where the federal government put unemployed masses to work on infrastructure projects during the Great Depression.

Carl Bonham, director of the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, compared the impact of laying off all Four Seasons workers on Lanai with U.S. unemployment that peaked during the Great Depression at about 25 percent.

On Lanai, hotel workers represent 42 percent of the 1,600-person workforce among a total population of about 3,000. Fewer than 50 people are unemployed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Because hotel workers represent such a large portion of the population, their spending is critical to supporting other local Lanai businesses including restaurants, supermarkets and the island’s sole gas station.

“There’s money still flowing within the community,” said Kurt Matsumoto, Pulama Lanai’s chief operating officer. “That’s millions of dollars being injected, and allowing that money to free-flow into the community.”

Of course, keeping Four Seasons workers employed benefits Pulama Lanai, which owns the hotels, by preserving the trained labor force. Layoffs likely would have led some residents to leave Lanai for work, perhaps permanently. Attracting new workers to the island can be difficult and costly.

“The employment initiative to redeploy people probably makes good sense for Pulama from the perspective of community relations, and ensuring that the workforce will be there when (the hotel) reopens,” Bonham said.

Job openings

About 100 employees opted to work at Four Seasons hotels in other locations from Jackson Hole, Wyo., to Shanghai .

The other 575 or so hotel workers stayed on the island and have been paid full wages, including tips, based on reported tips from the prior year.

Some of these workers remained in their usual jobs, such as cooks making three meals a day for construction workers, housekeepers maintaining rooms filled by contractors and crews tending the Manele Bay Hotel golf course that remains open.

A handful are studying to become licensed massage therapists, so the hotels no longer would have to rely on neighbor island massage therapists who commute.

Morgan Divina, a 25-year-old receptionist at Manele Bay Hotel’s spa was born on Lanai and is one of 10 hotel employees being paid to complete 570 hours of massage school training in what used to be a game room at The Lodge at Koele.

“It’s amazing,” she said, while practicing pohaku lomi, or hot stone massage, on a fellow student. “Who would ever have thought that this would happen? I’m honored and really blessed.”

About 300 hotel workers have jobs tied to the hotels while roughly 250 were put to work elsewhere on Lanai. The biggest piece in this initiative involved about 90 workers directed to help Lanai High and Elementary School.

“We’re very grateful to Pulama for their help,” said kindergarten teacher Diane Preza, whose assistants were a bartender from the Manele Bay Hotel and a food and beverage server from The Lodge at Koele.

School Principal Elton Kinoshita said the small size and closeness of Lanai’s community — much of which descends from Filipino migrant workers, or sakadas — allowed the project to succeed.

“I don’t know if this would have worked in other places,” he said.

Kinoshita added that the value of the assistance was immense. “It wasn’t cheap,” he said. “(Pulama is) taking a bath financially. They’ve had no income coming in. Most businesses would have laid employees off. We have been spoiled.”

Back to nature

Out in the former pineapple fields, another group of hotel workers was deployed to help Mike Donoho, Pulama’s vice president of natural resources.

Donoho’s staff was two people before the hotel workers arrived. Then it swelled to 18.

“They’ve been amazing,” Donoho said of the task force crew.

Crew tasks include fencing 16 acres to protect an endangered native plant, Kooloaula, from being trampled by deer. Donoho said the largest population of this plant anywhere in Hawaii is near Lanai’s airport in an area overgrown with guinea grass.

“We have an owner (Ellison) who wants to fund these things,” Donoho said. “He wants to do good for the island. It’s pretty exciting.”

Philip Bolo, a second-generation Lanai resident whose job was in beach services at the Manele Bay Hotel, has built fences and removed strawberry guava and Formosa acacia — physically demanding and rewarding work.

“This job, it’s good,” he said as he removed invasive weeds around endangered endemic kookoolau plants on the side of a gulch dropping away from a plateau about 2,000 feet above sea level where pineapple once grew. “I never knew about these plants and the watershed. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful sites that I never been to before. I never knew they existed.”

Some of this older generation, who left the pineapple fields for hotel work, have reconnected with their former jobs through their task force assignments.

Francisca Bayez, 74, joined a landscaping crew in Lanai City. It had been 24 years since she picked Dole pineapples, but on a recent day she dressed up like she once did to protect every inch of skin from the sun and prickly pineapple leaves — only to tend ti and other ornamental plants around the former Dole administration building.

“This is awesome,” Bayez said, making a comparison to her resort job as a baker earning $20.30 an hour. “Same pay. That’s good.”

Cultural renaissance

In other often remote areas of Lanai, another task force with up to 48 hotel workers is focused on restoring and preserving historic and cultural sites.

One job is to rebuild a 2,000-foot-long ancient Hawaiian fishpond at Waiaopai on Lanai’s eastern shore. Another is to restore a pump house built in 1924 far into one of Lanai’s deepest valleys by Hawaiian Pineapple Co. founder James Dole to supply his company town, Lanai City, with water pumped up a pipe over a ridge 800 feet above.

Not far from Lanai City is another project in a place called Hii that was part of a 5-mile-long Hawaiian dryland agricultural complex. Much of the complex was destroyed by pineapple operations.

On a recent day, a crew of about 25 had planted taro and wauke, or paper mulberry used for making clothing, and removed eucalyptus, albizia and silver oak trees from an area containing remnants of a heiau, an imu and a lua pau, or refuse pit.

Ben Ostrander, the crew’s field supervisor with Pulama Lanai, highlighted a spot where an adze was found earlier that day.

Maxine Figuerres, a food server at the Manele Bay Hotel’s Nobu restaurant who has lived her whole life on Lanai, had never seen Hii before or knew a heiau existed there. “I’m blown away,” she said. “There’s so much history to be discovered.”

Kepa Maly, the island’s longtime chief historian, who Ellison hired to be Pulama Lanai’s senior vice president of cultural and historic preservation, said the extra manpower has accelerated what Pulama’s small staff can accomplish while also spreading awareness of history and the need to protect it.

“For the first time in Lanai’s modern history, we have naturists (working to restore the land),” he said. “Hii probably hasn’t looked like this for a hundred years or so.”

The benefits to the environment and Lanai’s history and culture are clear. But Pulama’s goal isn’t only a benevolent one. The company envisions integrating the sites into visitor experiences.

For instance, visitors could help manage the Waiaopai fishpond, eat fish from it and learn about Hawaiian history. Maly envisions the historic pump house, which includes an abandoned caretaker residence, as a potential history center where visitors could help tend restored ancient taro ponds at the furthest recess of the valley that supported about 1,000 Hawaiians before Western contact and the introduction of ungulates disrupted much of the water and life in the valley.

“It’s a really cool place,” he said. “It’s a legacy landscape. You are stepping back in time.”

In the not-too-distant future, though, hotel employees will resume their resort work, leaving Pulama Lanai to carry on without task force crews.

Some wonder if there will be any lasting benefit.

Matsumoto believes so. He said the temporary assignments are reconnecting residents with their history, culture and neighbors in ways that enhance the fabric of the community, perhaps repairing threads that were lost in the decades after the end of plantation life where workers often relied on each other to get by.

“Hopefully that enriches the community at the end of the day,” he said.