Construction of American Savings Bank’s new headquarters tower in Chinatown will be delayed after iwi kupuna, or human remains, were discovered at the site.
Hawaii’s third-largest bank said Friday that the remains were discovered during an archaeological survey that began in February at 300 N. Beretania St., across the street from Aala Park. The iwi kupuna were determined to be of Native Hawaiian origin, and the bank said the Oahu Island Burial Council will decide on the final disposition through a burial treatment plan in consultation with cultural and lineal descendants.
“We want to do the right thing with the cultural descendants and want to get our project going,” American Savings President and CEO Rich Wacker said Friday, shortly after the bank announced a 6 percent decline in first-quarter earnings.
Wacker said it’s difficult to predict the timing of the headquarter’s construction because of the iwi discovery. American Savings bought the property on the corner of Beretania and Aala streets for $12 million on Nov. 24, 2014, from Pacific Constructors LLC.
The headquarters will consist of 11 floors of office space plus an unspecified parking area. The complex will have 367,573 square feet of total space. That would make it larger than the Royal Hawaiian Center, which is 310,000 square feet, but smaller than First Hawaiian Bank’s downtown high-rise, which has total office space of 418,000 square feet.
Wacker declined to disclose the cost of building the headquarters, but by comparison First Hawaiian’s headquarters, which was dedicated in October 1996, cost $175 million.
“We certainly would have liked to start construction sooner,” he said. “It’s been a function of the market environment and making sure the costs are in line with what we can spend, and we’ve got to do the right thing with the cultural descendants as we locate the iwi kupuna. We’d certainly rather be further along, but we’ll just keep working through it.”
Wacker said that approximately half of the bank’s 1,150 employees will be relocated to the headquarters, which he refers to as a campus.
“We’re still very committed to the project because it allows us to bring all our team not in branches directly into one place,” he said. “The benefits for efficiency and our company culture and the ability to work even better together is really important.”
It’s been an exercise in patience over the last year and a half for American Savings. It is waiting for the state Public Utilities Commission to make a decision on Florida-based NextEra Energy Inc.’s $4.3 billion proposed purchase of Hawaiian Electric Industries, which is the parent of both the bank and Hawaiian Electric Co. NextEra made its offer to HEI in December 2014, and the PUC subsequently held several months of public hearings. As part of the deal, NextEra requested that HEI spin off American Savings Bank into a stand-alone company.
Wacker said it will be up to HEI’s board of directors to decide to proceed with the spinoff if NextEra’s purchase is rejected by the PUC.
“We still think there’s a lot of compelling reasons for this deal to be approved for both the utility and the bank,” Wacker said. “So that’s where we’re focused — on getting everything ready for that. Anything else would be a board of directors’ decision.”
Wacker would remain as president and CEO of the bank after the spinoff, with the remainder of the management team remaining in place, according to a regulatory filing by the bank earlier this month.
The bank’s stock would trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “ASBH.”
American Savings’ earnings, meanwhile, declined during the first three months of the year to
$12.7 million from $13.5 million in the year-earlier period after increasing its provision for potential loan losses and enduring higher expenses.
The bank boosted its loan-loss provision to
$4.8 million from $614,000 primarily because of its riskier commercial real estate loan growth and a commercial credit charge-off of about $1 million. American Savings also had about
$1 million in higher noninterest expenses mainly due to investment in its electronic banking platform and higher compensation costs.
Loans rose 4.4 percent to $4.6 billion from $4.4 billion, and assets increased 7.3 percent to $6.1 billion from
$5.7 billion. The bank’s net interest income, the difference between the interest it pays on deposits and the
interest it receives on loans, jumped 10.7 percent to
$50.4 million from $45.5 million. Its net interest margin improved to 3.62 percent from 3.52 percent.
However, noninterest
income, which includes
service charges and
fees, slipped 4.4 percent
to $15.4 million from
$16.1 million.
“It was a good quarter, right in line with the things that we are expecting for the year,” Wacker said. “We have a lot going on, but we’re getting through it.”
Parent company HEI will report its earnings Wednesday.
