New Servco dealership to open on Kauai

A Servco Pacific Inc. dealership is under construction in Lihue. The company’s existing Garden Island dealership, Servco Toyota Kauai, sells both Toyota and Subaru vehicles, and its operations will move to 4464 Ulu Maika St. from Rice Street, once construction is completed.

The new dealership, to be called Servco Auto Kauai, will be a 12,000-square-foot facility with 10 service bays, a car wash and more than 200 parking spaces.

The new dealership will be part of a retail complex including Costco, Home Depot and Safeway stores currently under construction.

Merger of home loan banks to affect isles

The Federal Home Loan Banks of Seattle and Des Moines, Iowa, plan to merge.

The Seattle FHLB provides low-cost long- and short-term funding to more than 320 member financial institutions in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, as well as the U.S. territories of American Samoa and Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

"We believe that this merger of Federal Home Loan Banks will result in a cooperative that will be stronger than either the Seattle or Des Moines cooperative on an individual basis," said FHLB Seattle President and CEO Mike Wilson.

State Labor Department gets granted $1M

The U.S. Department of Labor awarded more than $1 million to the Hawaii Department of Labor and Industrial Relations. The federal grants will support technology for the unemployment insurance program.

About $500,000 of the grants will go to the development of an online employer website that will consolidate contribution payment and report filing into a single process. Employers will have access to their account and data in real time to complete their unemployment insurance transactions. The application is expected to launch in December 2016.

The other $500,000 will go toward improving worker misclassification prevention and detection. The grant will help create a UI tax field audit Web application that identifies employers and directs audits to employers that are most likely to employ misclassified workers like independent contractors. The completion date for the project is next September.

ON THE MOVE

Servco Pacific has hired Jennifer Crowe-Lopez as marketing manager, and she will be responsible for marketing activities at Servco’s Home and Appliance, Raynor Overhead Door and Servco Automotive divisions. Crowe-Lopez was previously a freelance marketing consulting for local startup companies as well as an operations/project manager for Bonterra Solar.

Yamamoto Caliboso, a Limited Liability Law Co., has announced that Carlito Caliboso has been recognized as one of "The Best Lawyers in America" in the areas of energy regulatory law and utilities law. He has 20 years of experience practicing law in the state of Hawaii.