My name is Kalani Kaleiopu. I'm the director of building
and facility maintenance for Kapalua Golf. We are located in Kapalua, Maui.
The property is just beautiful. You don't have areas too much like this.
My name is Noa Pepa, I work out here at
Troon Golf Kapalua. I work under the facility maintenance in the landscaping department.
People come to Kapalua, Hawaii and Kapalua it is a unique special place. You just have to come here
and experience it. Currently, the terrain in Kapalua is very windy, rainy, it has a lot of
wet areas, hilly, kind of dealing with mother nature. So some of the areas that we maintain
are kind of difficult due to terrain. It's usually wet rainy and slopes are pretty steep.
A small machine as you can see it's very easy for us to maneuver around a lot of
things without doing a lot of damage. When we bring in the bigger machines,
we end up doing a lot of damages, so the Ventrac is very versatile.
You know, it really helps us out in a lot of areas. As a manager it gives us the ability to
adjust other areas and at the same time be more efficient on how we utilize our labor.
I've been working here almost 14 years now and I've had
my share of time operating different types of equipment and the Ventrac it's awesome.
The thing that really surprised me was the versatility and the
different applications that could be put on.
When I operate the Ventrac I think of stability because everything is controlled with your hands,
so you know, basically, everything is in your hands. I like the comfort of it,
the stability of it, and the versatility of it.
So the tough cut we use that mainly on our sediment basins that we maintain.
They're very hard to get to places and the brush that we cut is pretty high
so it gets in there really easily stability wise it's awesome.
We have areas along the highway that we have to take care of
just so it opens up the view for the golf resort
and we also have areas you know in the bush that we have to maintain for other departments as well.
The contour mower when it comes to slope mowing in our common areas, you know, I used to send
my guys out with string trimmers and with the contour mower it saves me a lot of time
being that the deck is pretty wide it's way faster.
The
stump grinder is a really big point in operation. We have a
lot of trees that we have to maintain and take down due to some issues. So
some of the trees that we take down are on slopes. Instead of contracting out areas that some of the
contractors have a hard time to grind the stumps, so we can do that a lot faster and a lot cheaper
than what they can. In reality, it is a big plus for us on a contract side.
So here we had a little stump here that I just ground down with the
stump grinder. It was quite challenging but Ventrac proved itself what it can do.
The cost savings on us what we see we're able to
really utilize the one machine for specific areas, so it cuts out
our cost of buying more machines than needed and also lowers our labor cost doing things by hand.
Everybody wants to come to Hawaii, and you know,
see the beauty of it. So it's part of our job to kind of keep it that way.