Hawaii's recession is starting to really beginning to be felt on the top floor of Hawaii's largest companies.

On Sunday, The Advertiser ran a story detailing CEO pay in Hawaii, which was down 0.4 percent last year. (See:) Non-CEO senior executives have seen an even more dramatic drop in their pay checks.

Biz Bites reviewed the pay packages of about three dozen top executives at Hawaii's largest public companies and came up with an average compensation package of about $300,021.

That's down nearly 17 percent  from the year-earlier when the average was about $361,000.

Few of  executives received cash bonuses and the stock prices of most employers were in the doldrums last year, reducing the value of stock options.

Hardest hit were the bankers.

Bank of Hawaii Corp.'s Peter Ho saw his 2009 compensation package decline by more than $1 million last year to $1.2 million.

Dean Hirata, former vice chairman at financially struggling Central Pacific Financial Corp., saw his pay package decrease by about $500,000 last year. Last month, the bank announced that Hirata had stepped down from the company.

Other executives at Central Pacific, which received a $135 million cash infusion for the federal government's Trouble Asset Relief Program, have taken similar haircuts.

On the flip side, a number of companies did reward non-CEO executives with seven-figure pay packages last year.

Most notably, Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. paid CFO James Ajello nearly $1.5 million while Richard Rosenbaum, president of the company's electric utility subsidiary, earned more than $2 million.

Timothy Schools, president of HEI's American Savings Bank unit, earned nearly $1.2 million last year.

Given the company's recent electricity rate increases, you would hope that regulatory agencies such as the state Public Utilities Commission would take a close look at HEI executive salaries.

Probably the most intriguing compensation package for 2009 belonged to Castle Group Inc. CEO Rick Wall.

Like most hotel management companies, Castle had a tough year. It lost about $1 million.

But Wall, the company's founder, agreed to take just $1,000 in salary last year. He earned $227,000 in 2008.

I know it's good to set an example during tough economic times but this definitely takes pay-for-performance concept to the extreme.

Following the company's successful public offering this summer, Territorial Bancorp Inc. gave its CEO Allan Kitagawa a raise in his base salary.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission today, Territorial said Kitagawa will receive $801,854 in base pay this year, a 4.7 percent increase from the his 2008 base pay.

The increase comes after Territorial's successful IPO in July which raised more than $200 million.

The offering was one of the most successful for a local company in recent years and was closely watched by those in the U.S. banking industry.

To be sure, Kitagawa's base pay is just a portion of his overall pay package. Incentive pay and the change in the value of his pension holdings boosted his overall 2008 compensation to nearly $2 million.

But given the success of the IPO and the 50,000 Territorial shares owned by Kitagawa and his wife, the CEO's 2009 compensation is likely to surpass his previous year's.

It's proxy season so executive pay figures for 2008 are beginning to trickle out.

At the top of the list, Allen Doane earned nearly $5 million last year as CEO and chairman of Alexander & Baldwin Inc. But Doane's 2008 compensation was down sharply from his 2007 pay of $8.6 billion.

Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. CEO Constance Lau received a $2 million pay increase, upping her 2008 pay package to nearly $3.9 million.

Lau's increase came in a year the company experience significant challenges, including lower earnings at its American Savings Bank  unit and a Dec. 26 islandwide outage that cut off power to Hawaiian Electric Co.'s 294,000 customers on Oahu.

Rounding out the list, Bank of Hawaii CEO Allan Landon earned about $2.5 million last year, which was down about $100,000 from his 2007 pay.

Look for updates to this list as more local companies file their proxies with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the future, I'll publish a more listing in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper once all of the proxies are filed.