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.

It's earnings season again and if analysts' forecast are any gauge, it won't be pretty.

Bank of Hawaii Corp. kicks things off today when it reports its fourth quarter earnings while Central Pacific Financial Corp reports on Friday.

That's followed by Alexander & Baldwin Inc. on Feb. 3rd, Hawaiian Airlines on Feb. 4 and Hawaiian Electric Industries on Feb. 11.

It looks like a repeat of the third quarter when five of Hawaii's six largest publicly traded companies reported earnings declines.

Bank of Hawaii's analysts are forecasting fourth quarter earnings of 75 cents, which is off 8.5 percent from the year-earlier's 82 cents per share.

Analysts following Alexander & Baldwin Inc. estimate the company's fourth quarter net at 30 cents per share, which is off sharply from four quarter 2008's 58 cents per share.

Central Pacific, reeling from loans to troubled California homebuilders and local commercial borrowers, is expected to report a 41 cent loss, according to analysts.

The exceptions: Hawaiian Airlines Inc. and Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc.

Boosted by a 4.7 percent interim rate hike in August, analysts said they expect Hawaiian Electric to earn 23 cents per share during the three months ending Dec. 31, up from the year-earlier's 16 cents.

Hawaiian Airlines, benefiting from a cease fire in the interisland fare war, is expected to earn 12.3 cents per share during the fourth quarter, which is up nearly 20 cents from the same period last year.

For the fourth quarter in a row, Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. missed analysts' expectations.

Yesterday, HEI reported second quarter earnings of $15.5 million, or $0.17 per share. The results were more than 40 percent off the 29 cents per share projected by analysts polled by Bloomberg News.

The gap was even wider during the fourth quarter 2008 when the company reported earnings of 22 cents per share at a time when Wall Street was looking for 37.3 cents per share.

Either the company is not doing a good job of communicating to the investment community or analysts are not following HEI close enough.

Even in the post-Enron and post-subprime lending crisis era, the latter can happen ocassionally.

Nonetheless, Wall Street doesn’t like earnings surprises and usually punishes companies when they occur.

HEI’s saving grace is its 31 cents per share quarterly dividend, which the company voted to maintain yesterday. The dividend places the company’s yield at nearly 7 percent, which is pretty attractive these days.

Shares closed yesterday at $17.92 on the New York Stock Exchange. It will be interesting to see how the stock trades in the next few days.

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.