More than two years of community-led planning culminated in a sweeping vision for South Maui centered on more affordable housing, less commercial and luxury development, an emergency escape route and road improvements.

Over the coming two decades, residents wanted responsible growth, protection from natural disasters and better quality of life for the nearly 30,000 people who call Kīhei, Wailea, Māʻalaea and Mākena home.

But the county Planning Department has since changed key parts of the 171-page plan so much that residents feel it no longer would lead to the future they envisioned through dozens of community meetings, according to longtime Kīhei resident Mike Moran, former president of the Kīhei Community Association. They worry about too much development — and not enough affordable housing — happening too fast for the small coastal town to absorb.

The revised draft went back before the county Planning Commission on Tuesday. The nine-member body, with two vacancies and only one member representing South Maui, can accept the Planning Department’s changes, reinstitute the original language or make its own recommendations before sending it on to the County Council for final approval later this year.

“It’s changing so much of what we did,” said Moran, who chaired the Community Plan Advisory Committee that drafted the plan’s update.

The committee’s current chair, longtime Kīhei resident Rob Weltman, said the plan — with or without changes — won’t stop developers from building thousands of homes already approved for South Maui. But he is worried that the changes proposed by the Planning Department would worsen longstanding problems such as traffic and water.

“Have you ever been on Piʻilani Highway at 4 o’clock? Or 8 o’clock?” Weltman said. “It is just miles of not moving at all.”

South Maui is growing, but slowly. Its population hit 28,700 in 2020, and the U.S. Census projects the area will hit at least 32,000 by 2045. That growth requires 800 to 1,700 new homes in South Maui on top of the current inventory of 11,100 homes, according to Dick Mayer, a former Maui College economics professor.

But seven major developments — some already approved — could add 7,355 new homes to South Maui, with only 20% deemed affordable, he said. That’s on an island where the median home price was $1.37 million in December, according to the Realtors Association of Maui.

This could mean an additional 19,000 people and 14,600 cars in South Maui, Mayer said. And it’s not just the inconvenience of sitting in traffic. The congestion has created a public safety risk.

“When there’s flooding or fires and people need to get in or out, that’s going to get much, much worse,” Weltman said, underscoring the community’s concerns with the Planning Department’s changes that allow for more development.

During a meeting co-sponsored by the Kīhei Community Association at the ProArts Theater in October, presenters called out a “wave of luxury development headed for South Maui” threatening the district’s sustainability.

The luxury Honua‘ula Project, also known as Wailea 670, was heavily criticized at that meeting because developers are seeking a significant reduction in affordable housing requirements set in 2008.

Intermixed with the debate over more housing is where the water will come from to serve the new developments.

Most of the water for South Maui is piped over from the Wailuku aquifer on the northern side of the island. South Maui is on top of the Kamaole aquifer, but it is brackish at lower elevations and would need desalinization for drinking water, an expensive undertaking with possible environmental consequences, according to a presentation by the county Department of Water Supply in 2016.

Much of Maui is currently under a water restriction, including Kīhei where residents can now only irrigate their yards twice a week. Restaurants can serve water only upon request, and hotels may give guests the option of not laundering sheets and towels daily.

‘Grueling’ Process To Update Community Plan

The South Maui Community Plan is a legal document established by the Maui County Code. It is intended to support the community’s vision and provide the growth framework, goals, policies and action guidelines for the next 20 years from Māʻalaea to Kanaio.

All of Maui’s community plans are supposed to be updated every 10 years, but the last time South Maui’s plan was reviewed was in 1998.

There are nine community plans countywide, and only three have been updated in the last decade. Of the remaining five, four are even older than South Maui’s plan.

Starting in 2021, the county spent a year gathering community input to come up with a document that would serve as the basis for the plan’s update. Then, between October 2022 and November 2023, a 13-member committee picked by Mayor Richard Bissen and the County Council held 42 public meetings.

“It was grueling,” Moran said, but 35 of the community’s suggestions were incorporated into the final draft.

In May, the Planning Commission started reviewing the committee’s draft along with the Planning Department’s proposed changes, accepting some of its recommendations and rejecting others.

In some parts, the department has replaced more restrictive language with “encourage” and “to the extent practicable.” Moran said this type of language takes away the lawful requirements the committee had proposed in the plan and turns them into suggestions.

A section of the advisory committee’s draft says affordable housing obligations must be met within the plan’s subarea. So if a developer is required to include a certain number of affordable units, those would have to be at the same place as opposed to some other part of the island.

The Planning Department wants the plan to say “encourage” instead of making it a requirement. The department also proposed deleting a part of the plan that banned developers from using affordable-housing credits instead of building the actual units.

The community advisory committee’s draft also called for new hotels and expansions to be “water neutral.” The department changed this requirement by adding “to the extent practicable,” which the Planning Commission has already agreed to incorporate.

The commission has also already adopted the department’s recommendation to soften a restriction that would have barred construction of a development unless there was infrastructure available.

Maui Planning Director Kate Blystone said in a statement Tuesday that in some cases, the designations the advisory committee recommended would not have lead to the outcome they were intending, so her department offered alternatives for the commission to consider.

“Our job is primarily to protect health, safety and general welfare, but we also have a responsibility to listen to the community, especially when it comes to long-range planning,” she said. “When we make a recommendation, it is based on what we heard from the community and balancing that with what we know about the regulatory framework in which we exist. We are constantly working to craft a solution that gets our community where they want to go to the extent that we can within our state and county’s regulatory context.”

Collector Route As An Escape Route

Another requirement the department is seeking to change, Moran said, is a proposed 3-mile bypass road east of Piʻilani Highway that would connect Lipoa Parkway to Maui Veterans Highway.

“One of the things we have in the plan is that before they develop above the highway, they have to build another road up there,” he said.

Without a collector road, Moran said, anyone in any new development in South Maui must go through Piʻilani Highway to enter or leave the area, creating more traffic jams and safety issues.

Weltman said the community is not requiring developers to build the collector road before they build homes. They are just requiring that no one moves in before the road is built, something he said some developers had agreed to but are now backpedaling.

In November, the commission kept the requirement that the road be built prior to or concurrent with development of North Kīhei Mauka but deleted the requirement about people not being able to move in until it’s finished.

Weltman said it can be done and pointed to the Lipoa project, formerly known as the Research and Technology Park. Developers have already widened Lipoa Parkway from two to four lanes for the first phase of the collector road, even though they haven’t started the development yet.

“If the will is there, it can be done,” Weltman said. “It’s just that if companies are not forced to do it, then they won’t do it, and the county won’t do it.”

Rising Seas

Many homes near the shore in Kīhei will be affected by an estimated 3.2-foot rise in sea levels by 2050. The advisory committee used a University of Hawai‘i forecasting tool to identify empty lots that most likely will be partially or completely underwater by then.

The committee opposed development on those empty lots, and recommended they be designated as open spaces, which would help to absorb water from surrounding properties that will also be exposed to flooding.

The Planning Department says the community plan’s land use designation is not the appropriate tool to prevent development on parcels that may already have entitlements. Instead, it recommended the commission remove the open space designation in most of the area and designate 21 lots as residential and six lots as small town center.

At the commission’s most recent meeting Tuesday, Commissioner Brian Ward, who lives in Wailea and was appointed to represent South Maui, motioned to designate four large parcels in Wailea as “resort and hotel,” despite the advisory committee’s recommendation to keep them “residential.”

Ward withdrew his motion after pushback from his colleagues. They wanted more information before making a decision that would have major consequences for nearly 800 units on the Minatoya list. The mayor has proposed converting the roughly 7,000 short-term rentals on the list into long-term housing to address the island’s housing shortage.

The commission indicated the issue will be revisited in a future meeting. If commissioners approve the “resort and hotel” designation for Wailea, and the County Council agrees, those units could be allowed to continue to be used as short-term rentals.

Maui Tomorrow Executive Director Albert Perez said he is concerned the council will receive an altered plan that does not reflect the community’s wishes. The nonprofit participated during the draft process and in the Planning Commission’s ongoing review.

Perez said the right thing would be for the council to receive the original committee’s draft with the commission’s recommendations attached to it. This would give the council a clearer view of what the community decided and what the commission changed.

The review process by the commission was set to end in November, but the council gave it an extension until May 14, according to Jacky Takakura, county planning program administrator.

She said the commission is now in the middle of section three of five in the draft. Takakura said it’s difficult to say when the commission will finish its review because some sections take longer than others.

The commission’s next meeting is Jan. 28.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.