Federal lawmakers are signaling their support for preservation and restoration of treasured historic landmark sites in Lahaina by finalizing a study to establish a new historic heritage area in the town. But progress toward rebuilding these fire-damaged properties has slowed to a halt.

Owners of historic properties — both residential and commercial — who are hoping to rebuild say they are being systematically stymied by Maui County officials. They say county officials are slow-walking, stalling or stopping their plans by making it very difficult to obtain building permits that would allow them to go forward.

Property owners along historic Front Street are starting to demand action, which they say is long overdue. The devastating fire occurred nearly 18 months ago, in August 2023. Some are wondering whether Maui County is trying to kill off old historic Lahaina entirely.

Maui officials, for their part, say they are moving as quickly as they can in confronting a complex situation, trying to balance issues of shoreline erosion and community preservation in a measured way. They say they are working with a staff stretched thin amid uncertain federal disaster funding.

“Restoration of Lahaina is of the utmost importance to Mayor Richard Bissen’s administration,” Maui officials wrote in an emailed statement.

But property owners say that has not been apparent so far in downtown Lahaina.

A new organization called the Front Street Recovery Group, which includes owners of the cornerstone locations of old Lahaina, is gathering members and raising money to restore historic storefronts there. The owners’ lots are cleared now, and most have gotten their insurance money and are ready to begin reconstruction.

Kaleo Schneider, a fourth-generation Lahaina property owner whose land hosted five commercial buildings on Front Street, including one with a historic designation, said that 70 Front Street landowners, almost all of them local families, have joined their hui.

“Everybody on Front Street, we want to build like for like,” Schneider said. “It needs to look like Lahaina again. That was the charm. We’re all rebuilding. None of us intend on backing out.”

Another key player in the group is Kimo Falconer, whose family built and owns the Pioneer Inn, constructed in 1901. Falconer said they intend to rebuild their historic hotel “in the same exact way.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Kimo Falconer’s name.

Kate Blystone, Maui County planning director, said the county is following its established procedures for analyzing permits and is meeting with the affected property owners individually to hear their concerns. She said that shoreline setback rules have changed since most of these properties were built, and that it is difficult to predict how individual cases will be resolved by the county planning commission, which she said would be the ultimate decision-maker.

“We have every intention to return people to their property and we will do everything in our power to do that,” added Laksmi Abraham, a Maui County spokeswoman.

But the long delay has led many people to question the pace at which this is occurring. Many property owners in Lahaina have noted that top leaders have been unwilling to discuss these issues in public.

More than 20 residential homeowners along the Front Street corridor wrote to the governor last month begging for urgent action to help them move forward, either by drafting an emergency resolution that would spur rebuilding on Maui or by appointing a special master who can expedite permit reviews. They said that something needs to be done to prompt county officials, who they say take months to respond to even simple questions and do not appear to have any sense of urgency about moving ahead.

In a letter to Hawaiʻi Gov. Josh Green, Cathy and Dave Medina, whose home was located at 355 Front St., pleaded for him to step forward.

“We, along with the rest of Lahaina, desperately need your intervention!” they wrote. “We implore you to allow ALL structures destroyed by the Lahaina fire to be built as they existed the day before the fire, including properties within the shoreline area as well as commercial properties.”

Christine Ho and Dan Regan, of 303 and 307 Front St., told Green that Maui County planning officials had told them it would take two years to get through the permitting process, then two years for rebuilding, and that the end of the process “would be at least five years from the fire.”

“Please help us to end this nightmare from a fire that we did not cause,” they told the governor.

Several of the letter-writers said this week that the governor had responded sympathetically, and sent people expressions of his personal support. In early December, Green issued another proclamation related to the wildfire, exempting some properties on the shoreline from coastal zone management restrictions, in cases where houses are built on the same footprint.

Maui County has been widely criticized for the fire, first by its inexplicable failure to react to a previous blaze in 2018, and then by its glacial and secretive approach to managing the disaster. The county seemed to dawdle along for nearly a year before announcing a draft rebuilding plan in October, which it said would be followed by a more detailed rebuilding plan sometime soon.

One sign of officials’ cavalier or obstructive attitude about historic preservation was that the Maui Cultural Resources Commission, the county’s historic preservation agency and the locus for deliberations over historic renovation projects, shut down for almost a year, meeting only once between July 2023 and November 2024. Officials said they had been unable to achieve a quorum or that there were no issues outstanding for them to consider. The group met again in December but with barely enough members to operate.

Maui County officials said this week that it has been difficult to find volunteers to serve on the commission.

Meanwhile, federal agencies have done their part. Lahaina’s downtown historic area has been cleared, although some debris still needs to be removed. Although many wooden buildings were destroyed, many of the most historic structures were built of stone. They are standing and appear ready for restoration work to begin.

Support for restoring and highlighting some of Lahaina’s previously under-recognized historic places has crystalized in the past year, with more people becoming vocal advocates for restoring Mokuʻula, the one-time royal lagoon compound in Lahaina that served as the home of Queen Keōpūolani, Hawaiʻi’s most sacred chiefess, a revered and beloved aliʻi from Maui. Keōpūolani was the mother of Kamehameha III, who wrote Hawaiʻi’s constitution in Lahaina. She is buried at nearby Waiola Cemetery, as is King Kaumualiʻi of Kauaʻi. Both considered Lahaina their spiritual home.

In April, government officials announced plans to renew Moku‘ula. In August, Green transferred some parcels of state land at the site to the county to help make its full restoration possible.

The Lahaina Restoration Foundation, a historic preservation group, meanwhile, plans to rebuild eight of its historic properties in the Front Street area, according to Theo Morrison, the group’s executive director. Among the buildings it plans to restore are the Baldwin House, the oldest house on Maui; the Seamen’s Hospital; the Old Lahaina Courthouse and the Masters’ Reading Room, where whaling captains gathered to share news from New England.

The Lahaina Restoration Foundation’s masterplan for rebuilding will need to be reviewed by the Maui Cultural Resources Commission, Morrison said.

“Everybody that wants to rebuild will have to appear before the Maui Cultural Resources Commission,” she said. “You can imagine the backlog. It’ll be a nightmare.”

Not everybody agrees that historic Lahaina should be restored, however, which is the major impediment to rebuilding. Some people are opposed to tourism. But the biggest opponents are environmentalists who believe that all construction should be curtailed in areas that are expected to be affected by sea level rise in coming decades or centuries.

In March 2023, five months before the fire, the Maui Planning Commission approved new rules making it harder to build on the island’s eroding coastline.

Property owners in downtown Lahaina say their homes, stores and museums haven’t been adversely affected by sea level rise but by the fire that swept out of control last year. They say people should not be blocked from replacing what they had before that natural disaster occurred.

Lynn Barr, whose home was located at 1033 Front St., told the governor in a letter that she wanted to rebuild her home as it was before the fire, but that county officials have “taken my tragedy as an ‘opportunity’ to manage coastal retreat. The cruelty of this is unfathomable.”

“We feel abandoned and ignored by our local government,” Barr wrote, noting that Maui officials have told her she must reduce her house’s footprint by more than half its original size.

In the meantime, federal lawmakers are pushing to advance Lahaina’s restoration despite the inaction by Maui County.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Lahaina National Heritage Area Study Act, which will require the National Park Service to investigate how best to create a national heritage area there. National heritage areas are specialized local partnerships designated by Congress that link scenic, cultural and recreational amenities into marketing entities that get technical support from the National Park Service.

Unlike other kinds of parks, heritage areas do not involve federal land ownership. The real estate remains in private, nonprofit or local government hands. The enterprises are designed to promote tourism and cultural understanding while boosting economic development and appreciation of the natural world. They provide recognition, marketing assistance and a small amount of federal funding.

The study would require significant community consultation and would bring together cultural and historic advocates to discuss what and how to best emphasize and highlight Lahaina’s history.

Ideally the heritage area could showcase the many distinctive periods of Hawaiʻi’s history — from the ancient Hawaiians, through the early Kamehameha dynasty and into the monarchy, to places associated with Hawaiʻi’s introduction of near-universal literacy and also to sites associated with the missionary, whaling and plantation eras. Lahaina has also served as the primary economic engine for Maui, Hawaiʻi’s second most-visited island, because the town was Maui’s foremost tourist destination, and establishing a heritage area there might help the entire island recover financially.

The bill passed the House on Dec. 4. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it into law, making Lahaina Hawaiʻi’s first national heritage area.

But first the buildings need to be rebuilt. Unless the sites are restored, there will be no heritage to celebrate.

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