Radio listeners hear details about Grassroot’s latest Lahaina memo

from Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, August, 2024

Grassroot’s Jonathan Helton speaks with host Johnny Miro about how to deal with some of the area’s major challenges

What state and county laws are getting in the way of people being able to rebuild their homes and businesses in Lahaina?

That’s the question policy researchers set out to answer in the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii’s latest report, “Six ways to speed up the recovery and rebuilding of Lahaina,” according to report co-author Jonathan Helton, who spoke about it Sunday with Johnny Miro of the H. Hawaii Media radio network.

Helton said that “probably the single largest challenge” for many of the Lahaina property owners is obtaining special management area permits for shoreline developments.

So one of the six suggestions, he said, is that “the county should explore creating an expedited process so that it doesn’t take months or years of review for someone to rebuild their business in Lahaina.”

Helton said waiving various zoning codes is probably “the second most important issue for buildings that were destroyed,” because “it might be impossible to rebuild your business in the same way it was when it was originally built” — and the Maui County Council is now considering a bill that would do just that.

“They would have to be rebuilt with 2024 building codes, and there are some safety reasons for that,” he said. “But in terms of the zoning — setbacks, height, number of parking spaces — if this bill passed, those buildings would be able to keep, would be able to rebuild kind of as they were.”

Helton also talked with Miro about how important it is for Maui County lawmakers to encourage homebuilding in general, especially by allowing more homes on lots that are already in residential areas.

He also underscored the importance of passing a “Yes, in God’s backyard law” that would give special zoning exemptions to nonprofits such as churches, hospitals or schools that want to build housing on their lands.

TRANSCRIPT

8-11-24 Jonathan Helton with host Johnny Miro on H. Hawaii Media radio network

Miro: Happy Sunday morning to you, I’m Johnny Miro. 

Once again, it is time for our Sunday morning programming here — public access programming — on our five Oahu H. Hawaii media radio stations and our five H. Hawaii media radio stations located on Kauai, and we’re also available via your smart device at HawaiiStream.fm and Live 365. 

And I’m joined by a member of Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, as it’s been a year since Lahaina was destroyed in the wildfires. People are slowly recovering and rebuilding their lives, their homes and their community. 

So today, we are going to be focusing on some of the challenges that people have faced with finding housing and rebuilding in Lahaina. 

And it was back on the first of August, not too long ago, Aug. 1, the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii released a brief, “Six ways to speed up [the recovery and rebuilding of Lahaina].” One of the authors, Jonathan Helton, is here to speak with us about that. He’s a policy researcher at Grassroot Institute. 

Jonathan, good morning to you.

Helton: Good morning, Johnny.

Miro: All right, please give me and of course the listeners a little background about your group’s newest reports on Lahaina, which you sent to the governor and also Maui Mayor Richard Bissen, all members of the state legislature and Maui County Council and the regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Helton: The report wanted to answer a very simple question, and that question was: What state and county laws might be getting in the way of people being able to rebuild their homes and their businesses and ultimately their community in Lahaina? 

And so, the report started with that basic question. And we — as the title of the report [says], it’s “Six ways,” so we were able to identify six different barriers. And I’m sure there might be some more, but we focused on six. And we went on to suggest changes to these laws that could probably make it easier for people to be able to rebuild.

Miro: OK, and I do recall that Grassroot also sent a memo to all those same officials back in January. What were some of the recommendations you made back then?

Helton: So back in January — hard to remember back then sometimes — but the governor and Mayor Richard Bissen and FEMA and a couple of nonprofits, they announced a $500 million Maui housing plan. 

So that was their goal of “We’re going to build temporary housing units; we’re going to get people into units where either the state or FEMA would lease from the owner and the person displaced by the fires would live there.” So the goal was to try to find people housing. 

And so we sent a memo, and in response to that housing plan, we suggested a couple of things. 

We suggested, for example, that the general excise tax be waived for people who are renting their homes in a contract with the state or FEMA. We suggested the state look at allowing some out-of-state workers to come and assist with the rebuild if there wasn’t going to be enough people on Maui to help with the rebuild.

And then one of the big suggestions — and the suggestion that got passed — is we suggested some changes to Maui’s emergency permitting law to get people their building permits, you know, as quick as possible for rebuilding in Lahaina. 

And we can talk about that one in particular a little bit more later, but that was the original memo. And so this memo is a follow-up. We tried to go into a little bit more detail looking at some of the laws that are getting in the way of rebuilding.

Miro: OK, Jonathan. In general then, where are we in terms of, say, that debris cleanup — that was, that’s a very big issue, where they want to put it, what have you — and rebuilding in the Lahaina burn zone?

Helton: Yes, so that’s the big question, and obviously that is what has been occupying a lot of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the EPA [federal Environmental Protection Agency]. They’ve been very involved in debris cleanup in the burn zone. 

And so we’ve got some recent news. They’re hoping that drinking water can be restored for a lot of the Lahaina area sometime this month. And they’re hoping that they can restore wastewater — so sewer — sometime at the beginning of next year.

And those are, you know, those are, of course, estimates. It could be much later than that. 

They do hope that the debris cleanup for residential and commercial areas will be done sometime in the beginning of 2025. It’s already done for a lot of area, and there have been several people who have been able to get their rebuilding permits and have already started rebuilding their homes. And so that’s really great. 

But as far as the entire area of Lahaina, you know, the estimates for getting everything cleared up and maybe ready to go, you know, at the soonest, we’re looking at, at the beginning of 2025.

Miro: Right. There’s also been some headlines lately about some temporary shelters opening up, and what’s that housing situation look like currently?

Helton: So, we are seeing a lot of progress on people partnering with the state or county or FEMA to get temporary housing built. 

And so there’s a lot of different projects. I just want to list a couple. So you have the Ka Laʻi Ola project, which is in Lahaina. That’s the state’s project. They’re building about 450 units. They’re hoping to have people moving in there sometime this month.

There was another project from the State Department of Transportation. They’re building about 16 units, and they had the first move in a couple of weeks ago. So that was encouraging. 

There’s a FEMA project that’s also in Lahaina. They’re building almost 170 houses, and they hope to be finished by the end of the year. 

And so — and there’s a couple of other projects that are sponsored by the county or the state. In total, I think they’re building about 1,200 temporary or permanent houses right now. So that’s really good news.

One thing I do want to share: There’s been a couple of builders that have not really partnered up with the state or county, so they’ve been wanting to build for people who’ve been displaced. 

There was also the golf course in Kapalua that they were just trying to build housing for their employees at the golf course because so many of them lost their homes in Lahaina. 

But one of the projects I want to highlight is the Ohana Hope Village, and that’s in Kahului. It’s a partnership between several nonprofits. And this has been probably one of the most watched projects, because they got their first homes — they flew, they got them transported into Maui — less than two weeks after the fires last year. 

So they were one of the first organizations to really break ground on temporary housing, and unfortunately, it’s been pretty difficult for them to get all of the approvals lined up. So let me give you some context on what they did. 

They wanted to build 88 homes to house people who have been displaced, and they only got their approval from the county to open up 16 of those homes in May. So from last fall until May, they had 88 temporary shelters that were sitting vacant. 

And now, of course, not all of that is — you can’t blame all of that on just one thing.

They’ve had issues getting access to drinking water. They’ve had issues tapping into the sewer system because the sewer system in the Kahului area is at capacity. So there’s been issues that are not related to, like, getting approval from the county or getting their building permit from the county. 

But the Ohana Hope Village has unfortunately been an example of how some of the county’s approvals can be very, very slow in the time when you really need housing. So that’s something we’ve been following for the past year and will probably keep following just to see if they’re able to get approvals and get all of those 88 units built. Because there are definitely people who need the shelter.

Miro: All right. Joining me this morning from Grassroot Institute would be Jonathan Helton, policy researcher, discussing the recovery, speeding up the recovery efforts for Lahaina. 

Before we discuss a few of those recommendations for the new memo that was released, were you encouraged or discouraged by the response to the first one that you forwarded to the governor and the other elected officials and agencies back in January?

Helton: The response was pretty encouraging. We were able to get in touch with FEMA, and they were able to provide some data on the number, on the people who they were getting in the system with these lease programs to people who volunteered to lease their homes to FEMA and house people who were displaced. 

And we, as I said earlier, the Maui County Council — I think it ended up being a coincidence — but the Maui County Council, just shortly after that memo was released, they started working on legislation to change their emergency permitting law. And that’s been, that’s gone really well. 

The county changed their emergency permitting law to guarantee that people who are rebuilding can get their permit within 15 days if they have everything lined up correctly. So we’ve seen this in the burn zone where there have been several people who have already gotten their homes permitted to rebuild, and they’ve gotten them much quicker than the average time it takes to get a building permit in Maui. 

So we were encouraged, and we’re hoping that this next memo will also be turned into action.

Miro: All right. Let’s discuss some of the recommendations put forward by not only yourself, but Malia Hill and Jasmine Rocha from Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. I guess building permit fees — what’s the challenge?

Helton: Yes, building permit fees. We said this should be a straightforward thing to do. We looked at the amount of fees that some of these projects had to pay, so I’ll go ahead and list those to you. 

So, Ohana Hope Village, we just talked about that. They had to pay over $35,000 in building permit fees to the county. The Kapalua Golf Course project had to pay over $15,000. 

One of the state’s projects, they would have had to pay over a million dollars in permitting fees. But there’s a part of the Maui County code that says, “If you’re the county or if you’re the state or the federal government, you don’t have to get a building permit the same as everyone else.” So they didn’t have to pay those fees. 

So our suggestion is simple: Waive those fees. If you’re a nonprofit that’s trying to build temporary housing, or if you’re someone who is trying to rebuild your home or your business, the County should waive the building permit fee. One of the first people to get their permit to rebuild had to pay over $2,000. 

And in the grand scheme of things, when you’re rebuilding your house, that’s probably not going to break the budget. But in our view, the County should be doing everything it can to remove unnecessary fees and expedite processes so people can rebuild. So that was the gist of our suggestion there.

Miro: All right, Jonathan, what about the properties near the shoreline? Do they face extra levels of review?

Helton: Yes. So this is going to be a pretty big issue for a lot of the homes and businesses around Front Street in Lahaina. There’s a law called the special management area, and in Hawaii, the special management area goes from the coast for a little bit — could be 300 feet away, you know, inland. 

And so the purpose of the special management area law is to review developments and building that takes place in that area. There is a concern about sea level rise and whether or not a building that’s going to get built is going to be built in a way that is resistant to sea level rise. So that’s the kind of the idea behind the special management area. 

One of the concerns, though, is that normally if you want to build in that area, you have to go through a pretty extensive layer of review if you’re building anything other than a single-family home.

So for a lot of the businesses that might be around Front Street, they were completely destroyed. And so the question that I think the County is trying to deal with is: How do we make it so that these businesses can get permits that don’t take months or years? 

Because typically, if you need a SMA major permit, which is what most businesses would need, that can take months. It can take years, even, to get one from the Maui Planning Commission because they usually undergo a lot of review.

They require a public hearing, a pretty significant amount — a number of dollars in fees. 

So one of our suggestions was, “Hey the county should explore creating an expedited process so that it doesn’t take months or years of review for someone to rebuild their business in Lahaina.” 

And this is probably the single largest challenge for a lot of the property owners that are in that area. And as I said, this encompasses most of [Front] Street, so a lot of the properties that were destroyed, a lot of the town’s really historic core.

Miro: Yeah, I mean Front Street was just a haven for great small business, and that was part of the allure. Not only the beautiful harbor, but also those businesses. 

What about some of Lahaina’s older buildings I was just mentioning? For people looking to rebuild an older structure, Jonathan, what sort of zoning and building codes will they have to follow?

Helton: This is — this might be the second most important issue for buildings that were destroyed. 

So, for a bit of context: If you had an old building that was outside of Lahaina’s historic district — there are a couple of buildings that are in historic districts — if you had a building outside of that and it was destroyed, normally you will have to rebuild that building in compliance with current building code and current zoning code.

And the challenge here is that for some of those businesses, they were built, you know, 50, 75, a hundred years ago. They didn’t meet the zoning code of 2024. So if you’re looking to rebuild, it might be impossible to rebuild your business in the same way it was when it was originally built.

So, like, just a couple of examples. Zoning laws typically require setbacks, so it has to be set back a certain number of feet from the property line. You know, a lot of those buildings might not have been built with the same setbacks that are in the code today. A lot of those buildings might not have the necessary number of parking spaces that are required in the code today.

And so one question is: Is there a way for the county to change its laws to accommodate the buildings that were destroyed? And thankfully there is a bill at the Maui County Council that would do that. It would, more or less, it would allow structures that are nonconforming — which is just a legalese term for it didn’t meet the zoning code at the time — it would allow those to be rebuilt. 

So they would have to be rebuilt with 2024 building codes, and there are some safety reasons for that, but in terms of the zoning — setbacks, height, number of parking spaces — if this bill passed, those buildings would be able to keep, would be able to rebuild kind of as they were. 

And we think that’s important for trying to maintain some of the town’s historic character. We don’t, you know, the goal should not be “Let’s have a parking space every other building in what was an area in Lahaina that was full of shops and was very walkable.” So that’s the premise behind that bill. 

Miro: Yeah, yeah, I can see that. 

All right, Jonathan Helton, policy researcher with Grassroot Institute. A couple more questions on Sunday. 

Some of your recommendations, Jonathan, had to do with the county’s regulatory barriers as a whole — what were they?

Helton: We had two suggestions that kind of looked at Maui’s housing environment as a whole. And it is, typically, there are a lot of approvals involved in building housing on Maui. 

And so we said, well, what are some ways that the county can expedite this — not just for Lahaina, but for the whole county? And we looked at two. 

One is called a “Yes, in God’s backyard law,” which is kind of a play off of “Yes, in my backyard,” [which] is kind of a movement to allow more housing.

So this “Yes, in God’s backyard” law, basically it would give nonprofits like churches or hospitals or schools, it would give them special zoning exemptions if they wanted to build housing on their land. 

And we’ve actually already seen why this is important, because there’s a church that’s in upcountry Maui, and they were looking to build four temporary units to offer to people who were displaced by the fires.

And the church has received some, has received some of its approvals to build these units. But the only reason they were able to get them is because the mayor issued an emergency proclamation, where he waived a lot of the normal laws for rebuilding and for getting permits. 

If the emergency proclamation hadn’t been in place, it would have been impossible for this church to even get that initial approval to work on those. 

And they’re still in the process. But we think that it would make sense for there to be a law — not just, you know, not just an emergency order — that would allow community organizations to build housing on their own land.

So that’s the first one. And the second one is something we’ve been talking about for a while at Grassroot, and it’s simple: Let’s allow more homes on lots that are already in residential areas. And we talked about — a lot about — that during the legislative session this year. 

And Maui County is considering a bill that will allow a couple — depending on the size of the lot, it would allow more homes where you already have them. And then that would be good for a lot of reasons. 

Miro: All right, Jonathan, anything else to add? And I know I want to ask: Is there a third memo already being thought about, or is that not even in the process right now?

Helton: You know, I think we’re thinking about it. We’ll probably see what the response is to this second memo and how we’re able to work with people on it. 

But yes, we’re hopeful to continue identifying things that could be expedited or streamlined or even waived for the rebuilding process because we want people to have the certainty they need so they can rebuild their home, they can rebuild their business.

It’s important that the small business owners and the homeowners and the renters in Lahaina don’t all feel like they have to leave because rebuilding is taking place so slowly.

Miro: And they can see the first memo at the website?

Helton: Yes, yes, both memos are on the website. The second one, if you go to Grassroot — no “s” — institute.org, the second memo is probably the first thing you’ll see on the website. 

So we discussed what we talked about here on the show today and there’s, I think there’s a couple of other recommendations in there as well.

Miro: A very, very astute team over there at Grassroot Institute and a lot of good reading over there, so make sure you click on those prompts and get the articles and read what they are doing over there at Grassroot Institute. 

Great, solid team. And Jonathan Helton joining us, the policy researcher, with a fantastic breakdown of the six ways to speed up the recovery and rebuilding of Lahaina. 

Jonathan, fantastic job, and we’ll be in touch with you soon. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

Helton: Yes, you too. Thanks as always for having me on the show.