Kent shares wildfire recovery lessons from Lahaina on California podcast

from Grassroot Institute of Hawaii

The following abridged comments comprised the introduction of Joe Kent, executive vice president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, as the featured guest on “PRI Next Round,” a weekly podcast presented by the Pacific Research Institute based in Sacramento, California. The topic was “Lessons from Maui as LA Begins to Rebuild.” The interviewers were PRI staffers Tim Anaya and Rowena Itchon. In addition to the interview audio, a complete transcript of the interview is provided below.

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Here in California, the focus of everything continues to be on wildfires, and we’re now in the recovery and looking forward to the rebuilding process. … So it leads into this week’s guest on our podcast.

We’re thrilled to have Joe Kent, who’s the executive vice president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, which is our sister think tank in the Aloha State. 

Our listeners may remember we’ve had Dr. Keliʻi Akina, the president of Grassroot Institute, on our podcast in the past. And sadly, Hawaii has a lot of lessons to offer California on the rebuilding process.

We all recall still the devastating wildfires that they had in Maui a few years back, and they went through a lot of the issues that folks in the Palisades [California] are going through today. 

So Joe walks us through some lessons learned from the Maui wildfires that our friends who are wildfire victims should be paying attention to, and really gives us some things to think about as government starts to kick off the rebuilding process in earnest. …

I think you’ll all find this to be a very interesting discussion. So here is Joe Kent, and we thank you for listening.

2-11-25 Joe Kent with host Rowena Itchon on Pacific Research Institute’s “Another Round” podcast

Rowena Itchon: Welcome to “Next Round,” Joe.

Joe Kent: Thank you for having me.

Itchon: So here in California, we watched with horror, the wildfires that burn through the Lahaina, Maui, in August, 2023. 

Lahaina is a popular vacation spot for Californians, and many Californians even have second homes in Maui. So could you remind us again by providing us with maybe some numbers, the extent of damage and loss of life from the wildfires in Lahaina?

Kent: Sure. Well, yes. Maui and Lahaina in particular are the gem of Hawaii. People come from all over the world just to see the historic Front Street; it was a wailing village. And so many people have strong memories of that place and the happy times there. 

But, you know, the wildfires in August of 2023 overtook the town, and eventually, 102 people died as a result of that fire. And over 2,200 structures were burned to the ground that displaced around 12,000 people in the days after the fire, and it cost a lot of money, of course. Billions and billions of insurance claims and damages and so on. So this rocked the community, and it’s still rocking the community more than a year later.

Tim Anaya: Given this amount of time that that happened since the wildfire, you’ve been, you know, in the middle of the recovery process. Tell us what’s been happening. 

What’s been happening with the families, and the businesses, and the schools? Have you seen a lot of rebuilding begin and, you know, based on Lahaina’s experience, what can you tell families and business owners and the Palisades and Altadena and Pasadena, you know, what should they expect going through this process?

Kent: Well, I remember the days after the fire. And it’s very similar to the stages of grief. You know, there’s shock, disbelief, and you know, sadness and anger. And there’s all of these sort of psychological feelings. 

And along with that, you have a fog of war before you because the future is all of a sudden so uncertain. And a lot of people just caring for their fellow human beings and trying to, you know, offer shelter or any kind of support. And that’s what we saw in the days after the Lahaina fire.

Now, after that, there was the state and FEMA were offering a lot of money to put people into hotels. That was around 8,000 Lahaina residents were put into hotels. And that went on for several months, I think almost six or seven months. 

But until people started to wonder how much does this actually cost, which seems to be, like, an unseemly thing to think about at first. But over the long term, the costs do add up. So that became, you know, later a very big topic. Those costs were about $1,000 per day for per hotel room. And the reason for that was because of the food and all of the services that surrounded, you know, the support of the Lahaina survivors. 

And so after that amount of time, around six or seven months, they, the state, moved the survivors to temporary shelter around Maui. 

And, you know, concurrent to this, there was a ban on tourism. Tourists were not allowed to come to the west side of Maui particularly. And so it kind of made sense to, you’ve got, you know, the Lahaina survivors staying in the hotels. But after a while, Maui’s lifeblood is tourism, you know, its whole economy is based on tourism. And so they thankfully opened it back up. 

Again, there’s another psychological question there about, you know, is it OK, is it moral to have tourism in your community at the same time that you’ve had a natural disaster? But at the end of the day, the more tourism, then the more people had money to help them deal with, you know, all of the different survival issues in the days after the fire.

So anyways, all of this was very expensive for the state in terms of trying to recover. And also, we have rebuilding happening as well. Well, not much rebuilding. Only three homes have been rebuilt since the fires. And that’s not many homes at all, If you think about the thousands of homes that were burned down. 

Now, you know, Hawaii used to be very really good at this. In Kauai, we actually rebuilt many homes very quickly [after Hurrican Iniki in 1992]. But since then, all of the different housing regulations have sprung up over the years, and that has made it much more difficult to rebuild.

So basically, rebuilding is starting very slowly though government officials are doing what they can to expedite it.

Itchon: Three houses, Joe, that’s really something. 

So that said, Gov. [Gavin] Newsom suspended the California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA review, and the California Coastal Commission permitting requirements for the fire victims. So it’s a good start, but based on Maui’s experience, what else can the governor do immediately?

Kent: Yeah. So Maui is a great case study as a warning for what not to do because what has happened is a lot of the regulations are still in place, and that’s one of the major factors in why it’s been so difficult to rebuild quickly. Like I said, only those three homes, but there have been some bright spots. 

The county council on Maui passed a bill to allow a private permitting office to open on the island, and the governor waived all sorts of laws through via proclamation to allow that to happen. 

And so this private permitting office, it’s operated by 4LEAF; yeah, I think it’s 4LEAF which is a private engineering firm. And they’re helping to expedite a lot of the permits. And so that’s helped a lot. 

But also, the SMA laws, which is the Special Management Area laws — these are the areas between the highway and the ocean that have basically an extra layer of housing regulation associated with them — those laws were also waived by the governor. 

And that’s a good thing because Hawaii has already the most burdensome housing regulations in the nation. They’ve done studies about this. It’s very clear that we have too much red tape getting in the way of our housing. So it’s a good thing that Gov. Green reacted quickly and tried to waive as much as he could.

But there’s a reticence, I think, a hesitancy from the governor to overrule the counties jurisdiction in power when it comes to their abilities to keep their regulations in place. 

Now, I think effectively, the governor could, if he wanted to overrule and overstep the counties and waive laws that they are not willing to waive. But that just goes back to politics. If he does that, then how is that viewed politically?

So in any case, the governor and mayors have made a few steps, but a lot of the power is still in the hands of the bureaucrats at the departments that operate so slowly.

Anaya: So families and businesses who’ve lost their homes and shops and restaurants have the daunting task of rebuilding. They also have to contend with their insurance companies, and they’ve got to find, you know, contractors and architects and so forth. 

So what’s been Maui’s experience with this and what policy reforms, you know, would you suggest to help California residents rebuild their homes as quickly as possible?

Kent: Yeah, well, we wrote a report about this on our website. It’s called “Six ways to speed up the recovery and rebuilding of Lahaina.” And it was written by Jonathan Helton, Malia Hill, and Jasmine Rocha at our office. And basically, we identified waiving as many regulations and fees as possible. 

You know, part of this is fees, by the way. It takes a lot of money to pay for all the building permit fees and so on. On Maui, I believe they deferred the fees, but they did not yet waive the fees. That means that although people don’t have to pay them now, they do have to pay them later.

And, you know, we recommended waiving, again, the Special Management Area laws, which the governor did. Who knows, maybe he read our report and did it. 

And also, non-conforming buildings were a big hurdle. You know, if you look at a lot of the homes in Lahaina, many of them are not built to the zoning code because many of them were built before the zoning code. And the zoning code, you would not be able to build those types of things under the new codes. And so, why not allow those homes to be rebuilt, even though they would technically be non-conforming?

Maui County is still struggling with this. There’s a bill that would address this, but right now, it hasn’t passed yet. And so there’s a lot of kind of small bites at the apple that could make a big difference in allowing people to rebuild.

Itchon: Joe, it’s too early to know how the wildfires started in California, but after a long investigation by Maui County and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, it was concluded that the cause of the fire was a downed Hawaiian Electric Company powe line, which set dry grass on fire and firefighters thought that they had put out the fire, but winds blew a piece of smoldering material to another area, and that material reignited. And on top of that, if you have strong winds, it caused a huge firestorm. 

And similarly, you know, in California, had we not done prescribed burning and had rebuilt water storage facilities, we might not have had the devastating fires that we had that spread everywhere. 

So are there any policy and regulatory lessons that could be learned from what happened in both our states?

Kent: Yeah. You know, in both instances, and actually in California has a history of power companies starting wildfires. There’s a book called “California Burning,” which is an amazing recounting of the campfire fires in California. And it showed that a lot of the focus of the energy companies were not on wildfire mitigation, but instead on renewable energies and all of the costs associated with that. 

Well, the same thing is true in Hawaii, where our renewable energy portfolio mandates have the electric companies focused elsewhere.

And so that has resulted in old electric lines. If you look around Lahaina, their power electric poles were so old, they were rotting, easy to blow over, not to standard. And so that’s part of the problem. 

There was a video that was shot right before the fire, right as the fire is happening, this amazing video, somebody standing on their roof in Lahaina and filming the line as it snaps, and it’s down and it’s starting fires across the hill. And I’m sure that must have been used as evidence in court.

So yes, there’s a lot to say when it comes to what electric companies could do and the role they play in wildfire mitigation. 

I know a lot of people in Lahaina are talking about the need to bury electric lines. It’s really expensive to do that though. It costs a lot more to bury the line, I think, than to just have it above ground. And what the electric company’s done, as far as I know, is to just rebuild the poles, but stronger.

And so I think though that the community is still nervous if they rebuild their home, if they rebuild their community. Will these lines hold stronger than the other lines and are we going to see a similar thing happen? So that’s part of the conversation. 

Another one when it comes to mitigation is firehouses. There’s a gentleman in Lahaina, his home burned down, his name is Joe Pluta. He told me that he leapt from his burning window to safety and escaped just with an inch of his life as he watched his home burn down. There’s so many stories like that.

And it’s so ironic because he was part of the effort to get a firehouse built in Lahaina, another one built. And his argument was that, “Hey, community, if we build these firehouses, if we build more firehouses, then we can knock our insurance rates down. So why don’t you just take the insurance savings that you would’ve gotten and put that towards the firehouse?” 

Which is a very clever idea. He actually did get that accomplished just north of Lahaina in Napili but was unable to get that accomplished in Lahaina until after the fire. I think they are now going to build a firehouse. 

But as you mentioned, controlled burns are another part of the topic. I mean, on Maui, we have a history of doing controlled burns. We had sugarcane for, you know, a hundred years. And they did controlled burns there. 

Now, the sugarcane industry on Maui went belly up in 2016, leaving the land dry and fallow. And so that’s a wildfire risk, but we still have, you know, probably the world experts on sugarcane burning in or on Maui, but I think it’s kind of a taboo topic though. There still may be a fear about whether or not burning would lead to fires or mitigate against fires. So those are a few of the issues.

Anaya: So back in 1992, Hurricane Iniki devastated the island of Kauai. You know, the category 4 hurricane destroyed more than 1,400 homes and damaged another 5,000, leaving 7,000 residents homeless. And that total cost of that hurricane was about $6 billion in 2022 dollars. 

So an interesting move by the [Kaua‘i] Council two years after the fire was cutting industrial and commercial tax rates by 50% for one year to help businesses recover. So how did that turn out, and did it help bring businesses back? And would you recommend, you know, a policy like this for the affected areas of the wildfires in California?

Kent: Well, yes, cutting taxes is a good thing for humanitarian reasons. And, you know, it’s really important that the people on the ground have as much money and capital as they can get. They did do this in Lahaina where they cut taxes for all property owners, and I think that’s, you know, saved taxpayers around $10 million so far. 

But the businesses haven’t really come back. And it’s not because of the taxes, it’s because of the zoning and building issues. It’s hard to build houses, but it’s even harder to build businesses after the fires because all of the efforts to waive regulations have been focused on housing.

But the SMA laws and all of those laws that I mentioned earlier, none of them are waived for the rebuilding of businesses. And so there’s a huge barrier there.

I believe there’s an organization in Lahaina called Front Street Recovery. And they are a group of business owners that are trying to advocate that laws be waived for them. 

But, you know, anyone who’s been to Lahaina knows that part of the magic and special nature of the area was that it was right next to the ocean. It’s this beautiful old shanty wailing village that was built right abutting this beautiful harbor that looks across. You can see Lanai, you can see Molokai, you can see whales breaching in the ocean. It’s right next to this glorious banyan tree and King Kamehameha III Elementary School. 

But all of that, right now at the moment, would be very difficult to rebuild due to these regulations. And some people are talking about maybe we’ll never see anything rebuilt there. Maybe it will just be a wide, flat, open-space piece of land with a big banyan tree still there.

So it’s really up to policymakers and the community about what they ultimately want to happen.

Itchon: So, Joe, as you might know, California residents are suffering from skyrocketing insurance rates. And they’re going to only exacerbate the problem. 

So what’s been Hawaii’s experience? How quickly were families and businesses able to receive the payout from insurance companies? And 18 months after the fire, are residents seeing their insurance rates rise?

Kent: Oh, yes. Insurance rates are rising. Thankfully, families were able to get their insurance money though quickly to the tune of around $2.3 billion so far, at least. And I’m sure it’ll be a billion more at least. And this insurance money has helped them find temporary shelter and get their life back together, so that’s very important. 

But it is true that insurance rates are rising dramatically and they have risen dramatically after the fire across the state. I think insurance companies are realizing that Hawaii has hurricanes and wildfires, and volcano lava flows, eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis.

It’s not really a safe place to live as far as property goes. And so they’re trying to reprice their models, and that’s leading to a big spike. 

At the same time, if you look at the homes that have been built in Hawaii, many of them were built in the ’60s and ’70s before all of the zoning regulations and housing regulations came to being ensconced in our laws. And so the homes here are old and the condominiums, many of them are cracked and they have broken elevators and so on.

Some housing communities are near wildfire areas, and all of this is causing insurance rates to raise to the tune of sometimes 20%, sometimes 500%, some around nearly 1,000%. 

I mean, try to imagine an HOA, you know, your fee, your HOA fee for an apartment or a condo going up by several hundred dollars in the span of one month. Some people might not be able to afford that, and that is hitting pocketbooks right now as we speak. And so there may be some sell-off that happens on some of these old condos, thanks to the insurance hikes

Anaya: This is a question where we might shudder a little bit at the thought of this, but Gavin Newsom has been talking about a Marshall Plan 2.0 to rebuild the Palisades. And, you know, one thing that we’ve heard about from the experience in Maui was, you know, government being really heavy-handed in kind of pushing denser housing or favor developers or a bias toward their own kind of favored building agendas. 

So what are some lessons for Californians that they should look out for to avoid this heavy hand of government?

Kent: Well, it’s very tempting, if you’re the governor, to start proclaiming things immediately after a disaster because everyone’s looking at you to say something, anything. And I think Hawaii’s Gov. Josh Green stumbled into this. He may have made a gaff when he started talking in this direction at first, too — “We are going to do this with the land and we’re going to do that with the land,” and making these sort of broad statements, which he has since walked back, by the way.

But really, the only message that people, that really should play is, it should be up to the property owners what they want to rebuild. And if you can ensure that as a leader, then you will go far. I mean, after all, that’s the truth, you know, that the people there own the property. 

Even by the way, if some people wish to sell their property, that should be their decision. You know, on Maui, there was a lot of talk right after the fires about prohibiting the sale to speculators or people who would come in and offer money for the property.

But for some families, that actually might’ve made sense for them and actually put them in a financial benefit. If you just look right now, the price for those properties has fallen dramatically after people now realize how hard it is to build on Maui. And so you could have had people who needed the money, buy a house elsewhere on Maui, if they … 

Now thankfully, that moratorium on the sale of homes didn’t go through. But all I’m saying is that blanket, broad prohibitions or statements about what we design or dream to the community to be are, I would caution against those and think more about the individual liberty of the property owners and allowing them to do what they want and to rebuild what they want is the important thing. 

Also, after the fires, the Lahaina was surrounded by military or troops that were basically there to keep out people. They kept out Lahaina residents, people who wanted to go to their home and see if their valuables were still there. 

The homes were being looted anyways. And so a lot of people were wanting to save maybe the last vestiges of their family heirlooms and things like that. But they were prohibited by this sort of military presence. And that created a lot of resentment in the community. 

So there’s kind of a balance. You want to allow people in as quickly as possible. Well, at the same time, I know there’s– you know, on Maui, they sprayed this glue on everything to make sure that the ash didn’t turn into like a toxic soup that would go into the ocean.

So I think a light touch and an individual liberty-focused approach is the right way to go.

Itchon: Shifting to a related issue, Hawaii and California share a huge problem, the lack of affordable housing. So this was made worse by the wildfires in both our states. 

So what has Hawaii done that California can learn from to build more housing in our states?

Kent: Well, Maui and Hawaii are really more warning signs about what not to do, as I mentioned, but there is some progress being made though. 

Now, just to set the table, again, Hawaii has the most burdensome housing regulations. and we have the highest cost of living, so many people are leaving our state, very similar to California. 

And recently, we’ve passed some bills at the state Legislature to allow for more housing to be built — things like allowing commercial use to be used for residential. A lot of the malls or business districts in Hawaii are filled with empty business buildings. And yeah, you could convert those to housing if you had more flexibility. 

Other things like allowing for a second dwelling on your property if you so wish, you know, it’s up to the property owner, but they should be able to build on their property what they want as long as they’re not infringing on the rights of others.

And so there’s a few small steps that we’re making in these directions, but the biggest one is the percentage of land in Hawaii. The percent of land that’s zoned for urban development, which is where you could have any neighborhood or affordable housing or any kind of housing, is 5%.

That means statewide, only 5% of the land has been zoned for the type of housing that you would live in a neighborhood. 

Now, you could build like a mansion on agriculture land or something, but that’s around 45% of the land is agriculture. And the other, the rest of it is conservation. 

So if they took that 5% and added to it one percentage point, then that would be a 20% increase in the supply of land available for housing.

Now, I think a similar statistic exists in California where it could be that 5% of the land is zoned for urban development, just the same. Building up or building out, it doesn’t matter to me as long as you allow for building.

Anaya: So finally, as we close, you know, we don’t want to be all depressing and talk about all the problems because there has been progress in rebuilding Lahaina. 

You know, certainly for us Californians, and for many tourists in the United States and around the world, it’s always been a destination vacation spot. So tell us some of the good news and, you know, should Californians be considering Lahaina again for a vacation spot this year?

Kent: Yes, yes, yes. The more you vacation in Lahaina and on Maui, then the more money you’re putting into the economy to help people recover. So really, think of it almost as a goodwill or humanitarian thing. People need the economic activity. 

And people are coming back, thankfully. The tourism numbers are almost back to what they were already on Maui before the fires. And it’s still a beautiful place to visit and tour around. And some other good news is that people are getting their permits finally. There are hundreds of permits going through right now.

As I said before, only three buildings have been rebuilt, but maybe we’ll see a lot more as this flood of permits has been issued. Those permits have been issued because government waived a lot of regulations and lifted red tape to allow for that to happen. And so there is, you know, a good side of the story to this. 

And surrounding Lahaina, there has been a lot of building. Remember when I mentioned about the ability to build out, well, people are building out around Lahaina and they’re building, you know, hundreds of homes there. Many of those homes are temporary, but hopefully, the government can allow more flexibility for that so that those homes could be made permanent potentially. 

So there are a lot of great things happening. I talked to my friend the other day who was in the fire. She took a trip in the days after the fire and went to the mainland, went around the world and came back, and was housed by the support systems that the government provided for wildfire victims. And she now has a job, you know, working for one of the hotels. 

So absolutely, come to the hotels; that would really help our islands and help our Hawaii out.

Itchon: Thank you so much, Joe, and good luck to you and the people of Hawaii.

Kent: Thanks so much, and good luck to you as well as you start this long and difficult journey.