The human toll of the conflagration was more than 100 lives. Property damage racked up to nearly $3.5 billion. Virtually all of Lahaina’s homes and businesses were destroyed or severely damaged. The trauma endures as survivors of the disaster struggle to rebuild, recover and get on with their lives.
But — government officials nationwide take note — even now, almost two years after the fires, fewer than two dozen homes have been rebuilt. Most of the area’s residents have been living in temporary quarters elsewhere on the island, and many others have simply given up waiting and moved away from Maui permanently. Local businesses have also been unable to quickly rebuild and resume operations.
State and county tax, land-use, zoning and other policies and regulations are a big reason. These laws are not only strict, but — more important — inflexible.
Apparently, when the many layers of the area’s current regulations were being implemented, nobody considered what adjustments might have to be made in the event of something unexpected — such as a natural disaster. If state and Maui County officials had tried to imagine and account for such a possibility earlier, Lahaina’s desperate residents could well be back on their way toward full recovery by now.
To their credit, Hawaii’s governor and Maui County’s mayor quickly invoked their emergency powers to waive many laws and regulations that stood in the way of rebuilding, but those waivers didn’t cover everything, and emergency waivers are, after all, only temporary.
To provide long-term certainty, state and county lawmakers had to start legislatively codifying those waivers — or go beyond them to address other issues — a process that requires months, even years to fully implement.
One of the first issues to arise concerned property tax relief for owners whose homes were either destroyed or significantly damaged. Virtually everyone agreed that people shouldn’t have to pay taxes on homes that no longer existed or weren’t livable. But until after the fires, there had been nothing in the Maui code that made such relief automatic for all natural disasters.
County lawmakers scrambled to provide such tax relief, but other issues remained, such as the county’s rules pertaining to nonconforming structures and uses. Lahaina’s charm was its many old buildings and their uses that had been grandfathered in as modern zoning codes took hold. County regulations, however, did not account for what should happen to those buildings and uses should they be destroyed by a natural disaster. It wasn’t until this March that the county council authorized nonconforming structures to be restored — to be rebuilt mostly as they were — with some conditions.
Hawaii’s state rules on building in coastal areas are another example of how inflexible regulations can delay rebuilding. In general, any construction proposals near the coast must go through a special permitting process involving public hearings that are often contentious and unpredictable. During the past decade, only 42 of these permits have been approved.
The fires, however, destroyed or damaged more than 600 structures in Lahaina’s coastal areas. Hawaii Gov. Josh Green eventually waived that permitting process for most of those via an emergency order, but it wasn’t until a year after the fires.
The Hawaii Legislature followed up this May with legislation that codifies the governor’s waiver and applies it to future disasters statewide — though it does not include about 90 homes and businesses situated directly on Lahaina’s shoreline and strangely has a sunset date of July 1, 2028.
In any case, all of these changes represent progress for Lahaina residents eager to rebuild their homes and lives. But they only scratch the surface. Rules for bed and breakfasts, historic districts, infrastructure improvements, commercial signs and more all still need attention.
So far, the updating process has been slow and unpredictable — unfortunately for Lahaina’s disaster victims who still are homeless or unemployed. How much nicer it would have been had Hawaii’s state and county lawmakers written flexibility into their many rules and regulations from the get-go.
It’s a lesson for policymakers everywhere: They should adjust their policies and act sooner rather than later to account for the inevitable challenges of rebuilding after a natural disaster strikes.
Mark Coleman is the communications director and Jonathan Helton is a policy analyst at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, part of the State Policy Network.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
