Sea level rise, permitting and a push for restoration of a buried historic site and wetlands make it challenging. A two-story building with a basement built as a general store during the plantation era in 1916 is charred but still standing amid the rubble along the main thoroughfare running through Lahaina after last summer’s inferno. “It’s built like a fortress,” said Leil Koch, co-owner of the building at 744 Front St.
“Two-foot concrete, double-rebar thing. It made it through a fire in 1919 and so now it’s made it through two fires.” Koch is eager to rebuild the 25,000-foot historic building that on Aug.
8 was the home of Billabong surf shop, Na Hoku jewelry, Vintage European Posters, a store featuring the Morrison Hotel Gallery and drummer Mick Fleetwood’s popular restaurant and rooftop bar. Just down the road, the Furtado family wants to rebuild their six burned Front Street buildings, which President Biden walked past to shake hands with first responders during his August visit to Lahaina. Kaleo Schneider said some of the properties have been in her family since the early 1900s, when her great-grandparents Antonio Furtado, a Portuguese immigrant, and his wife Lucy Napela Kaukau bought their first building for a butcher shop.
But the mostly local owners of the prime real estate are waiting for direction from Maui County, which is wrestling with how to rebuild one of the world’s iconic public thoroughfares in a historic district boasting many century-old buildings that are oh-so-close to an ocean that continues to rise due to climate change. While many would like to see the quaint town recreated as it was, the county has been hearing from many residents who say the clean slate created by the fire is an opportunity to pivot away from Lahaina as a tourist mecca. A small part of the town under that vision could include restoring historic Moku’ula, a 1-acre island that was the private residence of King Kamehameha III, and its surrounding fishpond Mokuhinia.
The land and wetlands were buried decades ago to eliminate mosquitoes and make way for a ballfield and park. Schneider, who is part of the Front Street Recovery Group, said most commercial property owners have been patient while the focus rightly has been on helping the approximately 13,000 people who lost their homes and on community healing from the traumatic disaster that killed at least 102 people , making it the deadliest U.S.
wildfire in more than a century. But as the one-year anniversary of the wildfire approaches, she said now is the time for the focus to include the rebuilding of the business district that provides much-needed jobs and tax revenue. As of Friday, 21 residential property owners, taking advantage of expedited permitting, already have begun rebuilding their homes in the 5-mile burn zone and in Kula, with another 25 residential permits approved and 89 in the pipeline.
But so far no commercial permits in the burn zone have been submitted. Rebuilding in the commercial and historical area is much more complicated, said Kate Blystone, Maui County’s new planning director . Most of the 140 or so destroyed commercial and public buildings, and all of the Front Street properties, are in a special management area, established by the Legislature in 1975 to protect shorelines.
Construction and land use in the SMA requires special permitting that can take a year or more under normal circumstances. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution for this,” Blystone said last month. “It is very complicated.
It was complicated before the fire.” On Friday, Maui County Managing Director Josiah Nishita told the County Council that “in full transparency” the priority is on rebuilding residential housing, “but we are not in any way trying to lose sight of the business owners and our commercial property owners because they play a very important role in our community and our recovery process as well.” Council member Tamara Paltin, who represents West Maui, said she thinks the county should have a greater sense of urgency rebuilding the business district so mom-and-pop stores are not replaced by corporations.
She said local landowners in disaster forbearance are getting foreclosed upon. She said the county is not providing commercial property owners direction about who can rebuild or where they can rebuild. Most property owners in the special management area are waiting to see what is happening with the updates to the SMA and shoreline rules that the Maui Planning Commission approved in March 2023 but have not gone into effect due to delays relating to the wildfires.
The approved changes would increase the setback rules by factoring in a leading scientific model that predicts areas that could be flooded in the future if seas rise by 3.2 feet as forecast. Where there is no mapped erosion hazard line, the shoreline setback would be 200 feet.
Blystone said the shoreline rules are ready to be signed by Bissen. Meanwhile, Nishita said, property owners can submit applications under the current rules. The Planning Department already has taken some steps to deal with the issues created by the disaster, including initiating Bill 105 that is now being considered by the County Council .
It would amend the county code to provide an opportunity for nonconforming structures and uses to be reestablished to their state prior to the wildfire disaster. The bill calls for building permits for repair or construction to be completed within four years. Currently, if a building is more than 50% destroyed or damaged, it must meet the current county code.
“Discussion has always been about these setbacks being designed to avoid marine-related hazards,” said Chip Fletcher, interim dean of the University of Hawaii’s School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology. “And if your house burns, that’s not a marine-related hazard. And so one opinion is you should be allowed to rebuild it.
” But with the scientific community saying that the negative impacts of climate change are only getting worse, Fletcher said other people think: “Why not take that opportunity to leave the area, to be moved out of the area that you know is going to be dangerous.” Even if Bill 105 passes, any construction along Front Street would still have to meet current building codes and obtain SMA and other necessary permits, which makes it confusing to many. “The zoning codes and laws that we have in place right now would not, in some cases, allow the things that you loved most about Lahaina,” Blystone said.
This could mean that the restaurants with gorgeous views of Lanai and sunsets hanging over the water may not be able to be built back. “So that’s something we have to grapple with as a planning department, how are we going to deal with that?” Blystone said. She said that is why it is important to talk to the community about what they loved and cared about “so we can adjust how we do business as usual and meet the community where they need us to be.
” On Friday, Blystone provided some of the consensus points from the community workshop the county held June 29 at Lahainaluna High School. For community design, it included maintaining the unique architecture and small-town neighborhood feeling, building parking structures on either side of the town with shuttle service, and building the West Maui Greenway, with increased walkability, bicycle lanes and green spaces connecting downtown to residential areas. The input will be used for the county’s long-term recovery plan , which is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
During that workshop, Schneider pleaded for her family being able to rebuild in the same footprint of the buildings owned by her great-grandparents, and now helping to support 99 members of the Furtado family. Andrew Dixon, owner of Pacific Style Design , said the complicated issues are a reason the county should do a master plan for Lahaina, or at least one for a limited section of Front Street. “An architect could do the SMAs for all the properties so in three years you could start construction and in four years have the town back,” he said, adding that it would be a “hard sell” and expensive.
“Everyone I talk to says that’s what should be done but politicians think it’s too hard.” Blystone said something along the lines of a master plan could be part of the project and programs in the long-term recovery plan. Nishita said Friday that all the community input — which includes feedback from the 900 people who attended five workshops, 2,743 responses to three surveys and 190 interviews with individuals — is being compiled to determine “what exactly the community wants to see in Lahaina Town.
” The county will take into consideration “what current private property owners have rights to and what they are entitled to in order to see what can be developed to really build back what the community desires there,” Nishita said. He also told the council that the county was looking into land swap or buyback programs for property owners affected by sea level rise and other climate change factors. Koch said the business district can be recreated similar to what it was before the fire, while also bringing back important aspects that a lot of the Hawaiian community wants, including the waterways.
The coveted memorial park to honor the lost lives could be created on the grounds of King Kamehameha III Elementary School on Front Street that burned and likely will not be rebuilt in the same location, he added. “But we need to rebuild and recreate the economic engine that is necessary to bring back the lifeblood and the history of Lahaina, what made Lahaina special,” Koch said. In 1997, Front Street was celebrated as one of the Great Streets in America by the American Planning Association.
The association’s reasons: “Front Street packs in everything that makes Lahaina, Lahaina: wooden storefronts, second-story balconies, public parks, art galleries, eateries, residential quarters, whale-watching tourists, children scurrying to and from school, elderly couples taking early-morning walks, bicycles and vehicles sharing the road, divine views of the majestic West Maui Mountains, Lahaina Harbor and island of Lanai, and an archeological site dating to the year 700.” Lahaina Town Action Committee President Sne Patel, who is a member of the Maui Economic Recovery Commission that launched in January, said if there is a master plan the hope is it is not “great, bright and shiny” and loses the town’s historic charm. “One thing discussed in the smaller roundtable groups is we don’t want to lose the feeling that Lahaina had prior to the fire of being this nice intimate setting, having businesses and restaurants along the oceanfront,” he said.
The Maui Economic Recovery Commission, a collaboration of the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism and the county’s Office of Economic Development with about 100 community leaders and officials from federal agencies, has been working on a variety of issues. “We’ve also had members from Oahu, like financial institutions, the labor organizations, the trade unions that are going to have to be a big part of what’s going to be happening going forward with all the construction,” said James Tokioka, director of DBEDT and co-chair of the commission. “The main goal is keeping people home, local people home and rebuilding the economy.
” Just one indicator of the fires’ economic impact: The latest DBEDT data available shows visitor spending on Maui was $382 million in May, down a whopping $238 million from a year earlier. Patel said part of the business recovery plan includes constructing a temporary business district in West Maui where about 125 businesses can operate for several years until the Lahaina business district can be rebuilt. He said the fire displaced about 100 businesses that were part of the Lahaina Town Action Committee .
The economic recovery also is being helped by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s decision to handle and pay for commercial debris removal. Usually in disasters, FEMA only takes care of residential debris removal. The Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the project, expects commercial debris removal for the property owners who want it to be completed by February.
“I’m optimistic,” Koch said. “I would love to start trying to rebuild in a two- to five-year time frame of getting back up and going. I got a jumpstart with my building still standing if its structurally sound.
” He said he wants to be one of the first buildings in the business district to be rebuilt. “There’s still concrete walls, parts of Lahaina and green things growing back,” he said. “So, you’ve got these bastions of hope.
If we can get the banyan tree back ...
a few of these other things back ...
they become foundational bases of hope of bringing back Lahaina, of saying: ‘Yes, we’re here.’” Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation. Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by The Healy Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.
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