(AP) – Maui County is preparing to buy more than 160 acres of mostly vacant land in Lahaina to use for long-planned improvements and projects that are central to the town’s post-wildfire recovery.
The Maui County Council Budget, Finance and Economic Development Committee advanced legislation last week that would authorize a $20 million purchase of 120 parcels in and around downtown Lahaina.
Council members and county officials said during the two-day meeting that the county appeared to have a rare opportunity to take ownership of large swaths of contiguous land and expedite plans to implement new flood control measures and extend roads that could be used as evacuation routes during emergencies such as the deadly 2023 fire.
Yuki Lei Sugimura, who chairs the committee, said Friday that this purchase would make planning these projects significantly less complicated by clarifying where the county will be able to build and allowing officials to avoid separate negotiations for each parcel’s use or acquisition.
“It’s helpful for us to try to get things done quicker,” she said, “and easier if we are the landowner.”
Prominent West Maui developerPeter Martin offered to sell the predominantly agricultural land to the county late last month, requesting that the deal be closed by Nov. 14. So while council members still had unanswered questions, they moved the potential real estate transaction on to the full council to make sure that the county could meet his deadline.
The county would be able to use about half of the parcels to move forward with decades-old plans for better flood mitigation and to extend the Lahaina Bypass to the northwest, Jordan Molina, county public works director, said during the meeting Tuesday. Where and how the county will be able to acquire land is typically one of the greatest challenges associated with these kinds of large-scale infrastructure projects, he said.
“This opportunity to gain site control is a huge move to help facilitate the delivery of these projects, not only because it eliminates all the individual negotiations that we would potentially deal with facing down the road, but it also gives us the flexibility to adjust these projects when we encounter any unknown site conditions through the area,” he said.
The land could also be used to extend Kuhua Street south of the Kuhua Camp neighborhood, where the highest concentration of people died during the 2023 fire. The council earlier this year approved the purchase of several other small parcels to be used to extend Kuhua Street, Dickenson Street and Aki Road. Those routes, had they existed at the time of the disaster, may have saved dozens of lives by providing alternate evacuation paths, according to computer modeling that the Army Corps provided last year to Maui County planners.
Kirk Boes, a longtime Maui resident who narrowly escaped from his Kuhua Street home before it was destroyed in the Lahaina fire, said he would be more excited about the potential land acquisition if it advanced plans to widen and extend Kuhua Street northward. The parcels that the county is considering purchasing from Martin are located a few blocks away from Kuhua Street, which currently terminates at a dead end.
“We’ll probably end up moving. I look at real estate on the mainland all the time,” said Boes, 67, explaining that he would not consider rebuilding his house in Lahaina unless the county provided clarity on when they would fix some of the safety issues that led to so many deaths in his neighborhood in 2023. “I’m considering leaving Maui after 50 years.”
Council members also discussed using the parcels to relocate the Salvation Army from its former location in the burn zone, to build new housing and to expand the homeless shelter organization Ka Hale A Ke Ola ’s Lahaina location.
Unanswered Questions
Out of the 120 parcels, 18 had “clouded claims,” meaning there wasn’t clear documentation that Martin owned the property. Given the tight timeframe that officials have to close the real estate deal with Martin, Molina told council members that he recommended moving forward with the transaction and dealing with unresolved issues like contested land ownership as they arise.
“I’m not concerned about having to take on that extra work relative to the tens of millions of dollars we’re going to have to coordinate to deliver these projects,” he said.
By purchasing the potentially contested land from Martin, the county would have the option to work directly with local residents who might have claims to properties on possible land swaps, Molina added.
Recent appraisals of the 120 parcels have varied greatly, he said, because there were few comparable property sales in the area and many different ways to calculate the land’s value. The land had been assessed for as high as $50 million.
“We’ve been negotiating down, and we’ve reached $20 million … which we felt comfortable with,” Molina said, noting that the number was slightly lower than the county’s property tax assessment for the land.
Martin, who did not respond to requests for comment, has a long and polarizing history in West Maui. In early 2023, a judge ruled that three companies tied to Martin — Launiupoko Irrigation Co., Wainee Land & Homes and Hope Builders — broke the law when they tore through an old roadway while digging a trench to build a highly controversial water line.
Martin has also downplayed the possible role that invasive grasses on his land may have played in the Lahaina fire, and told the Washington Post that he believed the disaster was the result of God’s anger over the way that the state’s water regulations prevented farming and developmenton his lands.
A Maui County spokesperson said in an email Friday that no one from Mayor Richard Bissen’s office or the Office of Recovery were available to comment.
Sugimura said she expects the full council to take up the legislation to approve the transaction on or around Nov. 7.
Story originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
