Maui County Planning Update - Winter 2021

Community Plan Updates

By Jennifer Maydan and Kate Blystone, Maui County Planning Department Long Range Division

West Maui Community Plan

The Planning Department transmitted the Draft West Maui Community Plan to the County Council for the final phase of the update process. The Councilʻs Planning and Sustainable Land Use Committee is reviewing the draft plan, making amendments, and will provide the revised plan to the full Council for adoption by ordinance.

South Maui Community Plan

The South Maui Community Plan update has shifted into high gear! We completed the first phase of visioning in mid-February with nearly 200 people participating in Zoom vision workshops and through our online questionnaire. We are in the process of analyzing all of the feedback we received and will craft a few draft visions for the community to review before selecting one that will go forward with the rest of the draft plan to the Community Plan Advisory Committee later this year.

We also posted the first of four resource papers about the South Maui community to our website. The Housing Resource Paper is a deep dive into the housing situation in South Maui and how it differs from other places in the county. We discovered that while South Maui has 17 percent of the population of Maui County, it has 27 percent of the housing units. Unfortunately, approximately 44 percent of South Maui's housing stock is vacant due to a high percentage of second homes and vacation rentals in the area. We heard at the vision workshops, loud and clear, that housing for local people is a concern for the community and the paper illuminates that it is an issue that needs to be addressed with this update.

The next few months will focus on getting youth more engaged in the update, asking the community for their thoughts on what areas of South Maui should change and what areas should stay the same over the next 20 years, and getting more information out to the public about transportation, infrastructure and public facilities, and climate change and hazards.