Hawaii's wetlands are vanishing. This failed plan offers a warning

Associated Press

4 days ago

Last July, excavators and woodchippers appeared on a 7-acre wild thicket of kiawe trees near Kīhei that serves as a crucial habitat for the endangered Hawaiian Hoary Bats during pupping season.
Community members raised alarms about the unpermitted work, but the clearing continued unchecked. Within weeks, the Waipu'ilani Mauka wetland — which makes up a small portion of the estimated 83 acres of wetlands left in South Maui — was reduced to a plot of mostly barren red dirt.
To prevent this kind of destruction of wetlands without oversight, Maui County lawmakers passed an ordinance in 2022 requiring developers and county planners to take steps to protect these vital habitats.
That ordinance has never been fully implemented, let alone enforced.
Environmentalists say the county law, which some hoped would serve as a revolutionary blueprint for protecting wetlands across the state, has instead become a cautionary tale of how promised stewardship of the environment can fall flat amid inaction and confusion.
Almost three years after the ordinance was enacted, all county officials and lawmakers have managed to do is create a map of the wetlands with a price tag of more than $250,000.
Amid ongoing confusion over the 2022 law, environmentalists have filed a lawsuit against the landowners of the Kīhei property and the county arguing that owners should have sought environmental permits that would have required the county to consider how that work would affect the wetland.
Developers said in a written statement that they were complying with other county ordinances and addressing fire risk by removing the trees on land zoned for residential use.
The next steps in implementing the law — which might clear up such debates — are stalled at the County Council. Environmentalists say that's just a bureaucratic excuse.
'The ordinance itself establishes the policy of the county of Maui,' said Christina Lizzi, an environmental attorney who is challenging a permit issued for another property in an area covered by the wetland ordinance. 'It should have been guiding what they were doing here, and it was completely ignored.'
Stronger Protections
Residents in South Maui have grown used to flooding in recent years. Big rain storms in the mountains send a rush of muddy water down to the low-lying neighborhoods along the shoreline, sometimes washing out the major road through Kīhei.
Environmentalists and local officials blame the flooding on the near total destruction of the area's once prevalent wetlands, which serve as crucial repositories for storm water. Development in South Maui has exploded in the last 50 years, eating away at these environments that serve as crucial flood protection, a habitat for endangered native species and a barrier for sediment runoff that kills coral reefs.
The 2022 ordinance was intended to prevent more building in wetland zones, said Kelly King, a former county council member from South Maui who spearheaded the initiative.
'The idea was to try to increase that back up and absorb the storm water, so that we wouldn't have all this flooding,' King said.
The law created an explicit policy to protect wetlands and laid out a series of steps to do that. First, it required the county planning department to create a map of wetlands on Maui, Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi. The council was then supposed to use the map to create a special zoning district that prohibits significant destruction of the wetlands and restricts clearing vegetation or grading the land.
The ordinance also set up a process to identify lands that the county should acquire for conservation and required developers for certain projects to generate reports about the feasibility of taking steps to preserve the wetlands before building.
By establishing this policy, Maui aimed to go further than the federal government. Under the Clean Water Act, three things need to be present to be considered wetland: water at or near the surface of the ground, certain types of soil and wetland vegetation.
Maui took a more expansive definition. If just two of those criteria are met, the area qualifies as a wetland under Ordinance 5421, opening the door for more land to be protected.
Putting the broader definition into place became even more urgent in 2023 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that wetlands needed to be connected on the surface of the land to a body of water for federal law to apply. That weakened federal protections for Maui's wetlands, where water often flows into the ocean underground.
The ordinance should have become a way for the county to 'fill those gaps in wetlands protection that the federal side was no longer really providing,' said Wesley Crile, a coastal dune restoration specialist at University of Hawaiʻi Sea Grant.
Faltering Progress
The planning department was given a year after the ordinance was enacted in October 2022 to map the wetlands. The county paid environmental consulting firm H. T. Harvey & Associates $274,064.72 to do the work, in consultation with local scientists. But the wildfire that destroyed much of Lahaina in 2023 threw the project off course, and the planning department was granted an extension.
When the wetland map was eventually completed in June 2024, environmentalists raised concerns about several key wetlands that were included in previous drafts but were left off the final map. Other areas already set aside for conservation weren't included because they were protected by other means, according to Crile, who was involved in the creation of the map.
Then progress ground to a halt.
For the ordinance to be put into effect, the county council needs to adopt a wetlands overlay district, County Planning Director Kate Blystone said in an email. Lila Lawrence, a spokesperson from the Maui County Department of Planning, declined interview requests.
Before taking that step, the Maui County Council has been waiting for guidance from the Conservation Planning Committee, a group of experts that is supposed to advise the council on conservation and land use issues. But that group doesn't have enough members, and it hasn't met in about two years.
Earlier this year, Gabe Johnson, a county council member who chairs the Agriculture, Diversification, Environment, and Public Transportation Committee, introduced a resolution calling on the conservation committee to come up with recommendations. But he didn't think the measure had the support to pass, and lawmakers put off a vote.
'I'm just going to have to wait until the political will comes around,' Johnson said. 'And it might take something like, let's say worst-case scenario, flooding … a natural disaster because we don't manage our wetlands.'
Tom Cook, a council member from South Maui, said he's in favor of protecting the wetlands but wants it to be done in a way that doesn't create confusion and concern from property homeowners. He hopes the council picks the issue up again in the fall.
'What I would do is invite all the parties back to give their testimony, so that when we do this overlay map, it is something that is enforceable without too much pushback,' Cook said.
Even though the planning department says it is waiting on the council to take action, environmentalists and a former lawmaker who helped pass the measure say the county doesn't have to wait for that to start putting protections in place.
'It was supposed to go into effect as soon as we passed it,' King said.
King and environmentalists argue that the ordinance provides a clear mandate that the county protect the wetlands, something it can do without waiting for the incremental steps laid out in the ordinance.
Lizzi, the attorney representing the environmentalists in the lawsuit, said the intent is clear: 'Protect the wetlands to a higher degree than any other law that's out there.'
Will This Stop Development?
Environmental groups that filed the lawsuit over the unpermitted clearing of trees at the Waipu'ilani Mauka wetland say the ordinance should have applied — even if it wasn't implemented yet — and the property owners and the county should have taken steps to weigh how wetlands could be restored or protected.
But for others, it's not so clear that action would have been covered by the ordinance. That lack of clarity is why even if the wetlands ordinance does get fully implemented, environmentalists, scientists and policymakers disagree about how far it will go to protect these vulnerable ecosystems.
Some, like Crile from Sea Grant, interpret the law to apply only to certain land use changes or larger developments like subdivisions, leaving out single family homes and small buildings — the bulk of permit applications that come through the planning department.
Other permits needed for those kinds of projects might take wetlands into account. But this ordinance's requirements, including a report that addresses the potential impacts to the wetlands and the feasibility of restoring them, wouldn't apply to the kinds of homes that already have been built around identified wetlands in South Kīhei.
Crile thinks the wetlands protections could be strengthened by extending the law to apply to development of single family homes and other smaller projects. But as it's written now, he says the county ordinance lacks teeth when it comes to those kinds of projects.
'This ordinance is lacking the enforcement mechanism to stop that development, or to say you need to move it outside this area.' Crile said. While other permitting requirements exist, under this ordinance, 'there's nothing that says they can't build there.'
King doesn't agree that the ordinance carves out single family homes. She said that interpretation isn't in the spirit of the ordinance, which was put in place, in part, to protect homeowners.
'If you're going to develop on a wetland, you need to know that it's a wetland, and you need to make your decisions whether to go forward based on the fact that you're going to have flooding,' she said.
The wetlands aren't left completely vulnerable without the ordinance in place. Other land use regulations require developers to take steps to preserve natural resources. Most of the wetlands, for example, fall within special management areas that require specific permitting and take wetlands into account.
But environmental groups are battling land owners and the county over several cases where those other protections didn't prevent development in wetlands areas.
It's discouraging to watch this law intended to protect crucial habitats just sit on the shelf, city council member Johnson said.
'Is it frustrating to see our wetlands being disappeared? Is it frustrating to see our wetlands being developed? Is it frustrating to see South Maui flood every year? Is it frustrating to see the mismanagement of our land to resources? Yes,' Johnson said. 'Is there something the county can do? Yes, with this ordinance.'
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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.