Stream restoration, water supply needs prompt a closer look at Ha‘ikū streams

HA‘IKŪ — Lurlyn Scott spent nearly two decades fighting to restore water flows in the East Maui streams she and other taro farmers depended on. 

So when Scott hears that restoration efforts could be on the horizon for streams out in Ha‘ikū, she’s all for it. 

“I think it’s about time,” Scott said. 

Some of the earliest sugar plantation ditches were built across Ha‘ikū streams, but in-stream flow standards — which govern how much water should be flowing in a given stream — haven’t changed in the area since the late 1980s.

Now Maui County is planning to ask the state to amend the interim in-stream flow standards for 11 streams in Ha‘ikū, according to Department of Water Supply Director John Stufflebean. It comes amid a greater push for community control over East Maui water and the county’s search for more water sources in the face of demand and drought. 

“We’re certainly looking at how we deal with the water issues in East Maui,” Stufflebean said last month when asked why the county is planning to petition now. “We’ve got the issues of wanting to restore the streams, plus we have the supply needs for the people who live Upcountry and, you know, the agricultural needs as well. … So we felt it was time to really get a better understanding of how much really should be left in the streams as kind of the starting point and then balance that against the other uses as well.”

And while residents like Scott are eager to see the streams restored, they’re also wary of any efforts to tap into Ha‘ikū’s water resources for other areas. 

‘WILL WE EVER GET BACK TO THAT TYPE OF WATER FLOW?’

Growing up in Ha‘ikū as the daughter of a fisherman, Joyclynn Costa says she remembers Māliko Bay being so abundant that “you could sit on the cliff and you could see the ball of fish.” She says the moi her father brought home were so big, it was a struggle to fit them in the fridge. 

To this day, Costa uses the ocean to gauge the health of the freshwater streams, and the harder it gets to find the abundance and size of the fish her family once caught, the more she worries about the streams up mauka. 

“For me the perspective is from fishing and the shoreline and the health of the shoreline, the abundance or the decay of fishing,” Costa said. 

Scott sees things from the perspective of a taro farmer. Over the years she’s watched the streams get lower and the water temperatures get warmer amid competition between farmers and the former sugar plantation. She remembers cleaner streams where they used to catch crayfish that have now turned into trash-lined dumping grounds. She notes the encroachment of invasive plants, which can’t absorb and filter runoff the way native plants once could.  

Both Scott and Costa, former classmates at Ha‘ikū School, say they agree with stream restoration and setting in-stream flow standards, if it’s done right. They say it’s not just the surface levels of the streams that matter, but reforestation and restoration of groundwater as well.  

“It has to be a more holistic approach because you can study the stream, but if the wells underneath are not healthy, then you get more evaporation than you can restoration,” said Costa, the Hāmākualoa Moku representative for ‘Aha Moku O Maui. “You’d be fighting a losing battle because all it’s going to keep doing is percolating, percolating, and never fill the stream up adequately.”

Scott, who represents Huelo on the East Maui Regional Community Board that was recently created to oversee water use in the area, wonders if it’s even possible for some of the streams that have run low for so long. 

“A lot of these streams have already been depleted, so what are you going to study if the stream is dry?” Scott said. “And will we ever get back to that type of water flow? If you deplete it so much it’s so hard to recover from that. We don’t have, like I said, the forestry, our weather is just going downhill.”

To figure out what restoration might look like for these streams, consultant Brown and Caldwell is helping the county to create a framework that will serve as a “road map for returning the flow to the streams in the Ha‘ikū area,” senior project manager Lauren Armstrong explained at a Ha‘ikū Community Association meeting on June 19.  

Brown and Caldwell will be studying 11 total streams and their tributaries from Kailua Gulch to Kakipi Gulch. The mix of perennial and intermittent streams includes Kailua, Māliko, Kanemoe‘ala, East Kuiaha, West Kuiaha, Konanui, Kaupakalua, Manawai‘iao, Uaoa, Keali‘i and Kakipi.

The future goal is to have the state Commission on Water Resources Management decide whether to amend their interim in-stream flow standards, Armstrong said. 

Back in the late 1980s, the commission faced the monumental task of reviewing 376 perennial streams across the state, so it decided to set interim in-stream flow standards at “status quo” levels at the time the water code was adopted in 1988 and 1989, according to the commission’s website. For East Maui streams, including the Ha‘ikū area, that meant whatever was flowing in the streams as of Oct. 8, 1988, according to Dean Uyeno, acting deputy director of the water commission. 

The Hawai‘i Supreme Court later ruled that these “status quo” levels weren’t adequate protections. Since then the commission has been reviewing and updating stream flow standards, particularly in priority areas where there are perennial mauka-to-makai stream flows, former plantation systems or petitions by the public. 

“It’s our goal to set measurable in-stream flow standards wherever we can, wherever there’s contention or where we believe that water can be restored to the streams,” Uyeno said in a phone interview last month.

East Maui streams from Honopou to Makapipi and Nā Wai ‘Ehā streams were among those priority areas with a long history of plantation diversions and drawn-out legal disputes over water use. Streams in Ha‘ikū, while also subject to plantation ditches and tunnels, were not as high on the list because they didn’t flow to the ocean perennially, said Uyeno, who attributed this more to geology than to sugar plantations. 

“Our understanding currently of the streams is that they may flow in the upper reaches but they tend to lose water to groundwater, what we refer to as losing reaches, where that surface water starts to percolate into the groundwater,” Uyeno said. “And so there is very limited flow at lower elevation.”

However, the Ha‘ikū streams do have the protection of a 2003 consent decree that was forged following a complaint against the county over a water development plan for East Maui. Essentially, if the county wants to develop groundwater sources in the area, it first needs to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the plan and address stream restoration like it’s doing now. 

“No decision has been made to pursue water in Ha‘ikū,” Armstrong said. “There are no projects or funding currently allocated in the county budget to develop water here. So basically nothing can happen until the consent decree requirements are met.” 

Brown and Caldwell plans to seek public input this summer and get a draft report to the county in October. It’s the first step toward stream restoration; other steps include petitioning the state to amend the interim in-stream flow standards, doing studies for each of the 11 streams, going through the water commission’s decision-making process and modifying diversions to restore stream flow.  

Farming company Mahi Pono, part owners of East Maui Irrigation that oversees the complicated diversion system, issued a statement but did not directly address questions about what it thought of attempts to establish streamflow standards in Ha‘ikū and what changes it might have to make in response. 

“Water is a precious resource, and we are committed to using water efficiently to grow food and to keep Maui in active agriculture,” Mahi Pono said in a statement to HJI last month. “That said, access to water is essential for farming. We look forward to learning more about the County’s plan.”

Stufflebean said at the meeting that the county planned to submit a petition within the next couple of weeks; on Friday the county confirmed the department is preparing the petition and plans to submit it shortly.

ANOTHER SOURCE OF WATER?

When asked outside the meeting if the county hoped the Ha‘ikū streams in question could eventually provide water resources for Upcountry, which frequently faces shortages, Stufflebean said, “possibly.” 

“It just depends on, like, there’s the bigger picture, of what other possible sources of water are there,” he said. “And so you want to look at the whole picture and then make the decision as to where to focus our efforts.”

But, he said, any decisions about developing additional water sources in the area are well in the future. 

“The consent decree says we can’t do that until we complete additional work. This is part of that work that we have to do,” he said. “Really, there’s been no decisions made. We can’t develop it now. But we would have to complete all this work, and then it would be a question of, well then, based on all the information we have, would it make sense to do that? That’s still years away.” 

Drought and less rainfall have pushed the county to consider more wells, ways to make its system more efficient, water conservation and recycling measures, Stufflebean said. 

“We’re looking at all possible sources for future supplies for Maui,” he said. 

Costa, who also attended the meeting, had a clear answer when asked what she thought of Ha‘ikū streams potentially providing water for Upcountry use: “Hell no.” 

Scott thinks it would be more challenging because of the elevation and terrain. 

“They like easy, cheap water,” Scott said after the meeting. “East Maui water flows downhill — gravity takes care of that. Now if they’re gonna take water from Ha‘ikū and they’re gonna ship it up to Makawao, that costs money — electric, pipelines, all that. So, Ha‘ikū water gotta feed Ha‘ikū.”