Tight council race for South Maui seat sets up showdown for general election

In the closest Maui County Council race, South Maui candidates Tom Cook and Kelly King are each looking forward to what appears to be shaping up as a highly competitive race in the general election.

Cook, the incumbent who won the seat in 2022 when King unsuccessfully ran for Maui County mayor, held a lead of just 225 votes after the state Office of Elections’ first printout at 7:05 p.m. on Saturday.

Cook’s lead grew slightly on the second printout at 10:22 p.m. when he led King 10,375 votes to 10,091.

“I’m hopeful and it seems to be everybody in the community recognizes that she and I have very different views,” Cook said Saturday night. “I think we both care about the community. I don’t know her well. I’m an advocate of our government advocating for people and businesses and not being so stuck on the regulatory process. 

“It takes like 120 to 180 days to build a three- or four-bedroom home, but it takes 300 days to get a permit and that just shows that the regulatory aspect of it is overly burdensome.”

King said she is ready to return to the County Council where she spent six years in the South Maui residency seat from 2017-2022.

“Well, we’re really excited because they’re extremely close, so it’s pretty much of a dead heat,” King said Saturday night. “He spent about six times as much as what we spent for the primary race, so there’s everywhere up to go from here. So, I’m excited about the next couple printouts, too.”

Campaign spending reports as of July 26 show that Cook spent $55,793.78 for the election period to date, while King’s campaign spent $7,548.27. 

With more than 85 percent of the votes counted, it is clear that the race in the general election for one of the most hotly contested seats in Maui County will be between Cook and King. Johnny Keoni Prones had 1,382 votes and there were 3,546 blank votes in the South Maui race on the second printout.

“I think a lot of people know my record, so just reminding people of what I’ve already done and what I will continue to do in the future,” King said of her strategy for the general election vs. Cook. “It’s easy for people to use buzzwords like ‘I’m sustainable,’ ‘I’m an environmentalist,’ but if you look at my records I’m actually doing the things that prove that I am. I brought affordable housing, rentals and housing, 100 percent affordable projects to South Maui from my first term. And I passed a lot of bills to protect our environment, our land, our water, our biodiversity and I’m heavily involved in climate action.”

King added, “I’m excited about lifting Maui up in the eyes of the world with some of the things that we’ve been doing, a lot of the bills that I was able to pass to protect our coral reefs with the sunscreen ban, to restore and preserve our wetlands, the lighting bill that is protecting our seabirds, our sea turtles and things like that that I’ve been speaking about in global venues putting Maui on the map for some of these moves that we’re making that are groundbreaking.”

King, speaking before the second printout, said that she expects the general election to be a different story than the primary.

“I think the primary will probably be close, I’m hoping that we pull ahead of course, and I think that we can widen the gap by just pointing out the differences,” King said. “We haven’t done a lot of really hard campaigning mainly because we are expecting to make it through the primary and so from this point on it’s game on.”

Cook said he is ready for a hotly-contested general election campaign and will also embrace the differences between himself and King. He said growth shouldn’t be seen as a bad word.

“I’m not an advocate of over development,” Cook said. “Our island is limited in resources and in area. We need to prioritize for our local residents, our kupuna who have worked hard and deserve to have a really good retirement, a long life. People are living very long. There’s like 20-year and 30-year waits for some of the senior living facilities. We can do a lot better than that. 

“Building is not overly complicated. Roads, curbs, gutters, sewer, water, foundations, buildings, all doable, and it takes the political will to basically recognize that growth is not a bad word.”

Cook said there are clear differences in the two candidates running for a seat each has held.

“Kelly served three terms — and I don’t want to go there, but she was (council) chair and her peers eliminated her as chair and changed it,” Cook said. “I feel I’ve learned enough in this first term that in the next term I will be much more effective at being able to implement the policy and assist the administration in modifying administrative roles, that the building permit review and approve process, the land use planning and zoning processes are modified to work for the people and not so much being paranoid about over development. 

“I believe in Maui’s future and I think that the unity that we experienced and demonstrated to the world after the Lahaina fires and Kula fires, through that process, that unity exists on our island and that unity needs to come together for us to agree that growth is not bad. And that we need to manage it, mitigate it and not stop it.”

In the race for the council’s Upcountry seat, incumbent Yuki Lei Sugimura was stamped as the clear favorite going to the general election. She had 14,975 votes to easily outdistance second-place Jocelyn Cruz, who had 4,408.

“My reaction is I’m going to wait for the last printout,” Sugimura said. “I’m never going to count my chickens before they hatch. Gotta see the last printout, but I’m feeling pretty good about it. Haven’t gotten out a bottle of wine. I’m not celebrating because I’ve got to see the final, but I will.”

With the one-year mark of the wildfires that devastated Lahaina and Upcountry having passed just two days before the primary election day, Sugimura acknowledged that they had an effect on the outcomes of races in the primary and will also have a say in the general election. She said more needs to be done to help with rising insurance rates due to the fires’ aftermath. 

“I think there’s a lot of people that are upset about the fire,” she said. “So, I’m curious to see how much of the voters are going to want to take it out on the incumbents. I’m curious about that. I kind of look at it, but I don’t know, but, yeah, we can always do more.”