It’s a challenge: Expediting the rebuilding of homes in Lahaina’s downtown without compromising historic character

LAHAINA — Rebecca Lauricella’s Front Street neighborhood is quiet at sunset as she waters the plants lining the rock wall, one of the few things left standing on her burned-down property.

She comes here daily to nurture the plants, check on the progress of her single-family home’s foundation and monitor the properties of her neighbors who have left the island since the August 2023 wildfire in Lahaina. The street is nearly silent, empty of the neighbors who once cruised down the road in golf carts and the lights that once glowed from the business district.

Lauricella is hopeful for the day when the street will be bustling again, but she and her neighbors have no idea when that will be.

She is one of the few on Front Street who has begun to rebuild her home, after needing roughly eight months to nail down her final approvals. Some property owners have yet to even start the process.

What Lauricella has done is not a blueprint for her neighbors. There is no single process for homes being rebuilt along the shoreline or in historic districts. It depends on the location of the home, the proximity to historic structures and the agencies involved.

Maui County is trying to expedite rebuilding by easing up on shoreline requirements, proposing changes at the State Legislature and taking things off the plate of the Cultural Resources Commission, which has struggled to meet for months over quorum issues. 

But it’s a complicated balance of moving quickly while protecting the historic character of Lahaina, once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

“Our codes and laws were not designed for this moment,” Maui County Planning Director Kate Blystone said. “They were designed for thoughtful contemplation of development, and this current situation requires us to think more quickly and move more quickly, and so in these circumstances, we are moving faster than we’ve ever moved before, but of course it’s still not fast enough for people who just want to go home.”

HURDLES AND DELAYS

Lauricella was serving as an interim deputy fire marshal in Redwood City, Calif., when the wildfire broke out in Lahaina on Aug. 8, 2023 and her phone started blowing up with messages from her neighbors asking where to go.

Lauricella was used to seeing the devastation of disasters. She spent 20 years in California as a fire marshal and investigator, flew with the Air Force Auxiliary and for two years ran the Maui County Emergency Operations Center. But she never imagined a fire of this magnitude would happen to her.

“I think that was the hardest part for me psychologically, because people are asking me, how is this so easy for you?” Lauricella said. “I had to remind my friends, my family … I’m used to seeing burnt stuff. I’m just not used to seeing my own burnt stuff. … I built it and I worked two, sometimes three jobs, an entire lifetime to have what I have.” 

Lauricella was in her early 20s when she first moved to Lahaina in the 1980s and shared a house with a couple of fishermen. It was a historic structure built in 1924 that formerly belonged to a prominent Native Hawaiian family — William Kaluakini, deputy sheriff of Lahaina and Hāna and friend of Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana’ole, and his wife Abigail Kaluakini, a schoolteacher, according to county documents and the historic plaque fronting the property. The home eventually fell into disrepair and was restored in 2000, but its connection to the family and historic events as well as its architecture landed it on the Hawai’i Register of Historic Places in 2008 and the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. 

It felt like a full circle moment when Lauricella moved back to Maui and built a 2-bedroom, 2-bath, single-story plantation-style home on the lot next door in 2012. She started an animal rescue program and got involved with the Lahaina Yacht Club that taught kids about sailing and the ocean. 

But after the fire, her plans to rebuild next to a former historic home in the Lahaina National Historic Landmark District close to the shoreline meant she had a lot of hoops to jump through, including an appearance before the Cultural Resources Commission and approval for a special management area use permit, which applies to areas along the coast (in Lahaina, this means anything makai of Honoapi’ilani Highway, according to Blystone).

Lauricella applied for her rebuilding permit in April, before the county opened a new permitting center with contractor 4LEAF to speed up the process. She said she saw no movement on her application for three months. After a lot of back-and-forth over the details with the county, she finally got on the agenda of the Cultural Resources Commission in October, only to see it cancelled because of a lack of quorum, then cut short in November again, also due to a lack of quorum. In December the commission finally held a full meeting and gave Lauricella’s plans the green light. 

Lauricella said her building and Special Management Area permits were nearly ready to go and that the final stage held her back by three months. 

She’s rebuilding now, with modifications that include raising her home by 4 inches to meet new county flood requirements, as well as adding a second story to house her family when they visit. 

Next door, her neighbor Mike Lodato is weighing whether he wants to rebuild. On the day of the fire, he was off island and his wife Laura was at home in the historic Kaluakini house where they’d lived for about six years. When the back of their neighborhood caught fire, his wife grabbed their dog, jumped into her Bronco and drove through yards and over power lines to safety. 

“That’s a horrible way to leave a house,” Mike Lodato said. “That one thing you would’ve grabbed, you didn’t have time to grab, so that was added to the impact of everything.”

Mike Lodato was active with the local Rotary club, and Laura Lodato was known around town for arranging musical events for Mana’o Radio on the west side. A boater and fisherman, Mike Lodato had recently got his certification to operate a charter fishing business when the fire destroyed his boat. 

The couple has been living in California since the fire and is eager to return to Maui, where their adult daughter still lives. They want to rebuild the historic home the way it was. But Mike Lodato is concerned about what he sees happening at his neighbor’s house with the added second story. He worries that it’s the start of people building bigger homes and changing the character of the town. 

“I know I lost my house. Did I lose my town?” he said. “If everyone’s going to build giant, two-story, condo-looking buildings that are pressed to the lot lines, then Lahaina’s dead. That’s not the charming town anymore.” 

Lodato hasn’t applied for a building permit yet. He says he wants to be sure the county will do its part to keep Lahaina the town that it once was, “and that we won’t let it become this massive real estate juggernaut that profiteers are coming in and building maximum-size McMansions.” 

Lauricella says she doesn’t want that to happen either. She said her home is designed “wedding cake style” in an effort to limit the scope of the second story and is based on other houses in the neighborhood that didn’t burn. She acknowledged that her home will likely stand out as one of the first to be rebuilt along Front Street, but that eventually it will just be one of the homes lining the rebuilt neighborhood. 

She said she’s been friends with the Lodatos for years — even their dogs get along — and she wants to see everyone get through the permit hurdles and return to Lahaina. 

“We’re all here for the same reason — we all love Lahaina, we all love our community, we love our neighbors, we want what we had back,” Lauricella said. “We all have a little bit different ideology as far as how that’s going to happen, but the process should not be what’s holding us up.”

Some people are trying to find alternate ways of getting back to Lahaina. Steve and Diana Walton, who lost their home on Shaw Street in one of the county’s three historic districts, applied to build a small ‘ohana unit on their property that they said would be a quicker and cheaper way to return home after a year and a half living in someone else’s place. The commission approved their plans in December, and the Waltons, who appeared at the meeting virtually, were in tears after the vote.

SPEEDING UP THE PROCESS

Nearly a year and a half after the fire, signs of rebuilding have popped up across Lahaina town. A total of 556 building permits have been submitted, with 207 issued as of Jan. 2, according to the Maui County recovery dashboard. Of those, four have completed construction. 

One of the earliest neighborhoods to see progress is Komo Mai Street, a newer subdivision in a mauka area of Lahaina that’s not in a historic or shoreline area. Blystone, the planning director, said Komo Mai Street is at the easier end of the spectrum to rebuild, while neighborhoods on the shoreline like Front Street are on the more difficult end. 

She said every individual property must go through a different process for approvals depending on their district and the historic properties on their lot or nearby. 

Government agencies have been trying to streamline the process, especially for homes trying to rebuild along the coast, which is where a major portion of the damage was. In December, the 19th emergency proclamation for the fire allowed certain single-family and multifamily properties outside of the shoreline to apply for just a simple building permit and avoid the requirements of the Special Management Area. 

Blystone said the Planning Department also will propose a rule soon to the Planning Commission that would exempt properties mauka of Front Street from shoreline rules, even if erosion hazard mapping shows their property is expected to eventually be impacted by sea level rise. If the commission agrees, the emergency rule would have to be reviewed again every 120 days. 

“Let’s be real about it — sea level rise is happening, and this is something we’re going to have to deal with eventually,” Blystone said. “But at this point, it’s the county’s position that we are going to protect Front Street.”

The reason, she explained, is that Front Street contains infrastructure that services all of Lahaina, “and until we’re able to move that out of Front Street, we’re going to have to protect that resource,” she said. 

The Planning Department also is proposing to handle administratively some reviews that now are the responsibility of the Cultural Resources Commission. The commission is expected to see at least 106 historic district assessment applications on top of its regular work of reviewing projects that affect other historic structures and sites around Maui County. Streamlining the process was on the commission’s agenda Thursday, but the meeting was cancelled again — due to a lack of quorum.

Since the fire in August 2023, the commission, which meets monthly, has cancelled 13 meetings, mostly due to a lack of quorum, county records show. Of the nine slots, three are currently vacant. Ke‘eaumoku Kapu, who chairs the commission and has also been involved in providing cultural monitoring services during the fire debris cleanup in Lahaina, could not be reached for comment.

Blystone says she doesn’t blame the commission — like many other panels in Maui County, it’s made up of volunteers who can’t always get the time off for the hourslong meetings. Their expertise is also very specific, making it harder to find people with the time and the knowledge to volunteer.

“We don’t want to get rid of the Cultural Resources Commission,” Blystone said. “They have a really critical role to play. … But we do need to figure out a way to make them work more to streamline, and if, like I said, there are things that they could trust us to review and approve, that would be the best possible way to move forward.” 

The Planning Department also has a short-staffing problem with a 25% vacancy rate that includes planners as well as the clerks and secretaries needed to help move permit reviews along.  

Maui County Council Member Tamara Paltin, whose district covers West Maui, said she’s planning to introduce bills this term to help with rebuilding in historic areas. That could include one measure that would allow homeowners to use fire-resistant building materials even if it’s not in keeping with the historic materials used in the original structure. Another could allow residents to rebuild with package homes in historic districts in hopes of getting them back to Lahaina more quickly.

“Not trying to say we should do away with the historic district,” Paltin said. “That’s one reason Lahaina doesn’t look like Waikiki.”

Rebuilding efficiently while still protecting the town’s character and bolstering it against future disasters like the fire or even the historic south swell that flooded West and South Maui businesses. in 2022. Paltin said the fire presented an opportunity for managed retreat in anticipation of sea level rise. However, she said it’s up to property owners to decide if they want to take the risk when they rebuild.

The state also had said it’s trying to expedite the rebuilding process while protecting historic and archaeological resources. In November, State Historic Preservation Division Administrator Jessica Puff said the state is doing project reviews with Maui County and other state agencies, keeping an eye out for archaeology or iwi kupuna (human remains) that could be found during the construction process. 

The agency is considering developing sensitivity maps and one archaeological monitoring plan that all residential and commercial property owners can use so they don’t have to develop and pay for individual ones. The sensitivity maps would help predict the likelihood of finding ‘iwi and whether additional monitoring would be needed.

“We envision a filtering mechanism where the county will decide projects that have a low probability of uncovering iwi, cultural or historic artifacts and not send those reviews” to the state, Puff said in a news release in November. “Only projects with the highest sensitivity or most like to encounter iwi will come to us for review.” 

Blystone said the county is constantly facing the difficult task of balancing the need to move quickly and get people housed while protecting the island’s resources and the town’s character. 

“We really do need as much as help as we can get because this is a big job,” Blystone said. “We don’t just work on Lahaina, we work on all of the islands in Maui Nui, and no one is saying, ‘Oh, we’re not going to focus on these other islands or the other parts of Maui just because we’re focused on Lahaina.’ Everyone’s trying to do everything all at once.”

Preserving historic Lahaina means something different for many people, from the time of the Hawaiian Kingdom to the whaling and plantation eras, Paltin said. “So it’ll definitely be a challenge to reflect it all as accurately as possible with community buy-in.”