Maui Council committee advances Haʻikū fire station project, 6-2

A Maui County Council committee voted 6-2 Monday to advance three bills clearing the way for construction of a long-awaited fire station in Haʻikū, over the objections of two council members who argued the project sits on land wrongfully taken from Native Hawaiians.

The Housing and Land Use Committee’s recommendation to pass three land use measures for the 6.1-acre station site, moves the project forward after being in its planning stages for nearly two decades. But council members took action without resolving a dispute over the underlying title to the land that has hung over the project and, for at least two council members, made the vote a moral reckoning over native land rights rather than a routine land-use decision.

Council Member Shane Sinenci, who holds the East Maui residency seat, voted “aye, with reservations” on all three bills. He did not elaborate on his reservations on from the floor.

Roll call vote

The roll call was identical on all three bills: Committee Chair Nohelani Uʻu-Hodgins and Council Members Alice Lee, Yuki Lei Sugimura, Tom Cook, Tamara Paltin and Sinenci voted aye. Council members Keani Rawlins-Fernandez and Gabe Johnson voted no. Council Member Kauanoe Batangan, who has recused himself from deliberations because he worked on the fire station project before joining the Council, was recorded as excused rather than abstaining.

Lee characterized the outcome as a compromise: the county is building on 6 acres of the 27.9-acre parcel it owns in Hāmākualoa, leaving the remainder set aside for Native Hawaiian uses.

Questions linger

Rawlins-Fernandez, who has led the Council’s questioning of the county’s claim to clear title, delivered an extended statement before casting her no vote.

She said her personal policy as a council member is “to never steal land or displace or dispossess Kanaka Maoli from ancestral ʻāina, even regardless of how small a potential it could be, regardless of whether our attorneys are super convinced that our title insurance and the title report says so.”

“The title companies have been a tool for the colonizers to continue to dispossess ʻāina from our lāhui, from Kanaka Maoli, from native tenants,” she said. “The title companies are part of the racist system that persists to this day.”

Rawlins-Fernandez said that the burden of proving contested title, of the kind resource person Terrill James Kane Alii Williams has undertaken, usually falls on native tenants who lack the resources to litigate against the county. She maintained that a faster, cheaper alternative—buying and renovating an existing house on a larger parcel, as the county did for a fire station on Molokaʻi—remained available, and that pursuing the current site risked years of costly litigation.

Johnson said that building a fire station should be “great news,” cause for celebration. “We should be talking about our resiliency and our infrastructure, and ‘way to go team.’ But I don’t feel that this time.”

“I feel that we should pump the brakes because, as we all talk about this, (it) can get very expensive,” he said.

“Morally, I’m not going to bear that cost,” Johnson said. “I support fire stations putting out fires, and building on this parcel of land is only going to conflagrate the issues that kānaka and Hawaiians have over getting their land back.”

Sugimura said she supported the bills after hearing from residents at a recent Haʻikū Community Association meeting that the community wants the station built. She said the county does have “clear title” for the land, expressing sympathy for Native Hawaiians disputing the title.

Cook and Uʻu-Hodgins also voted in favor; Uʻu-Hodgins had earlier confirmed with the county Board of Ethics that she was cleared to participate and vote on the bills.

Maui County Fire Chief Brad Ventura, who acknowledged Rawlins-Fernandez’s comment that he “inherited” the fire station project, told the committee the department wants the modern, hurricane-resistant station it has designed for the site with room to expand from two apparatus bays to four.

“The Haʻikū fire station is built for the future; it’s not for what we need today,” he said. “You’re looking at something that is going to be able to grow in the future as the community grows.”

Ventura noted that the 6-acre site has enough room to add a water tank and a warehouse storage building.

The department examined an alternative state-owned site but found it lacked adequate water infrastructure, including water meters and tank capacity sufficient to meet fire code, he said.

Background

The Haʻikū Fire Station project has been in the works since the county purchased the 27.9-acre parcel in 2007. The project was ready for construction around 2011 but stalled amid what Ventura said was opposition to the project.

It was revived in 2019 when then-Council Member Mike Molina “came back to us and said, ‘the community wants it; the site is fine. Let’s go, but let’s do another assessment, which we did,” Ventura recalled. Both assessments pointed to the same property, the current proposed project site.

Now before the Council, land use measure for the project have stalled repeatedly as the Housing and Land Use Committee has wrestled with a land title dispute raised in testimony.

Williams has contested the county’s land ownership, arguing that its claim to the property—traced to an 1916 land patent granted to Florence Wood—improperly excludes land use or ownership rights connected to Native Hawaiian ancestors. County attorneys have maintained the title is clear.

The committee has met at least three times this year specifically to weigh the title question, including two executive sessions convened under state law to receive confidential legal advice—one on Aug. 8 that ran out of time before reaching a vote, and a second that preceded Monday’s roll call.

Council members have repeatedly cited a similar dispute the county resolved on Molokaʻi, where opposition to building on undisturbed land led the county to instead purchase and renovate an existing, previously disturbed house—an option some council members argued should have been pursued in Haʻikū as well.

The three land use bills move on to the full Council for the first of two readings.

Bills 89, 90 and 91 (2026) would reclassify roughly 6.1 acres of a 27.9-acre, county-owned parcel in Hāmākualoa. The legislation would move the property from state agricultural district to state rural district; amend the Pāʻia-Haʻikū Community Plan land use map from agriculture to public/quasi-public; and change county zoning from agricultural to public/quasi-public.