The Maui County Council’s Housing and Land Use Committee voted 5-4 last week to adopt criteria for which apartment-zoned vacation rental properties can be recommended to the Maui Planning Commission for hotel-district rezoning, tying eligibility to how deeply a property sits within the county’s Sea Level Rise Exposure Area.

The vote came after the close of public testimony that saw more vacation rental owners testify in support of hotel rezoning or for having specific properties added while a majority of testifiers on Thursday opposed resolutions advancing apartment rezoning before Bill 9‘s vacation rental phase-out takes effect and its benefits can be evaluated.

Kai Nishiki, executive director of Nā Papa‘i Wawae ‘Ula’ula and co-executive director of the Maui Nui Resiliency Hui, told council members she’s deeply concerned that sea-level rise and coastal erosion are being used to justify removing housing intended for residents and retaining properties for vacation rental use.

“Sea-level rise is indiscriminate,” Nishiki said. “The ocean does not care whether a unit is occupied by a Maui resident or a tourist. Changing the community plan designation and the occupants does not change the hazard, extend the useful life of an aging building, restore a disappearing beach, or protect the public from the eventual financial and environmental consequences.”

There’s a contradiction in testimony from shoreline transient vacation rental property owners, she said.

“They describe properties within the SLR-XA and flood zones that are already experiencing waves overtopping seawalls and inundating properties,” Nishiki said. “Yet most have no secured funding or realistic plan for the eventual removal of their structures. These are serious reasons to plan for adaptation, not reasons to designate these properties for more intensive and profitable visitor use.”

According to Nishiki, Maui County’s 2025 Hazard Mitigation Plan warns that coastal erosion can cause beachfront property values to decline, damage the county’s tax base and increase public costs. She said the plan identifies approximately $1.2 billion in replacement value for buildings in coastal erosion hazard areas. West Maui leads the County, with 162 of the 366 buildings identified, she said.

“This is an existential fiscal and environmental problem that cannot be ignored,” Nishiki said.

As it began deliberations, the committee, chaired by Council Member Nohelani Uʻu-Hodgins, worked to hash out the criteria for Resolution 26-129 rather than voting on individual properties. Resolution 26-130 was not taken up.

The panel plans to reconvene 10 a.m. Sept. 9 in the Maui County Council Chambers.

What’s SLR-XA? Why it matters

The Sea Level Rise Exposure Area, or SLR-XA, is a state-developed mapping layer that combines passive tidal flooding, annual high-wave flooding and coastal erosion into a single hazard zone, modeled at several sea-level-rise scenarios — 0.5, 1.1, 2.0 and 3.2 feet, according to the state’s Hawaiʻi Sea Level Rise Viewer / Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report.

The 3.2-foot scenario is the one that matters most for Maui County land-use decisions. Deputy Planning Director Ana Lillis told the committee that the Maui Planning Commission has adopted the 3.2-foot erosion hazard line—a subset of the broader SLR-XA—as the county’s regulatory shoreline for enforcing shoreline setbacks and other special management area rules. In places where erosion has essentially erased that line, such as areas of the coast that are accreting, or growing, rather than eroding, the commission instead applies a 200-foot vegetation-line buffer.

The criteria, after two rounds of amendment

Uʻu-Hodgins opened discussion with her own proposed criteria: that only structures fully inundated by the SLR-XA or a special flood hazard area, and not originally built as affordable workforce housing, be recommended for rezoning.

Council Member Tom Cook proposed broadening that standard, arguing full inundation set too high a bar for larger, multi-building complexes where connected infrastructure—sewer lines, fire systems—means a partial impact still functionally compromises the whole property. Cook’s amendment tied eligibility instead to whether a property is “substantially impacted” by the SLR-XA or otherwise subject to Maui Planning Commission shoreline regulations.

At Council Member Tamara Paltin’s suggestion, the committee settled on “majority impacted”—defined by committee staff as 51% or more of a property falling within the mapped SLR-XA—as a more objective substitute for “substantial” or “significant.”

Lillis told the committee her department already has data sorting properties into “full,” “most,” “partial” or “none” categories of SLR-XA coverage, and confirmed “most” would correspond to the 51%-or-more threshold the committee settled on.

The final criteria approved: Structures must be majority impacted—51% or more—by the 3.2-foot SLR-XA, or subject to shoreline regulations as adopted by the Maui Planning Commission, or within a special flood hazard area, and the property must not have been originally intended for affordable workforce housing.

The amended motion passed 5-4, with Council Chair Alice Lee, Vice Chair Yuki Lei Sugimura, Kauanoe Batangan, Cook and Uʻu-Hodgins voting aye, and Paltin, Gabe Johnson, Keani Rawlins-Fernandez and Shane Sinenci voting no.

Liability questions raised

Earlier in the meeting, Rawlins-Fernandez raised concerns about the county’s own liability.

“Now, we’re kind of on notice, and we’re acknowledging that we know that these properties are not safe,” she said. “But we’re going to put tourists in them. And I don’t know if we’re going to have to go into executive session to have this discussion, but now that the government is on notice we have made an affirmative acknowledgment that we understand that these properties are not safe now or gonna not be safe soon; that we’re gonna allow these to continue to house tourists that may now be at risk.”

Deputy Corporation Counsel Nāhulu Nunokawa told the committee some of those broader legal questions might be better suited for discussion in executive session rather than open committee meeting.

Lillis said there was a recent situation in which a sinkhole appeared and the county received a complaint.

“We were able to work with the Department of Public Works to put signs on the building, so no habitation, basically, because of unsafe conditions,” she said. “When we know about something that’s imminent and a public threat, we do our best to keep people from entering something that might collapse.”

Conditions still to come

Separate from the eligibility criteria, which the committee will forward to the Maui Planning Commission for its own review, several members floated conditions that could be attached to individual rezonings or recommended to the commission for consideration.

Paltin ran through a list including annual structural assessments, or facility condition assessments; an initial “remaining useful life” engineering report; a prohibition on further shoreline armoring; a hazard-mitigation or managed-retreat plan; disclosure of any sinkholes, financial reserves and insurability; and mandatory public shoreline access from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Lillis and Deputy Public Works Director Paul Barany responded cautiously to several of the ideas, noting their departments would need to coordinate on verification—Lillis said Planning could receive engineering reports but lacks staff to independently check them—and Nunokawa flagged that conditions touching on liability, insurance or restricting future Planning Commission action might need discussion in executive session rather than open committee meeting. Paltin agreed to put her proposed conditions in writing before the Sept. 9 meeting.

Rawlins-Fernandez separately raised a possible criterion tied to owner-occupancy rates in 2008—before short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and VRBO became widespread—but had not settled on exact wording or confirmed the data exists. She said she would work with staff before the next meeting to develop a verifiable version of the standard.

Johnson questioned earlier in the discussion why SLR-XA status, rather than a property’s original intent—such as historical workforce-housing use—should drive rezoning decisions, a point Uʻu-Hodgins said the committee had already addressed by excluding properties originally built for workforce housing regardless of their SLR-XA status.

Committee wraps up public testimony

The committee closed public testimony Aug. 27 after hearing two and a half days of testimony on Resolutions 26-129 and 26-130. The resolutions which would refer bills to the Maui Planning Commission to rezone up to 16 apartment-zoned vacation-rental properties—chosen mainly for their sea-level-rise exposure—into newly created hotel districts.

Housing advocates argue the move undercuts the long-term housing inventory Bill 9 (Ordinance 5909) was meant to create, while vacation rental owners and industry representatives say consistent criteria should apply to similarly exposed shoreline properties.

What’s next?

The committee is scheduled to reconvene at 10 a.m. Sept. 9, via the same Microsoft Teams link used for Thursday’s meeting, with in-person viewing available in the Kalana O Maui Building’s eighth-floor Council chambers. Members are expected to take up Paltin’s and Rawlins-Fernandez’s proposed conditions and criteria, and to begin applying Thursday’s adopted standard to the list of properties under Resolutions 26-129 and 26-130.