In 2022, Maui County was struggling to fill its volunteer boards and commissions that oversee everything from major developments to dangerous dog complaints.

So the Maui County Council proposed a charter amendment to create a new 11-member panel, the Independent Nomination Board, to help fill those vacancies. Voters approved it in the general election. 

But now, the county is looking to get rid of that board, saying it hasn’t solved the issues and in fact created more hurdles. 

“While I fully supported this idea and we worked hard to try to make it work for us, it unfortunately did not achieve the goals that we intended,” Maui County Council Member Keani Rawlins-Fernandez explained at an election forum in Kīhei on Tuesday night.

The proposal to get rid of the Independent Nomination Board is one of eight proposed charter amendments on Maui County voters’ ballots this fall. There are also two proposed state constitutional amendments, including one that seeks to help fund infrastructure for housing projects.

The Maui County Charter is the guiding document for county government, and every election cycle, the council has the option to propose changes that voters have to approve. This year’s eight proposed amendments:

Planning commission review of general plan and land use ordinances

• Providing clarity and consistency in deadlines for planning commission review of revisions to the general plan, zoning ordinances and other land use ordinances proposed by the council as well as the transmittal of related findings and recommendations to the council. The goal is to clear up inconsistent deadlines in the current charter.

Standardizing deadlines for voter initiative, recall and Charter Amendment

• Standardizing deadlines for the clerk’s processing of petitions related to voter initiative, recall of elected officers or board or commission members, and charter amendments. The council said the deadlines for processing the three types of petitions “are different and outdated” and create difficulties for the Office of the County Clerk.

Computation of time

• Establishing a formula for computing charter deadlines that excludes weekends and holidays. The goal is to align the county with the State of Hawai‘i’s formula and create certainty for county staff and the public.  

Processing of claims

• Streamlining the process for filing claims for personal injury or property damage by requiring that claims are filed directly with the director of Finance or as provided by ordinance. The council said this would eliminate administrative inefficiencies. 

Removing the English translation of the Hawaiʻi State motto

• Removing the English translation of the Hawai‘i state motto in the Maui County Charter preamble, allowing the original phrase, “Ua mau ke ea o ka ‘āina i ka pono,” to stand on its own. The council reasoned that the common English translation, “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness,” is frequently challenged by linguistic and historical experts, and allowing the text to stand on its own would respect “its complex indigenous meanings without subjecting it to potentially misleading Western interpretations.”

Emergency appropriations

• Allowing the mayor with council approval to pass an emergency appropriation for an application for a line of credit instead of issuing emergency notes and clarifying that the 1 percent limitation for emergency appropriations does not apply to funds that have already been allocated to an emergency fund. The goal is to give the county more flexibility in funding disaster response. 

Independent nomination board

• Repealing parts of the 2022 charter amendment that created the Independent Nomination Board and related procedures for nominations for various county officers.

Reappointment of members of the Board of Ethics

• Authorizing the mayor to reappoint members of the Board of Ethics with council approval for one successive term without an intervening waiting period. The goal is to help the Board of Ethics keep quorum and retain institutional knowledge.

The 2022 charter amendment that the council wants to repeal is one of the more complicated changes. Rawlins-Fernandez called it “a little bit of a Frankenstein proposal.” Not only did it create the nomination board, but it also eliminated the prohibition against paying boards and commission members, eliminated the prohibition against appointing more than a bare majority of members on any board or commission that belong to the same political party, set the clerk’s term at six years and staggered membership for new boards. 

“The goal was to increase transparency, depoliticize the process through community member involvement, and provide community members more opportunity to engage,” she explained. 

In the years since, both the council and members of the public have criticized the changes. The county still faces vacancies in boards and commissions, and creating another layer of review by the nomination board “has slowed the appointment process and lengthened the duration of some vacancies,” according to a council resolution. 

“They’ve been struggling to maintain quorum for meetings and therefore struggling to meet the deadlines to make recommendations for nominees on other boards and commissions,” Rawlins-Fernandez said. “So it’s kind of a domino effect. So then it starts to affect quorum on other boards and commissions.”

The council added that the nomination board’s involvement in the appointment of corporation counsel, the county clerk and the prosecuting attorney was “unnecessary.”

The charter amendment also reduced the council’s time to review the mayor’s nominations from 60 to 30 days, which the council said was not enough time considering how many nominations they needed to review while following Sunshine Law requirements. 

The council also disagreed with the charter amendment’s provision that allowed for an outgoing mayor and council to nominate and approve the corporation counsel and prosecuting attorney for the next mayoral term.

They said that the “new procedures created internal inconsistencies and gaps that have led to litigation and required legislative responses to fill gaps.”

If the amendment passes, other changes would include reverting the six-year contract for the county clerk to two years. 

Maui County charter amendments only need a simple majority to pass.

State constitutional amendments

With Maui County voters facing eight amendments to consider and voters in Honolulu weighing 20, state Sen. Troy Hashimoto said state lawmakers “thought hard” about what they wanted to put on the ballot. 

“We only have two,” said Hashimoto, whose district covers Central Maui. “It’s very deliberate because we felt that if we’re going to put something out onto the ballot, it needs to be vetted. It needs to be ready to go.”

Question #1

• The first state constitutional amendment proposes giving the Senate 60 days instead of 30 days to decide on the appointments of justices and judges made between April 1 and Dec. 31 when the Senate is not in regular session or about to adjourn. 

Question #2

• The second constitutional amendment would allow the counties to issue “RISE bonds,” or resilient infrastructure for shelter and equity bonds that would help fund public improvements in designated districts. Counties would be able to repay the bonds through future growth in property tax revenues within those districts instead of by raising real property tax rates. The bonds would be excluded from the counties’ debt limit. 

The first proposal is less complicated because “it’s not an ideological issue,” Hawai‘i political analyst Colin Moore said.

But the second is a little tougher to explain to the general public, which is why there has been a more high-profile advertising campaign to educate the public on it, he said.

Supporters say the proposal will help reduce the cost of housing by providing a way for counties to finance things like roads, sewer and water systems, which would lower the cost for housing developers and pass on the savings to future homeowners. 

“It’s attractive because you’re not raising anyone’s taxes,” Moore said. “Imagine you own a business. You invest in improving the look of it. The hope is you’ll be able to pay for the improvements you made with increased sales. And in this case, it would be increased property taxes that would pay for that bond.”

There are some caveats — the increased revenue created by the development can’t be used for other county needs; it has to be used to pay back the bond. And, while it could encourage development, there’s no guarantee that it will create more affordable homes.

“A real skeptic could say that, well, this will just subsidize developers,” Moore said. 

He added that there’s also the risk, “although I think it’s a really remote one,” that the developments might not generate enough property taxes to repay the bond. But in a place with such high property values, “that’s not a concern I have in Hawai‘i,” Moore said. 

The RISE bonds proposal passed the Senate unanimously in May, and Hashimoto pointed out that 48 other states already use this type of financing. He added that if it passes, counties will have the option to decide to use it or not.

“What we’re looking at, I think from a state perspective, is that it needs to be something that is beneficial to the community, and I think more importantly, it just gives another tool in the toolbox to help developers finance these really expensive developments,” he said. 

He thinks mixed-use developments would be the most likely projects to come out of the RISE bonds proposal if it passes, because “it has to create some type of future economic value for the property tax to go up.”

“A lot of people think that big developers want it, but … from a policy perspective, I think it’s just another tool that will help in the financing room, which is typically the hardest part of any type of project,” Hashimoto said. 

In the end, whether the amendments pass may come down more to public education than the pros and cons of the policy. 

Moore said it’s harder for constitutional amendments to pass than county charter amendments because they have a higher threshold.

State constitutional amendments have to pass two qualifications:

• Yes votes receive a majority of votes tallied, excluding blank and over votes
• Yes votes receive at least 50% of the votes cast, including blank and over votes

Moore also said state constitutional amendments are more difficult to pass because “people don’t often understand these. They’re complicated. I think the natural reaction is just to leave them blank, but by leaving them blank, that’s almost like voting no.”