Our Maui County Council has been working for the past two years to complete our first comprehensive Maui Island Plan. Council members have worked hard and are now set to finalize a most important part of the plan – the directed growth chapter which will describe

the urban and rural growth boundaries for each of our island’s six community plan districts.

Unfortunately, there are a few people who are now seeking to pressure council members to stop doing their work before the Maui Island Plan is complete. If successful, these efforts will drive up the cost of future infrastructure by turning Maui’s future growth into a guessing game.

Here is the background: Steps leading up to this final stage in the planning process began almost a decade ago when council members wisely adopted a new ordinance to describe how the island should be planned. The ordinance recognized that it makes little financial sense for growth and new developments to be spread out all over the island. Uncontrolled development could disappoint visitors, overwhelm the capacity of Maui’s natural environment and drive up costs of county infrastructure being stretched to serve isolated areas.

The ordinance requires that growth boundaries be established to constrain urban sprawl and to allow both the county and developers to more efficiently construct needed infrastructure, such as waterlines, sewage treatment, schools, roads, police and fire facilities.

The Planning Department began the process, hiring technical consultants and preparing an initial draft of the Maui Island Plan. Thereafter, the County Council and the mayor appointed a diversified 25-member General Plan Advisory Committee to gather input from residents, to hold public hearings throughout the island and to recommend long-range planning policies and growth boundaries. Those recommendations were further reviewed by the Maui Planning Commission and the county’s planning director.

Hundreds of hours, thousands of residents’ mana’o and many thousands of dollars have been spent preparing the Maui Island Plan that is now being finalized by our council members. It is a good plan that will greatly benefit our residents, children and future generations.

After the Maui Island Plan is adopted, the urban growth boundaries will serve as a very important framework for each of the citizen advisory committees in the six community plan districts. Within the growth boundaries they will decide the specific locations for residential areas, businesses, tourist facilities, heavy industries, and all the needed infrastructure. The urban growth boundaries will also allow future councils to efficiently prepare budgets to meet the needs of our residents and communities.

Some are asking council members to not delineate the urban growth boundaries that were recommended by numerous professional planners, 25 GPAC members and nine Maui Planning Commission members. Even several former planning directors were involved in the development of the plan. If the lobbying effort is allowed to succeed, it will jeopardize all the work done so far, just so that there will be no limits on future uncontrolled development.

Eliminating growth boundaries in the Maui Island Plan now, just when the job is almost done, would mean having to ask six district citizen advisory committees to go through the whole planning process all over again. Similarly, the busy Maui Planning Commission would have to repeat its reviews six more times.

And finally, some future County Council would have to complete the task that the naysayers are asking council members to avoid at this time. If our present council does not approve the growth boundary lines now, members will be shirking their responsibilities and merely kicking the can down the road to a future council. In the meantime, our residents, our communities and future councils will have a great degree of uncertainty as to where development will take place, what kind of infrastructure to construct, and how much it will cost.

* Dick Mayer wrote this article with 9 fellow GPAC members and two former Maui County planning directors – Tom Cannon, Stan Franco, Lucienne DeNaie, John Blumer-Buell, Lesley Bruce, Kehaulani Filimoe’atu, Lisa Hamilton, Wallette Pellegrino, Warren Shibuya, Chris Hart and Mike Foley.