WAILUKU >> Maui Council members heard frustrated, tearful and sometimes angry testimony from survivors of the Aug. 8 Lahaina wildfire, which killed at least 115 and left hundreds missing.
Tuesday’s Council meeting — the first since the fire that some are calling “8/8” — represented an opportunity for members of the public to vent to their representatives and the Council overall.
The Council heard sometimes conflicting recommendations about how quickly to move to rebuild Lahaina and what issues should be prioritized. The consensus was that community members should be consulted, but how soon remained unclear because many remain traumatized.
An outraged Autumn Ness, an aide to Council member Gabe Johnson, spoke on behalf of herself about the survivors and government mistrust that goes back generations.
“I was in a lot of meetings in the first few days after this disaster where people are talking about Lahaina folks without them in the room, and it felt really gross,” Ness said. “So I couldn’t handle it and have been on the West side almost every day.”
She said she continues to see “a collective rage … that a lot of this feels like a setup. … This is the result of a decades- and generations-long conversation that West Maui has had with people in charge that this is going to happen.”
The community quickly organized distribution centers in the absence of government assistance, which Ness said sent the message, “We are on our own. Nobody’s coming to save us. We’ve been asking for help for decades, and no one’s coming to save us.
”And now a few weeks in, agencies and government people are starting to come in and be like, ‘We have the answer, and we have these protocols that you have to follow and here’s our policies.’ And people are like, ‘Get lost! Why would I trust you after you put our town in this position and after you left us for dead? And now you come in and you tell us how to do things.’”
Ness continued, “It’s insulting. I’m not even from there and I’m shaking with anger. … It’s really hard to trust the agencies that put you in this very position to get you out of it. The same people that made the decisions about water and electric and getting in and out of Lahaina that trapped all these people are now the ones that are being asked to be trusted to build the solution. Nobody is going to trust FEMA right now.”
“Our pace does not match the urgency of the situation,” Ness said. “And now all of a sudden people are talking about rebuilding like that’s the most urgent thing. … This rebuilding needs to hang on for a minute.”
About 50 people signed up to testify Tuesday and expressed their views and frustrations before the Council got to its scheduled agenda.
Several urged the Council to lodge objections over Gov. Josh Green’s pre-fire emergency proclamation to quickly develop affordable housing, which testifiers contend waives county rights and give Green’s housing director enormous power over how Lahaina rebuilds through a process they claimed would ignore community members’ wishes about Lahaina’s future.
Others said the emergency proclamation also would suspend sunshine laws, sustainability plans, requests for government records, historic-preservation rules and collective bargaining agreements over wages.
On July 17, Green signed an emergency proclamation intended to kick-start a one-year revolution in how homes are built across the islands with the ambitious goals of quickly getting 50,000 new units up, cutting prices and keeping Hawaii residents from leaving one of the most expensive states in the country while bringing expats home.
The proclamation empowered a new, 22-member “Build Beyond Barriers” working group to approve and streamline housing construction projects, especially starting with 12,000 that are now stalled.
Some people at the Council meeting repeated unverified speculation that they heard or read about on social media. Others expressed third-hand speculation about government actions, motivations and decisions before and after the fire broke out.
Many others, such as Lahaina resident Christine Borge, 61, used Tuesday’s Council meeting to express years of rage as a Native Hawaiian that she said have only been compounded by the way survivors have been — and continue to be — treated.
She said she fled her home on Wainee Street with her dog, Olalani, and moved into one, then two evacuation shelters. Borge said she has been “part of a human experiment ever since.”
Borge said her pastor was not allowed in to lead prayer at the Baldwin High School evacuation center, “but Oprah could come in,” Borge said with indignation. “Who is she? Who is she? … Get her out of there.”
“I am not a proud American. I am forced to be American in Hawaii. You’re telling us to fill out this paperwork so that you can give us the least amount of money. All I’ve had since Day One is $700 (in one-time FEMA aid). … I’m hearing conflicting stories of what paper I should fill out. We need meetings in Lahaina. … Four out of 5 of us lost our homes, it was burned to the ground. We are only being told, ‘Stand in this line, sign here.’ What are we signing? Who is benefiting? Us or America? That’s what I want to know,” Borge said.
Borge also expressed outrage for some who discouraged tourism to Maui after the fire.
While Lahaina remains off-limits, the rest of Maui continues to be open for tourism.
Borge said, “Tourists, come. We love you. We have aloha. … We’re not saying don’t come. Come because you will be helping us, the lower people. The grains of sand of Maui is what we are.”
Pamela Tumpap, president of the Maui Chamber of Commerce, said Maui visitors have to be taught how to be culturally sensitive. At the same time, fire survivors who will likely greet them will struggle with “trauma that will last for decades.”
For the future, Tumpap said, they should be invited to join task forces looking at planning and rebuilding Lahaina.
Several people disagreed on various issues, such as the pace of cleaning up toxic Lahaina where the ground, air and water remain unsafe after the fires likely spewed asbestos, arsenic and lead “particulates” into the atmosphere.
Rita Ryan of the environmental group 350Hawaii.org said she remains concerned about sidestepping environmental regulations through Green’s affordable housing proclamation, along with sunshine and other transparency rules.
At the same time, Tumpap said, more needs to be done quicker to protect Lahaina from future climate-related disasters and rebuild without contributing more to greenhouse gases following the disaster, which has been blamed on climate change.
“We need to move faster,” she said.
And care needs to be taken to prevent toxic water and soil from contaminating the ocean.
“We have to act now to ensure we’re not sickening our environment worse,” Tumpap said.
Jen Mather of Facebook’s Maui Fire, Flood and Disaster relief group cautioned the Council to proceed slowly while working to include grieving and traumatized residents.
“The tears are going to come,” she said. “Our people are still grieving.”
But, Mather said, moving forward without input from survivors “would be further inflicting pain. Sometimes we have to weigh anchor and stop for a moment so that we can process all of this. … Pause. Pump the brakes. Ask us what we need and then move forward with those that are ready.”
Sterling Higa, executive director of Housing Hawaii’s Future, warned the Council that reform needs to happen now to build more affordable homes quickly to slow the exodus of working families — especially Native Hawaiians — to the mainland.
Existing zoning laws “are designed to discriminate” and were working “exactly as designed before the fire,” Higa said.
Since the fire, he said, “an economic tsunami is coming that will soon result in a loss of tax revenue, potentially billions of dollars in liability for Maui County, a drop in its bond rating and less money to build affordable housing that already was in short supply before the fire.”
“Potentially, this disaster is going to slide our state into recession,” Higa warned. “We cannot afford to wait, cannot say ‘no can.’”
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