The community board that governs the fledgling East Maui Water Authority took longer to get up and running than voters envisioned when they created it via county charter amendment in late 2022.

Appointing the 11 members became political, as water has been for the past 150 years in Hawaii. Then the Aug. 8 fires led to further delay.

But when the board eventually met for the first time Feb. 29, supporters say they still shared a sense of hope that something nearly 34,000 residents voted to create would finally happen. They were encouraged as members embarked on the monumental task of acquiring water leases for the county from private companies that for generations have sucked streams dry in East Maui for the benefit of commercial farming in the Central Valley.

Now, less than two months later, there’s uncertainty as to whether the authority will even receive the bare bones funding it needs to move forward into next fiscal year, which starts July 1, as it fends off internal resistance from a board member, state meddling through a last-minute resolution and doubts cast by a key county lawmaker. 

Residents have long wanted a stronger voice in determining how water is allocated. For generations, it mostly went to big sugar plantations. For the past several years, it’s been Mahi Pono, a joint venture between a California farming company and a Canadian pension fund, that bought 41,000 acres of former Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company land from Alexander & Baldwin in 2018 for $262 million.

While Hawaiian taro farmers and nonprofit groups have had significant success in court in recent years to regain some control, the East Maui Water Authority was created to give community members a seat at the table in guiding decisions on how this vital and valuable public trust resource should be managed.

The board seemed off to a solid enough start after an initial squabble during the February meeting over who would serve as chair, with water resource expert Jonathan Scheuer coming out on top over former Mayor Alan Arakawa.

The members sailed through their next meeting, approving a job description and going over the posting process to hire a regional director — a crucial staff member who will do the actual water lease negotiations.

But before the board’s third and most recent meeting, March 28, Arakawa fired off a letter rife with accusations over the water authority’s first budget, a three-employee, $400,000 proposal Mayor Richard Bissen’s administration developed and submitted last month for review and approval by the Maui County Council as part of his overall $1.7 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2025.

Arakawa — who publicly opposed the charter amendment to create the water authority in the first place, saying in 2022 it would “kill Mahi Pono,” and became a member of the board only after the deadline was extended to allow for other nominations — felt the board should have been directly involved in creating the budget from its inception, alleging it was done “improperly and illegally.” 

“I don’t want to keep being railroaded into doing stuff,” he said at the meeting. 

Scheuer denied having any prior involvement in developing the budget, and Arakawa ended up voting in favor of it with reservations. It passed unanimously.

But with that tussle seemingly over, House Finance Chair Kyle Yamashita, who has represented parts of Upcountry Maui for 20 years, surprised board members last week when he heard a gut-and-replace resolution in his committee that urges the county to pass a “financially prudent” budget while singling out the spending for the new water authority along with two other Maui departments voters created the same year.

The last-minute hearing, held the day before the council took up the water authority’s budget as part of its weekslong deliberations, found Maui County Council Chair Alice Lee prepared to testify via teleconference.

She explained how “we generally follow the will of the people” but that the county “may have to pause a few of those expansion” entities created by voter-approved charter amendments in 2022.

“If we don’t have the funding, we just can’t,” she said. “And right now, our situation is untenable” due to the added expenses and decreased revenue resulting from the destructive and deadly wildfires.

Emails last year revealed Lee’s influence in urging a local developer to insert himself in the water board’s nomination process. Everett Dowling, whose company has developed multimillion-dollar projects on Maui over the past three decades, told Department of Hawaiian Home Lands Director Kali Watson in early June that he should not recommend Scheuer to the new board because he’d “make it even more difficult to develop housing.”

Lee told the House panel that there is no charter requirement for the water authority to be set up by a certain date, which the Bissen administration later confirmed.

But the resolution, which cleared the 51-member House on Thursday with 13 voting against it, didn’t sit well with certain lawmakers. 

For some, it was the process. They didn’t like that the resolution, introduced by Oahu Rep. Darius Kila in January, started out as a measure urging the Department of Transportation to establish a safe parking pilot program for homeless individuals but was gutted and replaced last week with language urging Maui County to adopt a budget that “maintains current operational levels except for certain mandatory or critical increases.”

Yamashita defended the process, saying House rules allow for such changes even late in the legislative session, which adjourns May 3.

Other lawmakers disliked how the new version of the resolution went against home rule. Reps. Elle Cochran, whose district includes Lahaina, and Mahina Poepoe, who represents East Maui, Lanai and Molokai, both said Maui County has long been able to produce a balanced budget without state interference.

Poepoe said the resolution seems to imply “some sort of imprudence,” which led her to vote against it.

When the resolution made it to the House floor, Oahu Rep. Gene Ward was more direct, saying it felt like a “hit piece” to the voters of Maui County with the state saying it knew better than them.

Kila said he wouldn’t normally step into this position but with the cost of the Maui fires affecting the overall state budget, the Legislature “should be paying attention to what the county does.”

The resolution itself does not specifically call for defunding the water authority or the other new departments. But it was still enough to prompt the Sierra Club Maui Group to send out an email blast Wednesday alerting its members that the entities were “in danger of being completely gutted” from the county budget and calling on the public to testify at the upcoming council meetings.

Supporters of the charter amendment say it’s all stall tactics coming from politicians still beholden to the old powerbrokers in Hawaii committed to the status quo and those with development interests.

“The effort to gut the water authority is clearly not about saving the county money — its budget makes up a tiny fraction of 1% of the mayor’s overall budget,” said Shay Chan Hodges, who was influential in putting the amendment to create the water authority on the ballot. 

Instead, she said, the pushback is more likely the result of efforts to save A&B from having to repay Mahi Pono $62 million if it fails to help the company hold onto the water leases, pursuant to its sales agreement. A rebate provision is triggered if within eight years of the deal, East Maui Irrigation — which supplies the water to Mahi Pono and other users — is blocked from delivering less than 30 million gallons per day.

Arakawa implored the council last week to not rush and to instead commission a study on the cost of acquiring leases, the cost of maintaining them and figuring out who would do that.

“We need to be able to slow down this process and get a handle on what we are trying to accomplish,” he said. “The devil is always in the details.”

Arakawa, who underscored he’s always been in favor of the county acquiring all the water leases, said he still wants the council to fund the water authority’s proposed budget, which includes a regional director, grant coordinator and administrative assistant along with money for office space and equipment.

The council, which didn’t make decisions on funding the water authority last week, has scheduled June 5 as its final reading of the overall county budget.

Scheuer said in an interview last week that there’s a commitment from the board members to fulfill their charter-mandated directive.

“It’s certainly made more difficult when people are using both overt and behind the scenes methods to subvert the wish of the voters,” he said. “This is the only place in Hawaii where the community as a whole stepped in and said we should run this.” 

If the council ultimately chooses to not fund the water authority next fiscal year, Scheuer said it will be harder to work without staff who do the things that it’s mandated to do, including pursuing control of the water leases and delivery systems and developing watershed management plans.

“It could send a disquieting message to the voters of Maui that despite an overwhelming expression of their desires that there are other powers at play,” he said. 

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

Civil Beat’s coverage of environmental issues on Maui is supported by grants from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and the Hawaii Wildfires Recovery Fund, the Knight Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation.