Lahaina wildfire survivors reacted with anger Tuesday to a plan by Hawaiian Electric Co. to impose a fee of up to 5% on Hawaii ratepayers’ bills to raise money to help finance the utility’s wildfire prevention efforts.

HECO’s Chief Operations Officer Jim Alberts told the House Finance Committee the utility needs the fee to create a revenue stream that can be used to borrow money to pay for wildfire-related costs.

The fee would be subject to review and approval by the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, and would be capped at no more than 5% of consumers monthly bills, Alberts told lawmakers.

That drew an emotional reply from Lars Johnson, a Lahaina resident who said he lost everything when his home burned in the Aug. 8 wildfire. At least 101 people died in the fire, and Johnson described watching a man burn to death in the blaze.

“I would like to understand the audacity of HECO in thinking about raising rates on electric bills to pay for their sloppiness,” Johnson said.

He said Lahaina was his home for most of his life, but he cannot go there anymore because in Lahaina today he sees a community that was destroyed, and “the lives that are missing.”

“I’m still dealing with the after-effects of this fire. I’ll be dealing with them for the rest of my life,” he said.

“HECO has no right to ask me for a damn thing,” Johnson added. “If anything, HECO should be required to provide free electricity to the west side (of Maui) for eternity. The monopoly should be broken.”

The hearing was focused on Senate Bill 2922, which would authorize the utility to issue bonds to pay costs related to catastrophic wildfires.

Some of the money from the fee would be used to fund a wildfire mitigation program to prevent future fires, an effort that is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The PUC would also oversee the mitigation plan.

The bill was introduced on behalf of Hawaiian Electric Co., and the utility also initially proposed that some of the money from the fee be used to pay for damages from the Aug. 8 fire. However, lawmakers so far have rejected that idea.

The fee would also be used to finance HECO’s share of a potential pool of as much as $1 billion that would be used to pay for damages from future fires. Other potential contributors to that fund would be the state, major landowners and other utilities.

That pool would be established in another measure, Senate Bill 3344, which would create the Hawaii Wildfire Relief Fund to pay compensation for property damage resulting from future catastrophic wildfires.

Alberts said the key point in the utility’s plan “is that we have the resources to do the work.”

If lawmakers and the PUC approve the proposed fee, it would allow HECO to borrow money to do the wildfire mitigation work at a lower cost than the utility could borrow money on its own without the fee, he said.

That process is known as securitization, and is used in many states to secure financing for large investments, he told lawmakers.

“We need to keep Hawaii safe, and Hawaii needs a wildfire mitigation plan and a cost-effective way to pay for it together to accomplish this goal,” Alberts said.

Lawyer Jan Apo, who has been investigating the cause of the fire, said he opposes the bill because it would not directly help the fire victims. “The only parties I see that would benefit from the bill is, first of all, HECO,” he said.

Astrid Magallon, another Lahaina fire survivor, said she is “in profound opposition to this. I do think it’s a slap in the face for the representative for HECO right now to express that this was expensive.”

Jason Benn, senior vice president and chief information officer for Hawaiian Electric Co., said the utility’s proposals are “forward looking. It’s in the public interest. It is intended to protect the people of Hawaii and our economy from a future wildfire, regardless of the cause.”

He said the utility is trying to do “what is pono, how do we look forward, how do we help the people of Lahaina, and how to we help protect against a rising catastrophic risk in wildfires that is not a utility problem, it’s a changing land use problem.”

“We have fallow planation land all over these islands, we have rising climate change, and we need to address it collectively and collaboratively,” Benn said.

Finance Committee Chairman Kyle Yamashita said the committee will vote on the measures on Wednesday.

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