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It was 2002, and the business district of Wailuku Town had a parking problem.

The redevelopment of the old municipal parking lot was a priority, according to the county’s Wailuku-Kahului Community Plan, and key to revitalizing Wailuku’s commercial heart and improving walkability.

Finally in early December, over 20 years later, a new four-story 393-space parking garage opened to the public.

“The new Wailuku Garage has been a project in the making for many years,” Erin Wade of the Maui County Department of Management said on the county’s website.

In Hawaii, the best-laid plans can take a little longer, or just veer way off course.

That 2002 Wailuku-Kahului Community Plan is one of a bundle intended as “strategic planning documents which guide government action and decision-making,” according to the Maui County website.

However, the track record of these plans indicates that’s often not the case.

“People spend so much time putting their hopes and dreams and visions on paper,” said Albert Perez, executive director of the nonprofit . “I think the recently took … I don’t know how many months, it’s like seven or eight months of meetings like once a week for three or four hours.

“This is time out of people’s lives,” said Perez, who formerly worked in the county’s planning department.

The problem, Perez said, is that many of the good ideas from the plans don’t end up being implemented.

Take for example, the Maui Island Plan, adopted in 2012 as part of the policy roadmap for the Valley Isle.

That plan aspired to create more affordable housing, diversify the economy, protect watersheds and maintain Maui small towns and open countryside. The plan also clearly forecast a looming affordable housing crisis on Maui, and presented a diverse and to address the issue.

So how did that go?

A status report on the plan’s progress released in 2016 found that only 44, or 14%, of the 323 actions from the Maui Island Plan had been implemented, 148 had been partially implemented and 131 hadn’t been implemented at all.

Among those actions not taken or only partially implemented were the two dozen , according to the county’s own assessment.

After the 2016 county update, the next major check-in on the plan was in 2020, when Maui Tomorrow , Perez said.

Maui Tomorrow looked at a range of “quality of life indicators”, Perez said, including development outside designated urban growth areas, water quality, consumption patterns of local food and the health of coastal coral reefs.

Perez said he sent an inquiry to the county asking if the indicators were being tracked, “and the answer was no.”

The foundation found that in many instances the county wasn’t collecting enough data to tell if it was working toward the designated goals, Perez said, and the county generally agreed with him when he shared his findings.

In some categories, the trends were actually heading in the opposite direction to what the island plan recommended. Maui Tomorrow found that the number of acres of park space per 1,000 persons had declined by 10.6% between 2010 and 2020, despite the goal to “maintain the small towns and open countryside.”

Will The South Maui Plan Be Different?

So now there’s the new community plan for South Maui that was wrapped up in December after 42 meetings. The result is a 169-page document intended to guide the county’s decisions over a southwestern sliver of Maui for the next 20 years.

But the South Maui Community Plan will be different from previous efforts, according to Rob Weltman, a Kihei resident and chair of the advisory committee.

Weltman said he first came across Maui’s community plans in 2014 and was impressed with their aspirations but “over the years as I watched development and how decisions were made, I found that the guidelines in the community plans were not being implemented, not being followed,” he said.

In particular, Weltman said development on Maui had often occurred without adequate infrastructure being put in place first.

The previous plan for Kihei from 1998 was ambitious, he said, but many of the policies and actions were defined so broadly that it was .

So with that in mind “going into the my goal was to have everything be very specific, so we put a lot of effort into the actions since the actions are reported on, whereas the policies are not,” Weltman said, “and to make sure that whenever the go-ahead was given – especially to major developments – that the parameters for them were well-defined so that they could be tracked and audited.”

The plan focused on the only area left designated for growth in South Maui, Weltman said, and that’s a 583-acre parcel in North Kihei mauka of the Piilani Highway. The majority of the advisory committee felt “this is the only place where we can put affordable housing for our residents” who would otherwise leave.

The vision is for homes within walking distance of shopping, community centers and workplaces without the need to get in a car, he said.

Maui County declined to make someone available from the planning department for an interview, but in an email, Karen Comcowich a planner from the Long Range Planning Division wrote that the draft plan for Mauka North Kihei fills the entire growth boundary to “provide space for more housing while designating gulches and drainageways as open space to encourage natural drainage.”

Community plans in general can also “influence proposals for updates to the Maui County Code,” Comcowich wrote, and the progress of actions is tracked via an annual report to the County Council.

Weltman said there are stipulations for developers and the county in the South Maui plan, which also asks the planning department to complete a detailed infrastructure report with timeline and cost estimates for implementing it.

That’s the idea anyway. But the timeline for adoption of the plan stretches out to 2028 and a lot can happen in the meantime.

“Obviously things can change as it moves through the Planning Commission and the County Council,” Weltman said, “but I would hope that they would all agree that it’s important for the plan to be measurable and enforceable – that there’s no point in having a plan which is purely aspirational.”

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