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Nearly 200 people took advantage of the first official opportunity to weigh in on Mayor Richard Bissen’s proposal to curb vacation rentals to create more housing for locals.

The Maui Planning Commission ultimately deferred action Tuesday until July 9, but not before hearing almost nine hours of emotional testimony on both sides of the issue.

There was agreement that the island is in an affordable housing crisis but not over the impact of the administration’s proposed ordinance, which would eliminate about 7,000 vacation rentals — nearly half of Maui’s inventory — by Jan. 1, 2026.

“I know there is a lot of passion behind this, which is great,” said Kim Thayer, who chairs the Planning Commission. “This is a huge, huge decision to be made for our island and for our county and for our people and for our future.”

So many people showed up to the all-day meeting wanting to testify that the Maui Fire Department had to ask people to leave the chamber room to clear the exit paths in the Wailuku county building. The county set up a viewing area on the front lawn in addition to streaming it online.

Many people said the county was just recouping lost workforce housing and the measure would create the desired long-term units. But others said break-even rents for condo owners would not be affordable, and that the ordinance would cost jobs, harm businesses, cause loss of personal income and devastate the tourist-based economy.

Bissen said the housing crisis stems from a “myriad of complex issues that have challenged our community for decades” and was exacerbated by approximately 12,000 people in 5,400 households being displaced by the Aug. 8 fires, resulting in about 4,000 people having already left Maui.

“This is a consequence we cannot and should not accept,” he said. “Our system is broken and long overdue for change.”

Bissen put forward the ordinance on May 2, the day after the Legislature passed a bill to give Hawaii’s counties more authority to regulate short-term rentals, which had strong backing from the grassroots group Lahaina Strong and others who have sought such change for years.

The proposal calls for quickly phasing out and repealing transient vacation rentals in the apartment districts that are mostly along the coast. The first 2,200, located in West Maui, would have to cease short-term operations by July 1, 2025, and the rest of the units, primarily in Kihei and Wailea, by the start of 2026.

These units are referred to as the Minatoya list, named after the late Richard Minatoya.

In 2001, when he was deputy corporation counsel for the county, Minatoya wrote a legal opinion that said exemptions for transient vacation rentals in apartment districts should include units in projects that had building permits, special management area use permits or planned development approval issued by April 20, 1989, or apartments that were operating as transient vacation rentals before March 5, 1991. These units do not need to acquire permits from the county but are required to pay the general excise tax and transient accommodations tax.

Before public testimony started, Kate Blystone, the new county planning director, told the commission that her department recommends the ordinance. Her department did take into consideration the hundreds of pages of written testimony received before the meeting.

“Making this change to the code is one way we can help address this problem more quickly while working through the real constraints to developing new housing created by our county’s lack of supporting infrastructure like water and wastewater,” Blystone wrote in a letter to the .

Also before public testimony, presentations in favor of the ordinance were made by Greg Post, administrative planning officer with the county’s Planning Department, and Matthew Jachowski, director of data, technology and innovation at the . They highlighted the need for housing and provided information available at CNHA’s , but did not go deeply into the economic impact, which includes tens of millions of dollars in estimated lost tax revenue each year to the county.

Planning Commission Vice Chair Dale Thompson, who acknowledged he has a family-owned property on the Mintoya list, said because of the conflict he will not vote on the issue but will ask questions. After the presentations, he asked: “How many citizens of Maui will it bankrupt and how many will lose their jobs?”

Bissen said the county is working with the Hawaii Community Foundation, which is funding an economic impact study conducted by the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization to provide an objective and educated forecast and analysis of the bill.

A by Justin Tyndall and Emi Kim that was posted Tuesday morning with preliminary analysis of the issue said if the ordinance passes, Maui’s long-term residential housing stock, which is now at 63,000 units, would increase by 13% and “push down housing costs across Maui.”

Prior studies on the issue have focused on the economic toll. A 2022 white paper conducted for the Realtors Association of Maui by economist Paul Brewbaker concluded that the “hypothetical economic impacts” to Maui County would be the loss of 14,126 jobs and annual reductions of $1.67 billion in tourism money, $747.7 million in employee earnings and $137.6 million in tax revenue.

Another found that if all the units on the Minatoya list are phased out, Maui County would annually lose between $52.3 million and $91.8 million in real property, general excise and transient accommodations taxes. Its projected job losses were at 7,800, with economic output lowered by $1.3 billion.

Tasha Kama, chair of the County Council’s Housing and Land Use Committee, wants an “unbiased study” on the issue before the council needs to vote on it. She inserted a budget amendment last month to provide $300,000 for the study, which she said would likely not be completed until the end of the year.

While many in favor of the ordinance portrayed the owners and property managers of the vacation rental units as greedy outsiders who didn’t care about the people of Maui, there also were testifiers who talked about their contributions to the community, help they provided to fire survivors and personal accounts about how losing income from these units would affect them and the people they employ.

Leslie Brown, who has run the 60-unit vacation rental program at Luana Kai in Kihei for 38 years, said she has devoted half of her life to her business, which now employees four other people, including two single moms. She also employs a family cleaning company of a mom, dad and their daughter.

“All eight of us would lose our jobs,” she said.

But Shannon I’i, who lost her Lahaina home in the Aug. 8 fire, said “it is time to take back our neighborhoods.”

“Your paradise is our home, our community,” she said. “Get it straight, we do not need to rely on tourists. This has been forced down our throats for centuries and it is time to shift.”

The Minatoya list currently has 7,167 units, of which 6,172 are now taxed as a short-term rental and about 85% of owners have out-of-state mailing addresses, according to the UHERO post.

People against the ordinance cite that most of the units are small, have limited closet space and only one parking spot, don’t allow pets and are not “affordable housing” due to skyrocketing homeowner association fees, costly maintenance assessments and high mortgage payments because most of the units are oceanfront or near the coast in touristy areas.

Many testified that to break even they would need to receive monthly rents of $5,000 or more.

Of the Minatoya list properties, 51% are one-bedroom units and 72% are under 1,000 square feet, according to UHERO. Of the remaining units, 7% are studios, 39% are two-bedroom units and just 3% are three-bedroom condos.

“The small units may be unsuitable for housing large families displaced by the fires in Lahaina, many of whom would require more space,” the UHERO blog said. “However, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, half of the households in Lahaina had a household size of two or fewer people and two-thirds had three or fewer people.”

Appraised values range greatly, with the median Minatoya list property valued at $971,500, about 15% higher than median condominium units on Maui. There were 517 properties on the list appraised at under $500,000.

In April, 500 condos on Maui were on the market.

“If even a small share of the Minatoya List units ends up on the for-sale market, we would expect to see significant, possibly double-digit declines in condominium prices on Maui,” the UHERO blog said.

Bissen repeated Tuesday what he has been consistently saying: “Maui cannot build its way out of the housing crisis.”

Maui’s current construction of new residential housing is extremely low, with growth at “essentially zero” from 2018 to 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Now, much of the new construction will be to simply replace what was lost in the fires.

The nine-member Planning Commission, which currently has three vacancies and no one representing South Maui where a majority of the Minatoya list properties are located, wrapped up its daylong meeting at 8 p.m., a full 11 hours after it started. The commission plans to gather more information and reconvene in two weeks.

The commission is expected to make a recommendation that the nine-person County Council will consider when it takes up the bill, along with similar input from the Lanai and Molokai planning commissions which have yet to hear the proposal.

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