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The Maui Planning Commission can only meet for an hour Tuesday to discuss what is arguably the most pressing policy debate moving through county government — the Minatoya list — because it won’t have enough members to keep the 9 a.m. meeting running past 10 a.m.

Two weeks ago, the nine-member commission, which currently has three vacancies, held an 11-hour meeting on Mayor Richard Bissen’s proposal to turn more than 7,000 vacation rentals — nearly half of Maui’s inventory — into long-term housing by 2026.

The  deferred action to this week, but little progress is expected in developing its recommendation to the Maui County Council under the 60-minute constraint. The commission had yet to even finish hearing from the dozens of people who were still signed up to testify online at its last meeting before running out of time.

The reason for the cap on the meeting time is a matter of quorum. The commission presently has six seated members, but one of the them is unable to attend the meeting and another needs to depart at 10 a.m.

The commission needs a bare minimum of five members to meet. So when the clock strikes 10 a.m., the commission will have only four members left in attendance and the meeting will end.

The vacancies that plague the body threaten the spine of a commission responsible for regulating and advising on county-wide land use issues that extend well beyond what it should do with the short-term rental proposal. The commission holds enormous sway in shaping the county’s economic and cultural identity through the county it formulates and its nine community plans.

The commission is expected to eventually make a recommendation about the controversial proposal that the County Council will consider when it takes up the matter later this year.

The proposal aims to create more housing for locals amid an island-wide affordable housing crisis by discontinuing transient vacation rentals in apartment districts.

Roughly 2,200 properties in West Maui would need to cease short-term operations by July 1, 2025. The rest of the units, primarily in Kihei and Wailea, would need to be phased out of the short-term rental pool by Jan. 1, 2026.

All told, there are 7,167 units on the so-called , named after the late Richard Minatoya. The late county attorney wrote a legal opinion in 2001 that effectively grandfathered in the use of short-term rentals operating in apartment-zoned districts if the buildings were constructed before 1992 and already being utilized as such.

If the policy is enacted in full, researchers from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization have said it would .

Other experts predict, however, that there’d be an economic price to pay for this considerable housing supply boost. 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.

Planning Commission Vice Chair Dale Thompson, who has a family-owned property on the Minatoya list, has said he will not vote on the issue.

The commission is one of several Maui County boards and commissions in dire need of additional members. The process of filling vacant seats was stalled earlier this year by a weeks-long legal dispute that ensnared a string of appointments. 

The legal skirmish over the process by which the county selects nominees to serve on a number of boards and commissions was resolved in late May. 

Bissenʻs original 21 nominations to various boards and commissions, including the seat on the Maui Planning Commission to which the Maui County Council had appointed Danny Ray Blackburn to fill, is Tuesday afternoon by the Government Relations Ethics and Transparency Committee ahead of a vote by the full council.

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