As we’ve covered in previous issues, Maui’s vacation rental saga refuses to end. Quick recap: Bill 9, now law, phases out more than 6,000 apartment-zoned short-term rentals over the next several years, on the premise that those units should return to the long-term housing market.
Back in February, all three county planning commissions (Maui, Lānaʻi, Molokaʻi) rejected the carve-out that would have spared about 4,500 of them by creating two new hotel zoning categories, H-3 and H-4, for properties that operate more like visitor lodging than housing. That looked like the end of it.
It wasn’t. In late May, the proposal, now Bill 88, cleared the County Council committee 6-1, the exact supermajority it needs to overcome the commission’s unanimous denial. Chair Alice Lee and Vice Chair Yuki Lei Sugimura, two of the three who voted against Bill 9, are now backing the carve-out, and they warned about exactly this. Both argued the H-3/H-4 zoning should have existed before Bill 9 ever passed, with Sugimura calling the current sequence “chaos.” But Bill 9 passed 5-3 over their objections. Now the county is bolting on the zoning that its own dissenters said should have come first.
And the courts are already in it: within days of Bill 9’s signing, Kāʻanapali owners sued, calling the phase-out unconstitutional.
As we’ve said before, like much legislation, the intent is good. The execution is a mess.
