As Honoapiʻilani Highway realignment project moves forward, so does plan for coastal land, abandoned roadway

Moving Ukumehame Beach Park is among the changes up for discussion as the $160.8 million state and federal project to move a 6-mile section of Honoapiʻilani Highway away from coastal hazards advances, with the final environmental impact statement expected to be published this month.

While many people are eager to see what option is selected for the new section of roadway between Olowalu and Ukumehame, others have been busy working on a master design for the new uses of the road section and coastal land that won’t be needed for the highway when the realignment project is completed in 2030.

Ideas flew during a series of recent public meetings — in-person at Lahaina Intermediate School cafeteria on May 29 and virtual meetings Tuesday and Thursday — that were hosted by The Nature Conservancy and the University of Hawai’i’s Community Design Center.

The nonprofit and university, which are collaborating on an 18-month study called Olowalu: The Road to Resilience, held similar meetings in February.

Tamara Farnsworth, coastal resilience project manager for The Nature Conservancy, said the meetings in February were to introduce this project to the community.

“What do you like about this area? What is important to you? What don’t you like? What can you envision overall?” she said.

This time around, there are specific ideas that are coming into focus for the final design of the in-depth project.

Three “catalytic sites” have been selected for up-close plans: Olowalu town, Mile Marker 14 and Ukumehame Beach Park.

“Olowalu town, there’s more people there. There’s some commercial activity there. There’s certain historical facets of it. There’s a lot of private property,” Farnsworth said. “Mile Marker 14, it’s a very highly used recreational area. The reef is in pretty good shape in that area. It also has a really high level of pretty extreme coastal erosion, and the roadway itself is already under great duress.”

Ukumehame Beach Park will likely have to be moved due to “very low resilience to sea-level rise and the climate hazards,” Farnworth said, adding the land there has the potential for wetland restoration and biocultural practices.

More concrete parameters, from the ideas originally generated from the first set of meetings in February, were presented to the public over the last week. The next and last set of public meetings will be held in the fall for final public input before the overall plan is released next May.

“If we go into a little more detail in the next iteration of the design and really carefully think through these sites, and the overall project area in a slightly more realistic level of detail, the feedback we’ve received will become one of the drivers of the design decision,” said Judith Stilgenbauer, a UH school of architecture professor.

Among the more popular ideas that were bandied about Tuesday: Build boardwalks for coastal access. Restore native habitat. Create parking away from the beach. Clean up the dumped trash. And, make a multi-use path.

Stilgenbauer, the principal investigator of the study, said the overarching goal is to find ways to protect the Olowalu Reef from further damage by addressing climate and other coastal hazards to the area.

The second goal is to improve the ecological performance of the area and habitat. And the third goal is to focus on the community’s needs.

For each of the three catalytic areas the study is looking at place and community, ecology and habitat, and climate and hazards like fire mitigation. Maps were shown with suggestions from the first set of public comment meetings in February.

At the most recent meetings, Stilgenbauer’s team of six, two research assistants and four UH students, prepared presentations that were made for long-term and near-term sea-level rise exposure areas. The near-term date was 2045 when the sea-level rise is expected to be 1.1 feet. The long-term sea-level rise was estimated to be 3.2 feet in 2075.

People in attendance were asked for comments and finally voting to rank their favorite ideas for each spot, from boardwalks to a native fishing pond. The votes will be tallied and analyzed for release next week on the website.

In voting from the 40 or so participants in the Zoom meeting Tuesday, the most popular ideas by area: 

• Olowalu town: Recreational water access, a multi-use path, vegetated buffer zone/living shoreline, and continued native habitat restoration.

One comment from the Olowalu town area session said: “Access to the ocean and including the Greenway or multimodal access will be complementary. Including nature-based solutions with a Greenway could help accomplish many goals.”

• Mile Marker 14 area: Malama ‘āina (cleaning up illegal dumping) was the top priority. Others close behind included wetland restoration, conversion to public land, and a new public beach with ample parking.

Comments included: “Clean up the cars and illegal dumping all through that area.” And, “Stop cars from driving right up on the sand. Provide adequate parking. And find ways to keep cars from staying there for days/weeks on end.”

• Ukumehame Beach Park: Native habitat restoration and sediment mitigation, expand wetland and water access via a network of boardwalks, reef protection and vegetated buffer/living shoreline.

This area received the most comments, including: “This location provides an opportunity to promote biodiversity. Return it to ‘nature’ and have humans touch the ground lightly / hover above habitat.” And, “consultation with kanaka maoli is important to understand best practices for this area. There may be other priorities that are not listed.”

Maui fireman Jonny Varona, who has attended both in-person meetings as a private citizen, said the problems surrounding the houseless population and the dozens of abandoned cars and debris in the Mile Marker 14 and Olowalu Town areas have not received enough attention. 

“It goes without saying that these are people and we need to consider them, but it is an area with zero resources, zero infrastructure. It’s not a good place,” Varona said. “Nobody wants to go walk through homeless camps.”

He also said that abandoned vehicles are not being addressed while the government is spending millions of dollars moving Lahaina fire debris from the temporary facility in Olowalu to the permanent site in Central Maui because of one of the island’s most fragile and important reefs.

“But then literally half a mile away or a mile away, you’ve got leaking vehicles,” he said. “There’s cesspools. It’s not a good setup. … And there’s nothing being done about it. We’re talking about long-term resilience and we’re not addressing that. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

Maui County Planning Director Kate Blystone said the work being done by The Nature Conserrvancy and UH Community Design Center is going to help with the entire years-long process.

“We are in support of moving the highway mauka to account for the effects of climate change,” Blystone said. “We’re happy this companion project is moving forward and look forward to the results of community engagement in the project.”

According to the draft environmental impact statement, the total cost for the highway movement project is estimated to be $160.8 million — $71.1 million for Olowalu and $89.7 million for Ukumehame.

Emily Sobolewski Knight, a research associate with the UH Community Design Center, said there is hope the road project will include repairing streams in the area to their natural state with revegetation and removal of invasive species.

“Streams are a big area for riparian restoration,” she said.

Sobolewski Knight added that a living shoreline along the coast is important “so any high-wave impacts will not harm any existing properties” and provide a space for the public to enjoy.

Farnsworth said during Tuesday’s zoom meeting: “We are taking just a look at the very interim, we’re calling it, solutions to really ensure that we can help to keep the roadway in place through the time that the new alignment is fully constructed and operational.”

She added that activities that can be done in tandem with the alignment, and when the new roadway is completed, also are being looked at.

Stilgenbauer said she is extremely pleased about how engaged residents have been and about how meaningful and positive their feedback has been.

“There was nothing overly negative; it was all just really smart and factual,” she said. “That’s why we do this.”

This week’s public sessions were the end of phase 1 of the 18-month study’s four phases.

The next phase, which runs July through December, will provide steps toward a final proof-of-concept design for the overall project site, which will be made available for public engagement and feedback.

Farnsworth said parking for beach access and dune restoration using native plants are also popular options to be added makai to the stretch of highway as it moves mauka. All of the suggestions are becoming part of the final report that will be done before construction begins in 2027.

A big part of the meetings is the “diversity of participants, because we had lineal descendants in the room,” Farnsworth added. “We had various members of the different age representatives, from different agencies, from the county and the state in the room. … We’ve got the ocean users. We’ve had some commercial folks or people who are doing business in the area. So we really appreciate that diversity and the wide range of folks who are representing their sectors.”