A Maui County commission has called for “systemic reform” of the county’s boards and committees.
The Maui County Cost of Government Commission published Friday a review of 15 county boards, committees and commissions. That review, requested in 2024 by the County Council, discovered chronic mismanagement throughout the county’s governance infrastructure, and recommended some boards to be dissolved entirely.
“These are not problems that can be solved one board at a time,” said Cost of Government Commission chair Dino Goossens-Larsen. “They call for structural reforms to the system as a whole.”
The review found that many boards have failed to consistently meet for years. The Maui County Council on Aging was only able to reach quorum twice in 2024, and only four times in 2025, while the Conservation Planning Committee had no meetings at all for three years.
The review attributed this issue to difficulties in recruiting volunteers to serve on each board. Some commissions require expertise within a narrow subject field, or geographic seat requirements that make filling seats harder than necessary.
Meanwhile, other boards appear to be vestigial organs that continue to exist despite having no clear purpose. The review highlights the Affirmative Action Advisory Council, which was formed in 1989 to advise the county mayor on the county’s equal employment opportunity initiatives, and meets only once per year.
The six-person advisory council is now redundant to the duties of the county managing director and an affirmative action coordinator, and seems to be “barely operational,” the review found. Nonetheless, it has continued to exist despite a previous review in 2011 recommending that the council be eliminated.
These problems extend beyond problems with individual committees, and highlight structural faults in how the county’s administration is set up.
For example, the review notes that the county’s Real Property Tax Review Board has to manage more than 1,000 property tax appeals annually, with hours-long meetings every two weeks. Despite this, the board is staffed entirely by volunteers, and the review determined that the board is at high risk of failure in part because of the extremely high workload placed on the five-person board.
At the same time, the oversight of the county’s boards and commissions is confusing, the review found. For example, the Maui Redevelopment Agency is formally attached to the county Department of Management, but relies on the county Planning Department for administrative support.
This confused structure also opens the county up for potential conflicts of interest and fraud. In particular, the review highlighted the Commission on Healing Solutions for Homelessness — a commission formed in 2020 to make housing policy recommendations — a commission plagued with resignations due to conflicts between members with financial ties to county-funded service providers.
That commission was also determined to be effectively non-functional, with 16 out of 28 meetings cancelled due to lack of quorum between 2024 and 2026, and only produced a single policy recommendation since its formation.
Ultimately, the review called for the County Council to conduct a comprehensive review of the process of establishing all county boards and commissions, and recommended the dissolution of five of the 15 boards evaluated by the board: the Affirmative Action Advisory Council, the Commission on Children and Youth, the Commission on Healing Solutions for Homelessness, the Dangerous Dog Adjudication and Appeals Board, and the Urban Design Review Board.
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