The Hawai‘i Supreme Court has overturned Maui County rules exempting certain projects within the Maui Special Management Area from requiring a permit.
The Coastal Zone Management Act dictates how Hawai‘i’s counties manage their special management zones, vulnerable shoreline areas at the periphery of every island. The CZMA, in part, requires special management area use permits for any “development” within the SMAs, which in turn requires a lengthy public hearing process.
In 2024, the Maui Planning Commission attempted to elide the CZMA by implementing new administrative rules granting categorical exemptions for certain types of projects within the SMA, excluding them from the need for an SMA permit. On Wednesday, the state Supreme Court concluded that the Commission’s rules violated the CZMA.
“[The] amended rules … stripped oversight and procedural safeguards from SMA permitting review,” wrote Associate Justice Todd Eddins for the opinion of the court.
The Planning Commission’s rules allowed projects such as some pavement resurfacing, renovations to existing structures, “limited” ground disturbances for hole boring or trenching, tree trimming or cutting, or the installment of electric vehicle charging stations in existing parking lots.
After being implemented in 2024, the rules were quickly challenged in court by environmental nonprofit Maui Tomorrow Foundation, which argued that the rules delegated the county’s responsibility for overseeing development to the developers themselves.
The Foundation’s suit against the Commission argued that the rules undermined a necessary process in the CZMA whereby a planning commission reviews specific projects and makes a determination on whether it should be exempt from the permitting process on a case-by-case basis: “unless [the commission] finds no environmental harm, a permit is required,” Eddins wrote.
While the CZMA does allow counties to streamline their permitting processes at their discretion, it does not allow them to bypass the review process by which they determine whether a permit is needed at all, Eddins wrote.
Eddins wrote that the Maui Planning Commission had envisioned “a world where the Commission would have to screen every beachgoer, every sandcastle builder, every tourist on Hawai‘i's beaches.” But by Eddins’ interpretation, the CZMA’s assessment framework already should filter out such minor individual impacts easily, while the Commission’s rules would categorically exclude projects like agricultural grading or utility infrastructure installations from ever requiring a permit.
Furthermore, Eddins wrote, the rules delegated to the developers themselves the responsibility of assessing the impacts of a project, which he opined is a violation of the county’s constitutional duty to protect the state’s natural resources.
The Foundation and other environmental groups testified against the rules when they were being proposed in 2023 and 2024, identifying the rules as potentially unconstitutional violations of the CZMA even then.
At the time, however, the rules also generated their share of support, in many cases from shoreline businesses that would otherwise need to go through lengthy permitting processes in order to continue operating.
The Circuit Court ruled in favor of Maui Tomorrow in 2024, but Maui County appealed the case to the Intermediate Court of Appeals, which then transferred the case to the state Supreme Court.
Eddins’ opinion affirmed the Circuit Court’s decision to partially invalidate the amended rules.
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