Council approves village housing money, leaves evacuation road unfunded
Wildfire Safety Advocates filed a formal objection before the June 4 vote, arguing the spending plan is both unsafe and unlawful. The Council adopted it unchanged.
The Hawaiʻi County Council approved its FY 2026-27 capital budget on June 4, committing $11 million to build the streets, water, and sewer lines for hundreds of new homes at the north end of Waikōloa Village. It committed nothing to finishing the second road out of the village.
Before the vote, we filed a formal objection asking the Council to change course. The Council passed the budget without the changes we requested. We have since published our full objection, and we are asking residents and the press to read the record and judge it for themselves.
Our objection turns on a single fact about the village. Waikōloa is served by one ordinary road, Waikōloa Road. A rough emergency track along Hulu Road can be opened during an evacuation, and it was opened during the 2021 Mana Road Fire, but it is unpaved, gated, and runs in one direction only. Even with that emergency route available in 2021, residents sat in traffic for more than an hour just to leave the village. An emergency route is not a substitute for a dedicated, two-lane second road.
The County itself named the second road the "top priority" for Waikōloa in its 2008 South Kohala Community Development Plan, citing the need to give residents a way to evacuate during a wildfire.
The risk has been documented elsewhere. The state Attorney General's 2024 Lahaina Fire Incident Analysis Report cited that Waikōloa's wildfire risk was higher than Lahaina's was before the 2023 fire that took more than 100 lives. The late Fire Chief Kazuo Todd told the community that under Red Flag winds, the fire department cannot stop a wind-driven fire and that evacuation is the only protection. The growth the budget helps enable would push the village toward 10,000 residents, with the newest families living farthest from the only existing road out.
Na Hale Makoa is a 140-unit workforce rental community that opened to residents in May 2026. (Pacific Business News / Moss & Associates)
We do not oppose new housing itself. People need homes, the families who would live there are neighbors and coworkers, and the affordability crisis is real. Our objection is to the order of the work, not the work itself. The community's own plan already answered the question of sequence: second road comes first.
We also argue the budget is unlawful. In 2020, county voters amended the County Charter to require that capital spending be prioritized in alignment with community plans. The Waikōloa plan makes the second road the top priority, to be completed before more housing is added. A budget that funds the housing while leaving the road unfunded reverses that priority and conflicts with the Charter. It also implicates the right to a clean and healthful environment guaranteed by the Hawaiʻi Constitution. The full reasoning, with citations, is in our published comment.
We also credit the progress now underway. The second road would run from the north end of the village, across county land toward the wastewater treatment plant, and then across private land from the plant out to Queen Kaʻahumanu Highway. The State is working now on the lower stretch, from the treatment plant to the highway. County money in the budget could build part of the upper stretch, on county land. Both are genuine steps toward the road.
Our concern is that the road is being built in disconnected pieces, by different hands. Gaps remain in between, especially near the wastewater treatment plant, on county and adjacent parcels that no one has planned, funded, or taken responsibility for. A road the County's own plan calls the top priority cannot be left to assemble itself out of whoever happens to build a piece. To serve as a second way out, it has to be completed end-to-end to Queen Kaʻahumanu Highway, open in both directions and ungated, so that families can drive out and fire crews can drive in. A road that stops halfway is not a road.
For now, the Council has adopted the budget without funding or sequencing the second road. We are disappointed, but we are not finished. The full record of what we raised, and when, is now public. We will continue to pursue this through every appropriate channel, and we are asking residents, the press, and anyone concerned about the community's safety to read the record, weigh it, and join the call to fund and sequence the road before more families move in.
The question, for us, has always been the same. When the next fire comes, and on this landscape it is a matter of when and not if, will the people of Waikōloa Village, those here now and those the County plans to add, have a way out? Until the answer is yes, we will keep working.
Mahalo for supporting us.