Two major developments that had long been knocking at the doors of the County Council were approved in 2008.
Honua'ula / Wailea 670 and Makena Resort are project districts established in the Kihei-Makena Community Plan, with the Makena Resort approved since 1978.
But the owners of the project districts had revised their plans and were seeking modifications of the original project district designations, reopening the public review processes. Both project districts have been long awaited by some, long dreaded by others. Years of discussion and debate didn't dampen the controversy over these developments when they came up for a yes-or-no vote this year, it only seemed to fuel it.
In both cases, supporters said the projects would generate hundreds of jobs over a long build-out and provide a badly needed boost to the island's flagging economy. Opponents said the developments would overrun hundreds of acres of open space in South Maui, and objected that environmental reviews on the projects were decades old.
Honua'ula's revision actually reduced the scope of the original plans to 1,400 housing units on 670 acres. The Honua'ula Partners agreed to comply with a 50 percent affordable housing component - in line with the county's Residential Workforce Housing Policy. But some of the affordable units are planned off-site.
Still, 20 years after Wailea 670 was proposed, and after more than a year of debate in the County Council, Honua'ula was approved in April by a 5-4 vote. The council added 30 conditions to the project, including requirements the developer help widen Piilani Highway to four lanes and provide $24 million in public park assessments.
In the fall, Makena Resort scurried through the council in just over a month, after languishing for years in legislative limbo.
The decades-old project had been passed out of the council's Planning and Land Use Committee after an exhaustive review more than four years ago but had never been moved on to the full council for a final decision when Makena's original owner apparently balked at the conditions imposed by the committee.
With a new investment group headed by Everett Dowling, the resort was pushed back to the front of the line. In November, Council Member Mike Victorino made a plea to put the project on a fast-track to complete review by the end of the year.
Council members met late into the night at a pair of special meetings of the Land Use Committee and the full council, and heard from hundreds of testifiers both for and against the project.
In the process, conditions were refined and the density of the development cut back from 1,000 to 800 units, with another 400 units of affordable housing to be built off-site. The council voted 5-3 to approve the zoning changes requested for 603 acres to allow the development to proceed.
