The council voted 6-3 to disapprove the Hale Waipu’ilani housing project at 16 Waipu’ilani Road in Kihei.

Council members reversed course from their vote to recommend approval for the project during an Affordable Housing Committee meeting in June. At the time, they also struggled with a decision, weighing the benefits of affordable housing against neighbor concerns and location issues before finally pushing forward the project.

On Monday, Council Members Gabe Johnson, Kelly Takaya King, Mike Molina, Tamara Paltin, Shane Sinenci and Council Vice Chairwoman Keani Rawlins-Fernandez voted in favor of disapproval, while Council Chairwoman Alice Lee and Council Members Tasha Kama and Yuki Lei Sugimura voted against the disapproval.

Because the project is under the affordable housing fast-track approval process, the council had until Sunday to make a decision or the project would be deemed approved. But since the deadline fell on a Sunday, it was moved to Monday, the next working day. The project was on the council’s Friday agenda, but members recessed Friday’s meeting until Monday as testimony took all day on Friday.

The project was to be located just mauka of South Kihei Road on a 1.53-acre parcel bounded by East Waipuilani Road to the north and Kauha’a Street to the south, which would have been the access points. Plans had called for one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom units.

Van Bruce Investments LLC is the property owner; Alaula Builders would have been the developer.

More than a dozen community members and neighbors testified against the project on Friday and Monday, sharing stories of flooding on their properties nearby, increasing traffic, cost of flood insurance for buyers and impacts to suspected wetlands on-site.

Lawrence Carnicelli, who represented the applicant and is also vice president of Alaula Builders, countered some of the public testimony, saying that the units would never go to market rate; the property is not a wetlands, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and the project is not bypassing drainage standards. He said that the project would have frontage improvements and is working with a county department to bring down prices on the units.

However, council members still had concerns.

“Although this project would provide 28 residential workforce housing units, I’m hearing loud and clear from the testifiers about the ongoing concerns, particularly the frequent flooding and drainage issues and the related health, safety and monetary implications,” said Johnson, who chairs the Affordable Housing Committee but was excused on the day of the committee vote. “I believe developers also heard this concern from the beginning and decided to ignore the voice of the community and carry on regardless.”

He said that as the chair of the committee, he “wholeheartedly” supports more affordable housing, and so does the council. But, he added, “as they say in the real estate world, location, location, location.”

King, whose residency seat is South Maui, said she doesn’t think there is any doubt that the property is on a wetland, and while the council supports affordable housing, “sometimes there is inappropriate locations for certain projects and this is one of them.”

She added that she has supported some projects in which she saw aspects of “NIMBY-ism,” or not-in-my-backyard mentality, but said “this is not one of them.”

“Just because people don’t want it in their neighborhood, it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea and everything is ‘NIMBY-ism’,” she said.

But Kama, who supported the project, said, “We say we should not let perfect be the enemy of good, and sometimes that happens more often that not.”

“I’m also very concerned about all the people leaving Maui, because every moment and every day that goes by it gets harder and harder for them,” she said.

Kama added that council members should give the public “the opportunity to choose” to live in the project or not.

“Because it’s their life that is on the line, not ours, not the neighbors, not the people who live around there,” she said. “They have been living with those conditions for years, we heard them, so why not give others the opportunity before the prices get so beyond us?”

Kama said that when there is talk of “location, location, location, we are talking about relocation, relocation, relocation of our people.”

“When is that going to stop?” she asked.

Lee backed the project because she worried about market-rate homes being built instead.

“There’s going to be either affordable homes built there or market homes built there, and I choose affordable,” Lee said.

* Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com.