A group of Front Street merchants want to be allowed to rebuild their businesses as they were prior to the Lahaina wildfire but with heightened safety features. They also say they would like to speed up the permitting process. Gary Kubota photo/The Maui News

The burnt beams of her family’s 110-year-old historic building serve as a reminder to Kaleo Schneider of the August 2023 wildfire that devastated Lahaina, killing 102 people and destroying more than 2,200 homes and businesses.

But Schneider, a Hawaiian whose buildings housed 15 seaside businesses, said she’s hopeful her family will be able to help to rebuild the waterfront town, which served as the first capital of Hawaiian royalty and as a leading visitor attraction that generated close to a billion dollars a year in revenue.

“I think the county understands the town needs to be rebuilt,” said Schneider, part of the Front Street Recovery Group with more than 70 member merchants.

Talks have been ongoing between merchants and Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen’s administration, with some planning officials worried about climate change and rising sea levels. However, the merchants note that it was a fire that destroyed the town, not the ocean.

Town merchants said they were upset when, at one of the meetings, the administration offered to relocate businesses seaside of Front Street to an industrial area near the Pioneer Mill smokestack a quarter mile away.

“The county wants to change what Lahaina looks like,” said Keoki Freeland, former head of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation.

Maui County Planning Director Kate Blystone said Wednesday that officials are developing a “Rebuild Lahaina Plan” and are having meetings with merchants and residents before completing it.

Freeland said that because of its location and fringing reef, the town of Lahaina has never had major ocean damage.

“It’s fully protected. It never was a problem,” Freeland said.

Weather forecasters point out that, historically, the Big Island’s Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa have weakened hurricanes from the east traveling in the direction of Maui.

David Allaire, a founder of TS Restaurants, said other seaside visitor destinations have historically kept their locations close to the ocean, including Venice, Amsterdam and Dubai.

According to Allaire, Kimo’s and other neighboring surf shops and stores have sat on about two acres of land reclaimed over 100 years ago and so did Bubba Gumps, the former Lahaina Broiler on a former section of landfill on the makai section of Front Street just across from Longhi’s restaurant.

“The former residents of Lahaina saw fit over a century ago to reclaim ocean land in order to build residences and small shops on the makai side of Front Street,” Allaire said.

Allaire, president of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, said hundreds of seaside communities across the world, including Shelter Island near the edge of San Diego Bay, have chosen to put landfill over the ocean to accommodate community needs for more available space for living and commerce.

“Please just let us rebuild what we already had and go back to the wonderful Lahaina life we all had,” Allaire said.

Allaire recalled that during Hurricane Iniki, which devastated Kauai, the high waves had little effect on Lahaina because of its fringing reef. He added that Kimo’s restaurant is ready to rebuild on the water.

“We’re willing to take the risk,” Allaire said. “Nothing’s perfect.”

The Front Street Recovery Group also wants the county to lift shoreline management rules and other measures that might hold back rebuilding stores and restaurants seaside of Front Street, and to speed up the permitting process to allow businesses to redevelop as they were prior to the wildfire but with safety precautions.

The photograph looking south on Front Street near Lahainaluna Road was taken after the fire. To the left is Sargent’s Fine Art Gallery and to the right is the Cheeseburger In Paradise. Gary Kubota photo/The Maui News

Schneider said the majority of the property owners in the group are descendants of local families who live in Hawaii, including herself, a great-grandchild of Lucy Napela who was a teacher at King Kamehameha III School.

“These are Hawaiian lands and they’re in Hawaii hands,” she said.

Her property near the state Lahaina Library once provided space for a number of longtime businesses including Sunrise Cafe, Wyland Galleries, Lahaina Grill and Honolulu Cookie Company.

Schneider said her family’s commercial activity in the building structure took place mostly on land, although there were some private lanais on post and pier.

Lahaina has been fertile ground for successful startup businesses such as Maui Tacos, Cheeseburger In Paradise and Kimo’s. It’s also been a top choice for a store location in Hawaii by well-known businesses such as Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood and Fleetwood’s On Front Street.

Town merchants have also been developing successful nonprofit benefit festivals in the past, such as Halloween In Lahaina, Friday Night Is Art Night, A Taste of Lahaina, and the Festival of Canoes.

While some environmentalists point to the startling rise in ocean levels on the United States’ eastern seaboard — predicting sea level rise of 3 to 6 feet in some places in the next 50 years — a 2013 Sea Grant study shows the sea rise on Maui, Oahu and Kauai has been considerably less than some other areas because of its active volcanoes.

The islands sit on a lithosphere, a layer that is the coolest and most rigid part of the earth, and the rate of sea level rise varies based on its distance from Hawaii island’s volcanoes.

The Impacts of Sea Level Rise on Maui’s Shoreline study was based on tide gauges in Kahului Harbor and found the rate of sea level rise on Maui in a century was 9 inches. The same study said the rate of sea level rise in a century was about 6 inches on Oahu and Kauai.

Under a 2018 study through the Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System, the rate of sea level rise in Hawaii is predicted at between 0.7 and 1.5 feet by 2050 and between 1.3 and 8 feet by 2100.

The study said its modeling was based on sandy shorelines and did not account for shoreline erosion where there is a fringing reef or existing seawalls — structures that are present in Lahaina.

Now that more than 100 commercial lots in Lahaina have been cleared by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, many businesses are looking forward to rebuilding, and Schneider hopes the county can find a way to streamline the process.

“If we can rebuild, it really would be awesome because it would give everybody hope,” Schneider said.