The Weekender article (March 13-14) about the “plan” to manage Maui’s visitor numbers is a complete farce.

The so-called plan created by visitor industry insiders isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on and is nothing more than business as usual.

Maui County Council and the mayor must do the following to begin managing visitor numbers:

• Cancel all permits for new hotel construction and hotel expansion on any project that hasn’t started construction. We have too many hotel rooms now accommodating too many visitors; we don’t need more.

• Shut down the illegal vacation rentals. Finding them isn’t a problem and it reduces numbers by reducing available accommodations.

• Stop all funding for the Hawaii Tourism Authority and the Maui Visitors Bureau and disband them. Visitors know we are here and there is pent-up demand. We don’t need to waste money on advertising and whatever else those agencies do with TAT revenue. Use that money instead to fix roads, benefit the homeless, help the unemployed or other higher priorities.

These proposed actions are essential to addressing the problem of too many visitors once the pandemic is over. Without these, it’s just business as usual, so contact council members and the mayor to get them moving.

Otherwise, we’ll soon long for the days when “only” 3 million people visited.

Kevin Bridges

Kahului