The fever to wring as much money as possible from the fallow sugar and pasture lands of picturesque West Maui is putting the squeeze on the county’s Department of Water Supply. Anticipated development on that side of the island is “very high,” according to county officials, and the DWS will undoubtedly need to expand its minimal 9-well system there to keep up. “In my mind, it’s going to be the next critical area,” DWS director George Tengan says.
For the last few years, the Maui Department of Water Supply has been in a widely publicized pickle over water issues in Central and South Maui. According to DWS maps, about 35 development projects are planned for the Wailuku and South Maui areas, which are served primarily by the ‘Iao and Waihe’e aquifers. Last July, the ‘Iao aquifer came under control of the state Commission on Water Resource Management after the county exceeded a threshold set by the commission to limit its pumping to no more than 90 percent (18 million gallons a day, or mgd) of the aquifer’s sustainable yield. Since then, the DWS has ceased issuing water meters for ‘Iao water and any new uses will be regulated by the Water Commission.
According to an August 11, 2003, letter that Tengan wrote to the Maui Board of Water Supply, between 26.4 and 27 mgd is theoretically available from the ‘Iao and Waihe’e aquifer systems: 18 mgd from ‘Iao, 6.6 or 7.2 mgd from Waihe’e (depending on when a well in Kupa’a comes on line), 1.2 mgd from the ‘Iao tunnel, and .6 mgd from the ‘Iao-Waikapu Ditch and Treatment Plant. Of these sources, Tengan wrote, all but the Waihe’e aquifer were being used at maximum capacity.
Earlier this year, the county’s Central Maui water budget got cut even further when the Water Commission voted to enter into a Memorandum of Agreement with the county to limit pumping of Waihe’e to 4 mgd. While the MOA is not yet complete, county officials have indicated they will try to stick to the cap.
These new pumping restrictions limit the Central Maui system to about 24 mgd. Yet by October 31, 2003, demand on the system, averaged over the previous year, was 25.11 mgd. With demand in Central Maui only increasing, the DWS is frantically trying to develop alternative water sources.
The situation at West Maui is not as pressing – yet.
A DWS map lists 16 proposed projects, all residential or resort developments, in the area between Kapalua and Ukumehame. The DWS’s Ellen Kraftsow acknowledges that the map may not identify every project in the works. Some that are missing from the DWS map but reported in local newspapers include the following:
- Starwood Vacation Ownership, owner of the Westin Ka’anapali Ocean Resort, is planning to build a new 258-unit time-share resort project on a 12-acre lot next to the original resort. The units will all be lockouts, which means an interior door in each unit can be locked to create two separate units, giving the resort up to 516 units.
- Intrawest, a Colorado company, plans to build two hotels, one 12-story and one eight-story, as well as 72 town houses on 40 acres at North Beach in Ka’anapali. The two hotels will have 628 rooms, some of which may be lockouts.
- The Maui Marriott is planning to raze its tennis court to build two 12-story towers, featuring 143 villas, all lockouts.
- In late 2003, Maui Planning Director Mike Foley was quoted in The Maui News as saying that the county is working on five or six affordable hosing projects of varying size in West Maui.
- Developer Peter Martin has plans to turn 4,500 acres at Launiupoko into subdivisions. This includes the Pu’unoa subdivision, a low-income development rejected by the Maui County Council last December but revived since then.
A report issued last year by the county’s Long-Range Planning Division states that Lahaina’s population is expected to reach 25,400 in 2020, an increase of about 30 percent from the 2000 population of 18,000. According to that document, West Maui has a water supply capable of providing up to 8 mgd, while demand in 2000 came to just 5.4 mgd.
The Department of Water Supply has a slightly different take on things. Kraftsow says the county system in West Maui has a total capacity of 8.4 mgd, not counting surface water or out-of-service wells. However, she adds, “if you account for standards,” such as chloride content, the actual well capacity is closer to 6.5 mgd. As of June 2003, the DWS was pumping only about 2.4 mgd from its nine wells in West Maui aquifers – 1.74 mgd from Honolua and .66 from Launiupoko, which leaves 4.1 mgd available for municipal uses.
So why is the DWS concerned?
At full buildout, Kraftsow says the area is expected to consume about 12.7 mgd, 3.8 of which will need to be provided by the DWS. While an additional 3.8 mgd many not seem like much, she says it is “high relative to the infrastructure,” she says.
On the upside, West Maui has seven aquifers whose combined sustainable yield is about 40 million gallons a day: Kahakuloa (8 mgd), Honokohau (10 mgd), Honolua (8 mgd), Honokowai (8 mgd), Launiupoko (8 mgd), Olowalu (3 mgd), and Ukumehame (3 mgd).
What’s more, the water quality in some of the area’s saltier wells has improved with the end of sugar cultivation in the area.
“With the change in land use from agriculture to urban, nobody was sure how it was going to affect the aquifers. There has been some freshening of wells on the Lahaina side with less pumpage,” Kraftsow says, but quickly adds, “How much we can rely on that, I don’t know.”
Information, Please
No matter how fresh the existing wells are or abundant the water underground, the DWS faces challenges to developing more capacity in West Maui.
How much it will cost to add 3.8 mgd to the system depends on where the demands are coming from and on negotiations with ditch operators, but according to the 2005 budget proposal before the Maui County Council, no new well development in West Maui is planned within the next six years. There is, however, a request for $100,000 to do a Lahaina well site and source optimization study.
Whether the department can afford to develop new wells to keep pace with development is another problem. Rates paid to the DWS for water service cover only repairs and maintenance of the existing system. Expansions are paid for by the Water System Development Fund, which is supported by meter fees. But, says Kraftsow, the fees don’t cover the cost of expansion.
New wells are expensive, requiring source and site optimization studies, pumping tests, and transmission lines, among other things. The county, according to DWS documents, has notified some developers planning to request large amounts of Central Maui water that they may be required to develop their own water sources.
Another problem the county has in planning its well developments is the fact that neither it, nor the state, has adequate data on how much supplies are being drawn down by private wells.
Tengan says, “It’s difficult for us because we know what we produce, however, there are two big private water systems out there, the Ka’anapali system and the Kapalua system, and we don’t know exactly what the production is.”
Well drilling and pumping permits are approved by the Water Commission, which requires anyone with wells pumping more than 50,000 gallons a day to submit monthly reports. Maui County has no permitting process for wells.
In June 2000, at a West Maui Water Advisory Committee meeting, Charley Ice of the Water Commission noted that “generally, out of a dozen users on the west side, only three report reliably and regularly.” Ice, the meeting minutes continue, “also points out that there is much less reporting (either required or submitted) for surface water use than for ground water use, so that there are large gaps in our knowledge of the source. Nor does CWRM have much luck with follow-through.”
Pumpage reports for Maui Land & Pine and Ka’anapali Water Corp., two of West Maui’s largest water users, are in various files, some organized, some not, and little or no trend data or daily pumping averages are available for either company. Ice said recently that positions for people to process these reports have been cut. As a result, it’s been nearly impossible to determine exactly how much water is being taken from West Maui, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Even without going through the tedious process of calculating the endless pages of raw pumping data, Ice says that for the Honolua, Honokowai, and Honokohau aquifers, which span from the top of the “head” of West Maui down to about Lahaina, water use is far below the sustainable yield. Using figures on pumping capacity submitted to the Water Commission by developers during the well permitting process, Ice estimates that 6.55 mgd is being taken from Honolua and about 4 mgd is being taken from Honokowai, both of which have sustainable yields of 8 mgd.
Ice adds that Honolua has 10 active users, but there may be as many as 14 potential users according to the commission’s well files. The extensive Kapalua development, which has its own water system run by Maui Land & Pine, is one major user of the Honolua aquifer. According to pumping reports at the Water Commission, Maui Land & Pine’s single well at Kapalua pumped an average of about .48 mgd between November 2001 and October 2002.
The Honokowai aquifer, Ice says, has 30 potential users, but only about 12 of them are active. Ice’s estimate that about 4 mgd is drawn from the aquifer seems to be supported by actual pumping data for the Ka’anapali Water Corp. According to its monthly reports, in 2002, the company pumped about 3.068 mgd from seven of its Honokowai wells. How many of the proposed West Maui projects will actually come on line is “the $60 million question,” Kraftsow says, noting that some projects given discretionary approvals by the county can take 15 to 20 years to begin construction, while others might take a month.
Although current public and private use of West Maui’s groundwater appears well below critical levels, knowledge of who is pumping it out, where their pumps are, and how they’re running them is critical to managing the aquifers in the future.
“We are in the process of getting an automated compiling system,” says Ice. “We don’t have as many people around. We have pumping reports, but it’s a lengthy process to sort them, do data entry and compilation…”
On the county’s side, the DWS has proposed to the Maui County Council that it be allowed to develop a county well approval process that would give it the same information that the Water Commission now receives. To date, no action has been taken on the request.
In the meantime, the DWS is also updating its Water Use and Development Plan, as mandated by the state Water Code. As part of the process, the DWS will convene community committees to discuss regional water issues.
“We’re trying to resolve the long-term questions in the Water Use Development Plan,” Kraftsow says. Although the DWS had plans to convene a water advisory committee to discuss Lahaina water use, that’s been put on hold to address crises in the ‘Iao area.
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 14, Number 12 June 2004
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