Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen has announced his 2026 reelection campaign after winning over some initial skeptics during his handling of Maui’s devastating wildfires.
Bissen, 63, said the fire that killed 102 people, destroyed about 5,500 homes and nearly wiped out Lahaina on Aug. 8, 2023, inspired him to seek reelection.
As Maui continues to
approve building permits for Lahaina and families
are moving back in, and with tourists gradually returning, Bissen said that signs of progress “have strengthened my resolve
to finish the work that we started. … Every single
person in Hawaii was impacted by that disaster in some way, and there’s much more work to be done.”
He is also eager to have the Maui County Council vote on his Bill 9, which would convert 6,100 short-term vacation rental units mostly in West and South Maui into long-term housing for local residents.
In July, the Council’s Housing and Land Use Committee voted 6-3 to forward the measure to the full Council over fierce objections from Maui’s short-term rental industry, which has repeatedly threatened to sue.
If Bill 9 passes, owners
of vacation units in West Maui would have three years to convert them; South Maui landlords would have five years. Without it, Bissen said, Maui would be unable to build thousands of units over the same period because of a lack of water and other infrastructure demands.
“There’s no way we could build that many units in the same time,” he said.
Bissen called Bill 9 “one of the more, if not the most, consequential bills in our time. These are tough times and tough decisions. The purpose of the bill was to preserve what we have left.”
For Bissen, the potential to free up thousands of rentals for long-term use remains personal — and critical for keeping more Maui families from leaving in the aftermath of the fire.
Bissen has a large extended family and generational roots on Maui, and said the two youngest of his three daughters — who are 31, 33 and 36 — and their children live in his home and his oldest lives across the street. In all, he has four grandsons ranging in age from 3 months to 13.
“They’re the whole reason I ran the first time and they’re the reason I want to stay,” Bissen said. “These kids need a fighting chance. We want to keep our family together. We want to keep everyone’s family together.”
Council member Tamara Paltin, who lives in Lahaina and holds the West Maui
residency seat on the nine-member Council, did not support Bissen’s first mayoral campaign because she worried about his relative lack of county government experience after retiring as chief judge of Maui’s 2nd Circuit Court.
Now, Paltin said, “a lot of the Lahaina residents are supportive,” as she is, because of the mayor’s handling of the wildfire recovery.
Paltin acknowledged that “of course nothing is without mistakes or errors.”
“But he pretty much does what he says he’s going to do, and you can have a rational discussion if you disagree,” she said.
So far, no candidates of note have announced a challenge to Bissen’s reelection. Paltin worries that progress following the Lahaina fire could stall if a new mayor gets elected, shepherding in a new administration that would have to get up to speed on critical and complex issues three years into Maui’s recovery.
“I definitely wouldn’t want to jump to another person,” she said.
Paele Kiakona, a founding member and spokesperson for the grassroots Lahaina Strong group formed in response to the fire, helped
organize protests against Bissen, Gov. Josh Green and visitors to Maui in the early days after the disaster.
Months later, in early 2024, Kiakona was one of three Lahaina Strong members invited for a private talk with the mayor and governor at the Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua — where some of the fire survivors were being housed — that helped change Kiakona’s opposition and led Lahaina Strong to join forces with elected leaders.
KIAKONA recalled he was “pretty indifferent” when Bissen ran for office the first time. That sentiment turned negative after the devastating fire, which occurred
just eight months into the mayor’s first term.
“We were frustrated, angry at everybody and hurting because we didn’t see a lot of action,” Kiakona said. “… It was easy to point fingers as to who’s to blame. I was just as angry at Mayor Bissen as I was at Gov. Green, as I was at (Hawaiian Electric).”
But that began to change during the Lahaina Strong meeting with Bissen and Green.
“We were still protesting on the beach but we started to see the mayor’s demeanor and tone soften,” he said.
Kiakona and other Lahaina Strong members began to hear about Maui County’s so-called Minatoya List while working with people in the community who were also looking for ways to house displaced fire survivors in homes of their own.
In 1989, the County Council tried to restrict short-term vacation rentals to land zoned for hotel use. But an opinion written by then-Deputy Corporation Counsel Richard Minatoya exempted units built before March 5, 1991.
Bill 9 would repeal the
exemption for the grandfathered units on the Minatoya List.
At their initial meeting, Bissen and Green liked the idea of somehow converting vacation rentals on the list, Kiakona said.
“It aligned with the housing crisis,” he said. “That was that inflection moment after speaking with the mayor about the Minatoya List. It didn’t come just from us. Other members of the Maui community were involved. We always come with respect first. But we also came with solutions. That’s when we gained their respect.”
BY THE END of the 2024 legislative session, Bissen told Lahaina Strong that he was going to take “decisive action” to add more affordable housing “because our people need it,” Kiakona
remembered.
“It took some time for me to really embrace him and feel confident in him,” he said. “But I saw how he
carried himself and the empathy he felt for the community on things we aligned with. I wanted to see action and I started to see that. He’s really stepped up to
the plate. My point of view of him has completely changed. I really see him as an ally now who’s really there for the community. It’s the first time I’ve seen advocacy turn into policy.”
Kiakona also credited the mayor for transparency and for his “Hawaiian values.”
Bissen, meanwhile, continues to worry about the struggles of Maui residents, especially their ongoing mental health needs.
“It was really, really bad what happened to us,” he said. “The mental health strain has been the biggest issue. Eighty-nine county workers lost their homes,
including 26 first-responders, and everyone has different layers of loss. It’s fair to say we all go through periods of grief and gratitude — sometimes in the same day.”
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