The issue could show up on the board’s agenda in July, but it is complicated by a lawsuit, brought by the Sierra Club and working its way through the state’s Environmental Court, over the one-year revocable stream diversion permits the board has been issuing to Mahi Pono.

For Māhealani Wendt, who alongside her husband Ed, a sixth-generation kalo farmer, waged a decades-long fight to have the streams in East Maui restored, the delay and lack of transparency are par for the course, but discouraging nonetheless. 

“That’s the advantage that moneyed interests have,” Wendt said. “They can drag out the process. And, as they say, justice delayed is justice denied.”

It’s not the board’s role to decide management of the East Maui water system as a standalone matter, according to Department of Land and Natural Resources communications director Andrew Laurence.

“The Board is responsible for determining the appropriate disposition of water emanating from state lands and any related state interests consistent with applicable law, the public trust doctrine, and the record before the Board,” he said in a statement, adding that community input is an important part of that process. 

The department declined requests for an interview with Kanaka‘ole.

From Sugar To Citrus

For over a century, water from the streams running down through the eastern slopes of Haleakalā has been diverted west toward the center of the island via a gravity-fed system of ditches and canals. Built by the sugarcane company Alexander & Baldwin, the aging system is run by East Maui Irrigation, now a subsidiary of Mahi Pono. 

The 41,000-acre farming operation includes citrus, watermelon, onions, coffee and macadamia nuts as well as alfalfa and corn for cattle feed and irrigated pastureland. All that production requires a great deal of water. The company estimates it needs 3,900 gallons of water per acre of land it operates every day, and it recently reported using an average of 28 million gallons of surface water a day. 

Mahi Pono has been operating as a tenant under a series of one-year revocable permits for the last seven years. With its 2025 acquisition of EMI from A&B and the new lease, it hopes to effectively take over the system currently run by the state and begin acting as a de facto landlord.

At a time when lawmakers are focused on reducing the state’s dependence on imported food, Mahi Pono has positioned itself as a valuable new source of local produce. This spring, it provided mandarins for school meals through a partnership with the Department of Education. 

However, critics say Mahi Pono’s owner, PSP Investments, has a broader goal of acquiring water rights at relatively low prices in places where the natural resource is becoming increasingly scarce and eventually selling them for much more. PSP has undertaken similar projects in Australia, California and Brazil — often at the expense of Indigenous communities. 

To many community members, the battle is about much more than agriculture. 

Chang, the outgoing land board chair, proposed issuing Mahi Pono a 30-year lease once before, in 2024, but community members pushed back, Mayor Richard Bissen got involved, and the proposal was voted down by the board. The following year, Green appointed three new members to the BLNR and Chang brought a similar proposal back to the table.

During the same period, the East Maui Water Authority, a county entity created through a charter amendment supported by over 64% of Maui residents, was taking shape. Guided by Aha Wai O Maui Hikina, a board made up of Native Hawaiians, farmers and local community members, the authority was explicitly created to manage the East Maui water system. 

Representatives from the water authority and Mahi Pono have been meeting monthly since early 2025 and while they say they have worked together amicably and come to better understand one another’s perspectives, the process hasn’t ended in anything close to a compromise. 

At the land board’s April meeting, Mahi Pono’s attorney Calvert Chipcase said, “We, at the end, see things differently.” He added that the company’s goal is to remain the long-term licensee from the state, while ensuring “the continued safe, efficient, and complete delivery of water to the county right now, for its needs, at a cost that is less than the actual cost of the delivery of that water.”

Mahi Pono would like to see a contested case move forward. When asked about the potential for a public-private partnership, Chipcase said, “it just isn’t a space where there’s an opportunity to cooperate, because we each seek to do the same things.”

EMWA Executive Director Gina Young, Aha Wai O Maui Hikina Chair Jonathan Likeke Scheuer and James “Kimo” Landgraf, deputy director of the Maui County Department of Water Supply, also presented at the April meeting about how the county has positioned itself to begin repairing an aging system in need of maintenance. That includes doubling the EMWA staff, planning for new positions in the Department of Water Supply, and securing public and private funding. 

Landgraf said while the work to take on the system could be done quickly, it would be ideal if it were to happen gradually. “We can run if we have to, but we’d rather walk,” he said. 

Mahi Pono currently pays about $3 million in total for its revocable permit and the cost of maintaining the ditch system through EMI. That works out to an estimated 26 cents per 1,000 gallons of water, or about half of the average cost most farmers pay.  

Young told Civil Beat that the county wants to see Mahi Pono — and agricultural operations in general — succeed. The county isn’t looking to profit, she said, but it would charge the company more for the water it plans to use.

“Water delivery pricing would reflect not only the direct costs of operating the system, but also the long-term investment needed to maintain and improve reliability,” she said. 

If Mahi Pono were to shoulder a greater portion of the cost to shore up the system it would also upend an age-old pattern where agriculture companies in Hawaiʻi extract more from these systems than they give back, said Wendt, former executive director of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation.

“The voters of Maui agreed that they want this public trust resource to be managed by a public entity, for the public,” she said.

Private operators have obligations to their shareholders, Young said, while municipalities are directly accountable to the public. With the help of Aha Wai O Maui Hikina, the water authority also hopes to reinstate cultural values and practices that could help the next generation shoulder the burden of climate change. 

In an April letter to Kanaka‘ole, Young, Bissen and Josiah Nishita, the county’s managing director, pointed to a 2021 instance in which DLNR representative Ian Hirokawa “noted the importance of addressing County interest prior to moving forward with a public auction process.” 

In other words, at that point, it didn’t seem at all controversial that the county would get the first right of refusal. But that might have been easy to say when there wasn’t yet a water authority in place to take him up on it.

Scheuer, a land and water rights consultant who has been working on water rights in Hawaiʻi for decades, said the vast majority of water that is delivered to Mahi Pono comes off of state-owned lands — and yet that fact is rarely discussed by land managers. At the meeting, he pointed to the Public Trust Doctrine, established in the 1970s, which affirms that the state holds all public natural resources in trust for the benefit of its people. For that reason, he said, there should be no such thing as “company-owned water.”

“Either the state indeed owns the vast majority of the system, which should change the entire discussion … or somewhere in the last few decades, the state gave away an asset that Mahi Pono claims is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, so that’s also probably worthy of investigation and consideration,” Scheuer said. 

Mahi Pono, which declined interview requests for this story, disagrees with that analysis. In a letter to BLNR, the company wrote, “EMI owns the ditch system and has no intention of selling it.”

Less Water Overall

East Maui is typically wetter than many parts of Hawaiʻi, but in recent years it has also seen its share of drought conditions. Chris Shuler, a hydrologist who lives in Haʻikū and works for the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa, said the region sits on a gradient between the leeward and windward sides of the island so the farther east you travel, the wetter it tends to be.

Last fall the East Maui streams were reduced to their lowest level in decades and land managers declared an extreme drought. 

The island has been getting drier overall for the last 100 years, Shuler said, but the trend has been much more extreme over the last 20 years. One theory is that the trade winds are shifting direction, he said, and that may be causing the line that separates the dry portion of the island from the wet portion to move east. 

“Even without that long-term effect of the diversions, some of these streams would be intermittent anyway,” Shuler told Civil Beat.

In the monthly stakeholder meetings, the ongoing impact of severe drought in the region seems to be one of the only issues that everyone agrees on. According to the end of year report on the stakeholder process that EMWA’s Young published last December, Mahi Pono said it had stopped planting trees for a stretch last fall due to lack of water. At the time, executives from the company said they were pumping an average of 17 million gallons of groundwater a day in addition to the surface water they use. 

“That’s not a ratio that we feel is feasible in the long term,” said Grant Nakama, senior vice president of operations for Mahi Pono, in one meeting. 

In another, Mark Vaught, director of water resources at Mahi Pono, said, “I have never seen it this dry in my 33-year career.”

While members of the community board argued in the meetings that the environmental conditions have changed significantly since the initial Environmental Impact Statement was done for A&B — warranting a new study — the Mahi Pono executives disagreed.

“Our conclusion is that we are in a drought period as of the last 5-10 years, but that is too short of a period to draw any long-term conclusions from,” Nakama said.

The EIS lists the total water potentially available for Central Maui agricultural fields at 85 million gallons per day — more than three times what the company is currently using. 

Lucienne De Naie, long-time Sierra Club member and East Maui resident, said that number doesn’t reflect the current reality. “The streams just don’t have that much water anymore — except during really rainy events,” she said.  

In 2018, the state Commission on Water Resource Management ruled to restore 10 of the 25 key streams in East Maui after a petition from Maui Tomorrow, a citizen advocacy group representing Huelo area stream users and Na Moku Aupuni O Ko‘olau, a group of Ke’anae-Wailuanui kalo farmers, fishermen and hunters, petitioned to see streamflows restored.

As a result the kalo farmers living near the base of the streams have had access to more water in recent years. But even streams that are restored on paper often run dry. And East Maui area residents have often bemoaned millions of gallons of water lost or wasted every day due to cracks and other damage to the aged system.

East Maui isn’t one of the state’s designated water management areas. If it was, water users there would have to go through a much stricter permitting process that would require them to prove their use is beneficial, reasonable and doesn’t infringe on Native Hawaiian communities’ rights to practice their cultural traditions or the Department of Hawaiian Home Land’s right to water.

“They don’t have that permitting process, but they still have those legal obligations,” Scheuer said. “And BLNR hasn’t established a process to ensure that any of that is happening.”

A Transition Ahead

The state land board doesn’t need a contested case hearing to vote on a set-aside via a governor’s executive order. And the fact that the previous chair pushed for such a hearing over the last few years led many water advocates to infer that her ultimate goal was to issue Mahi Pono a long-term lease. 

Kanaka’ole, like Chang, is a Green appointee. So it’s not clear whether he will have any more latitude to take a different approach.  

However, 1st Circuit Environmental Court Judge Lisa Cataldo, who ruled to cap Mahi Pono’s stream diversions earlier this year, could also force BLNR to hold a contested case over the revocable annual permits. If she does that, it could stall the process further. 

Regardless of the result, Young, Scheuer and members of Aha Wai O Maui Hikina intend to continue building a water authority designed to one day run the system.  

“This is not just their entire lives, but their parents’ lives, their grandparents’ lives and their great grandparents’ lives,” Scheuer said of the members of the community board he leads. “So yes, there’s frustration, certainly, but there’s also an acknowledgement that it took 150 years to get here. We’re not going to solve it in a day, and we’re not going away.”