Federal agencies responding to Maui’s wildfire disaster over the past 13 months received much praise along with several tough questions during a congressional hearing Wednesday in Lahaina.

Select members of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce held the hearing to assess what has been done well and perhaps not as well to help Maui recover from the Aug. 8, 2023, wildfires that killed 102 people and destroyed most of Lahaina town.

Some of the more critical questions included whether paying homeowners lucrative vacation rental rates to house fire survivors was wise in hindsight, if enough temporary housing is being built, whether permanent replacement housing could have been built, and why a high percentage of federal loan applications haven’t been approved.

U.S. Rep. and Subcommittee Chair Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said the purpose of the hearing was for bipartisan representatives to hear directly from sworn witnesses involved in Maui recovery efforts, including county and state officials, to perhaps improve such responses by federal agencies in future disasters.

“We know that no federal agency, indeed no human institution, can address every concern, but we are here today under official business to do our duty as best we see,” Sessions said to participants and others at the hearing at the Lahaina Civic Center.

Sessions added three special members to the subcommittee for the hearing — Reps. Jill Tokuda and Ed Case, Hawaii’s two Democratic members of the U.S. House, and Rep. Katie Porter (D-California). No regular members of the 21-person subcommittee attended other than Sessions.

During the three-hour hearing, Tokuda, whose district includes Maui, asked Bob Fenton, regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, if FEMA’s leasing of about 1,300 rental homes and paying owners short-term vacation rental rates to house fire survivors was the best approach given that an unintended consequence was a spike in rent for housing across Maui. In some cases, existing renters were displaced by landlords opting into FEMA’s program against FEMA rules.

Fenton said there were fewer than 10 reported instances of households being displaced in favor of fire survivors, all of which were referred to the state Department of the Attorney General for action, and that FEMA tried to limit negative impacts on rents by focusing on homes that were already being used for vacation rentals.

Ultimately, he said there weren’t any better options to provide temporary housing after using hotels, at a cost of $1,000 a day per household including food and services, to shelter survivors of the fire that destroyed more than 4,000 homes on an island that had an affordable-housing shortage before the disaster.

“There are just not a lot of good solutions,” Fenton said.

Tokuda also asked whether FEMA, which is building 169 temporary modular housing units on undeveloped state land in Lahaina for fire survivors, plans to do more such construction.

Fenton said FEMA assessed more than 20 potential sites on which to develop such housing but is only building the one project, called Kilohana. He noted that the agency is working to provide households that lost their primary residences in the fire with modular units they can put on their lots in Lahaina as temporary housing while they work to rebuild.

Another FEMA initiative Fenton told subcommittee members about is possibly leasing residential lots in Lahaina where fire destroyed homes that were not occupied by owners. Fenton said about 1,100 such lots exist, and that FEMA is considering leasing such lots and providing modular homes that can be rented to fire survivors.

Porter explored how the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development possibly could have been better involved in Maui’s housing recovery and whether FEMA could have produced new permanent housing given the $1,000-a-day hotel room cost that she called “pretty eye-popping” for taxpayers.

“Why not deploy the permanent housing construction program,” Porter asked Fenton. “Given the housing shortage we have already in so many communities, when there is a disaster does it make sense to have FEMA focus so much on temporary instead of on a better balance between temporary and permanent?”

Fenton said permanent housing production under FEMA’s authority can only be done for uninsured homeowners in the absence of temporary housing solutions, and also has to be cost effective.

On Maui, he said it would cost about $1 million for FEMA to build a roughly 1,100-square-foot permanent house given construction costs around $900 per square foot.

“It’s not the silver bullet if you will,” he said. “There’s a lot of other solutions before you get to (permanent) housing.”

Maui Mayor Richard Bissen told subcommittee members that developing permanent housing would have been ideal to help Maui, as would have integrating HUD efforts earlier.

Bissen also thanked a host of federal agencies for their work, and expressed how important it is that the people who have been displaced from the West Maui town are the ones who return after rebuilding.

“While we can rebuild structures, if we do not return Lahaina to the very people who represent the spirit and the soul of the community — if we don’t recognize the faces of our friends and our family — as we repopulate, then we will have lost this battle for our people,” he said.

FEMA has spent over $3 billion on Maui fire relief efforts, including housing costs, debris removal work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and work by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency removing hazardous materials and helping restore county water and wastewater systems.

Col. Eric Swenson, heading up USACE work on Maui, told subcommittee members that debris was cleared from the last of 1,390 residential properties last week, months ahead of schedule, and that 60% of commercial lots have been cleared. USACE also built a temporary elementary school and removed about 3,100 vehicles in Lahaina and 141 vessels in and around Lahaina harbor.

USACE has done much of this work using local contractors and cultural monitors from Maui.

Ke‘eaumoku Kapu, president and CEO of the nonprofit Na Aikane O Maui, which has provided 62 cultural monitors for recovery work, told subcommittee members that the federal response was great and only had what he referred to as some “hiccups” with regard to protecting Native Hawaiian burials and other historic property.

Case said federal officials in charge of Maui’s wildfire disaster response without question have been competent, caring and dedicated people who have embraced Maui.

“This doesn’t always happen in the federal government,” Case said.

One area where help might be falling short has been low-interest loans available from the U.S. Small Business Administration to help not only businesses but also nonprofits, homeowners and renters.

Francisco Sanchez Jr., associate administrator of SBA’s Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience, told subcommittee members that the agency had approved more than $405 million in loan offers and disbursed over $90 million to date.

Porter asked about the volume of loan applications to loan approvals, and was told by Sanchez that 2,278 loans, including 1,434 for homes, were approved out of 6,028 applications.

Sanchez said SBA has a reconsideration campaign to understand why loans were denied and to help get them approved. In some instances, SBA has provided leeway with regard to credit scores that may be affecting loan approvals, according to Sanchez, who also said some applications were withdrawn.

Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hara, adjutant general of the Hawaii State Department of Defense, thanked subcommittee members for their attention and said the federal government’s response to the Maui disaster was organized and immense.

“The overall response to the Maui wildfires has been nothing short of extraordinary, and we are immensely grateful to the federal partners who have come alongside us in this effort,” he said. “We look forward to continuing to work together and to recover and rebuild Maui.”