Restoration
Will Lahaina become a victim of Agenda 2030?
The county wants to take control of Lahaina. They’re currently using permit denial as leverage to force a sale. Their main focus is the commercial area on Front Street.
Property owners defeated the attempted land-grab bill (SB 3381) in 2025. However, it is expected to be reintroduced this year, and I suspect the state and county will be far more subtle about it next time.
Our governor, Joshua Green, is an outspoken advocate for mRNA vaccines—he currently wants to mandate them for children attending public schools—and he is also an enthusiastic supporter of the United Nations. He has made at least two presentations at the UN in New York City outlining plans to reconfigure existing towns: Lahaina on Maui, two towns on Kauai, and one on the island of Hawaiʻi.
Both of those presentations occurred before Lahaina was destroyed by what I believe to have been high-tech arson using directed-energy weapons, producing temperatures of up to 3,000°F—hot enough to melt car windshields, fatigue steel vehicle frames on land, and weaken the steel hulls of boats anchored offshore.
I’ve since learned that many state, county, and city governments in the U.S. are working in concert with the UN toward so-called “sustainable development” goals: no private vehicles, no private property, digital ID, CBDCs—the entire package. Agenda 2030 is the hurry-up offense for Agenda 21, which was moving too slowly given the rapid increase in public awareness.
Still, my intention from the beginning is to remain positive.
The renovation of the seawall on Front Street could be read as a hopeful sign.
The new concrete cap is clearly designed for human use. It’s smooth, molded, and finished to a high standard—an obvious bench seat rather than a purely utilitarian repair. The wall runs from Baby Beach to the intersection of Papalaua and Front Street, roughly half a mile, and it was fully recapped during the two weeks I was in Lahaina photographing the town’s current condition.
The cap overlaps the original lava-rock wall, protecting it from erosion while transforming the entire length into a continuous place to sit. It feels almost generous: a half-mile bench where residents and visitors can watch the sun set over Lahaina Bay, with Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi on the horizon.
From one perspective, this looks like preparation for restoration—an investment in public life that assumes people will once again gather on Front Street.
From another, darker perspective, the seawall may be the only thing being preserved.
It protects the shoreline infrastructure of Front Street itself—the spine leading to what was once Lahaina’s commercial heart—while the buildings that gave the street its meaning remain absent. In that reading, the county is not restoring a town but stabilizing a corridor: preserving the edge while waiting for everything behind it to be erased, reclassified, or reconfigured.
The seawall sits at a crossroads of intent. It may be the first visible sign of genuine rebuilding—or a placeholder for a future version of Lahaina that no longer belongs to its original owners.
Meanwhile, the county is not allowing private property owners to repair their own seawalls. In Hawaiʻi, beachfront property extends to the high-tide line, and seawalls require constant maintenance to withstand daily erosion.
If owners are prohibited from repairing them, those walls will eventually collapse. The sea will advance inland, undermine foundations, and the county can then condemn the property and acquire it for pennies on the dollar.
This is already happening in parts of Maui, particularly in the Napili-Honokōwai area north of Kāʻanapali.
It’s a land grab—plain and simple.
The county has also outlawed Airbnbs and rezoned coastal resort properties that were originally approved and built specifically for short-term vacation rentals.
The justification is “affordable housing.”
“Avoidable fiction” would be more accurate. Affordable housing does not exist on Maui. The tax assessment on my modest inland home is $1.5 million.
What the government actually wants is “workforce housing.” They used that exact UN terminology in the early days after the fire. If the government manages the market, it can dictate prices.
This new rental-property ruling will be challenged in court. Maui County may face years of legal costs, followed by substantial settlements for loss of use.
Meanwhile, our economy continues to suffer from the collapse of tourism. The demographic that rents Airbnbs is unlikely to shift to hotels; they’ll simply go elsewhere. Maui is lovely—but it will never be Mo’orea.
Any compromise that grants government oversight of private property inevitably leads to government ownership, and that future may arrive far sooner than we expect as 2030 approaches.
That’s how our local representatives and bureaucrats operate—slowly, indirectly, and with plausible deniability.
Front Street property owners are resisting pressure to sell.
I suspect Mick Fleetwood still intends to rebuild the “Lahaina Store” building, and I think Kimo’s Restaurant is also planning to return, but they face additional resistance from sustainability officials who claim that wharf-pile construction harms the environment.
The county is employing the strategic withholding of building permits—quiet pressure designed to make eventual public acquisition feel inevitable. Front Street owners, however, have deep pockets, so this may become a prolonged standoff between the Sustainables and the Capitalists, punctuated by loss-of-use lawsuits.
I’ve never been successful as a social-media influencer. Still, the Universe nudged me to make this small video—despite its 35 views—and to stay the course, even when it feels pointless.
We face real, empirical problems in the world, but at its core this is a spiritual war. Lahaina is the ancient heart of Maui.
Most people will never read the UN’s Agenda 2030, but I would be remiss if I didn’t provide the link here, along with Rosa Koire’s, “Behind the Green Mask” and my video of Lahaina before and after the fire:
• https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda
• https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Green-Mask-U-N-Agenda/dp/0615494544
—RHS