A Kihei oceanfront condo building is gone, and its association blames the county
A Kihei oceanfront condo building is gone, and its association blames the county
2026-09-10 · Hawaii · Compliance · Reported — unconfirmed
A South Maui condominium that lost four oceanfront units to a January 2025 Kona low lost an entire building to the next one, and its board is publicly blaming county permitting for the gap between the two. The allegations against the county are the association’s, reported and unadjudicated. The destruction is not in dispute.12
What happened
The AOAO of Kīhei Kai Oceanfront Condos sits at the junction of North and South Kīhei roads and dates from 1970. It flooded in 2021 and 2023. The January 2025 Kona low damaged four oceanfront units. The March 13–16, 2026 Kona low destroyed the oceanfront building outright; emergency inspectors arrived Monday, March 16, and the county began compiling damage estimates toward a federal disaster declaration.1
The association reports spending roughly $1 million on 2025 emergency repairs, about 75 per cent of it insured. A replacement six-storey building has been estimated at roughly $40 million. Owners are split between demolition-and-settlement and repairing the surviving building.
One factual caveat. The two outlets covering the collapse do not agree on the association’s size — one describes a 32-unit association with a 16-unit destroyed building, the other a 25-unit structure. We report the discrepancy rather than pick a number.
What the association alleges
Three claims, all contested and none tested in court: that county permit delays pushed shoreline repair past the second storm; that the county failed to enforce against a neighbouring property’s unpermitted walls; and that a county bridge rebuilt in 2016 over Waiakoa Gulch channels floodwater into the property.
The statute this lands in: HRS § 514B-47
Hawaii’s condominium chapter does not have a general “damage and destruction” section of the kind many states carry. What it has is § 514B-47, “Removal from provisions of this chapter,” and it contains two routes out. Both matter here.
The consent route. Property may be removed from condominium status where owners of eighty per cent of the units and all lienholders consent by recorded instrument. Every mortgagee, in other words, holds a veto.
The substantial-damage route. The section also reaches the case where “substantial damage or destruction has not been rebuilt, repaired, or restored within a reasonable time” — opening a petition for partition and court-ordered sale at the instance of a unit owner or a lienor.
That second route is the one that matters to a stalled association, because it does not require the board’s agreement or a supermajority. It requires only time to pass. “Within a reasonable time” is not defined, and Hawaii has thin authority on what it means for a building that cannot be permitted quickly.
Why the owners are genuinely opposed, not merely disagreeing
Partial destruction splits an association into two groups with different balance sheets. Owners of destroyed units hold an insurance claim and a share of common elements. Owners of the surviving building hold a functioning asset that a $40 million rebuild would encumber. A vote that looks like governance is in substance a transfer between those groups, and it is why partial-loss associations stall.
Nothing in chapter 514B mediates that split. The chapter assumes an association that repairs.
The permitting layer, which is the part other shoreline boards face
The association’s central allegation is a timing one: that shoreline repair could not be permitted fast enough between storms. Hawaii’s Special Management Area framework under HRS ch. 205A is what decides that, and specifically whether a given repair qualifies for SMA minor-permit treatment or is pushed into SMA major review.
The category-level lesson does not depend on whether the county was at fault: an SMA review timeline can be longer than the interval between storms. A shoreline AOAO that discovers its permitting track after the damage has already lost the season. Boards in that exposure should know now — not after a loss — which of their likely repairs fall on which side of the minor/major line, and what the current processing times are.
The claim against the county, and why we are not scoring it
Permit-delay and public-works-design claims against a Hawaii county run into governmental liability and immunity doctrine, and a design claim about a 2016 bridge is a different animal from a processing-delay claim. We are not predicting how any of that comes out, and a plan that assumes it will is a prediction.
What to watch
Three things. Whether the federal disaster declaration reaches this property, which changes the funding picture materially. Whether any owner or lienor invokes the § 514B-47 substantial-damage route, which would be the first live Hawaii test of “reasonable time” in a climate-loss posture. And whether the 2027 session is asked for a purpose-built casualty and renewal provision — a gap this case makes visible from the inside.
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