The county’s program to buy back properties destroyed, damaged or isolated by the 2018 Kilauea eruption has not been significantly delayed by a missing agreement with the state.
At Wednesday’s County Council meeting, Planning Director Zendo Kern and Recovery Officer Douglas Le requested that the mayor’s office sign an agreement with the Department of Land and Natural Resources in order to proceed with the county’s Voluntary Housing Buyout Program.
The program, whose second phase concluded in January, allows owners of the impacted properties to have the county buy them for up to $230,000.
Kern said that, as part of the terms stipulated for the project by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — which awarded the project $107 million in Community Development Block Grant funds — the county must carry out a programmatic environmental assessment.
“But, we hit a snafu,” Kern said. “They told us that there was an element of the environmental assessment that we missed.”
Kern said his team determined that they needed to draft a programmatic agreement with the DLNR’s State Historic Preservation Office in order to execute the assessment.
Although the assessment cannot proceed without that agreement, Kern said it already has been drafted, and the project has only been set back by about two weeks at most.
When completed, the assessment would determine what impact, if any, demolition of each of the properties involved in the buyout would have on historic sites or endangered species habitats.
Le said properties inundated by lava will be determined to have no potential impact on fragile sites or habitats, but those properties that have been isolated by lava will need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
The council approved the request with little discussion.
As for the buyout program itself, Le said the recovery team has continued work on processing applications, and is close to inking deals with property owners from the program’s first phase, which ran from May 2021 through July 2021 and allowed owners of primary residences affected by the eruption to apply.
The second phase, which allowed participation by owners of secondary residences, ran from November 2021 through January 2022.
The third and final phase, allowing participation by owners of vacant lands, will run from May through July.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
