HONOLULU (KHON2) — It’s a historic deal aimed at helping Lahaina fire survivors move forward.
A global settlement has been reached to benefit thousands of wildfire plaintiffs just days before the one-year anniversary of the disaster. 2,200 parties filed about 450 lawsuits.
The total compensation came out to $4.037 billion. Defendants include the State of Hawaii, Maui County, Hawaiian Electric, Kamehameha Schools, West Maui Land Company, Hawaiian Telcom, and Spectrum-Charter Communications.
Governor Josh Green joined Wake Up 2Day on Monday morning to discuss the settlement.
“I’m grateful to have worked through this problem with so many parties. That’s what I’ve been doing for the better part of the last two and a half months, which is to bring everyone together. It’s incredibly complex but the reason to get a settlement is so people can begin to heal. To bring that 4 plus billion dollars back to the community will help us to give money to people to build their houses back, some people lost loved ones, to relocate back to Maui for a lot of people who couldn’t find a home. So many things. So I really pressed hard one to get it done so the people didn’t have to wait many years in litigation, could take 5-7 years. Also, I wanted to make sure a lot of that money, in fact most of that money stays here in the islands. A lot of times when these large settlements are reached, far too much money goes to a certain subset of the attorneys who take money away so I fought very hard to make that a success for our local people,” Governor Green said.
Attorneys say they still face one massive hurdle — insurance companies are still wanting the $2 billion they say they’re owed from policies paid out. The agreement is just the first step.
The settlement is still subject to court approval, and the state legislature must also approve the money being paid by the state.
Once that’s done, payments could start by the middle of 2025 and be paid out over the span of 3 years. HECO said they will contribute nearly $2 billion dollars, and according to Governor Green, the state will pay close to 20%.
“I know exactly how much but I’m going to be a little cautious about disclosing information until they ask me to disclose everything. I will tell you it will be partially paid for by the $250 million of insurance that we’ve received from burned state buildings, and I’ll work with the legislature to make sure it doesn’t put a dent in our priorities for housing, affordability for our state, and so on. It’s very important also to know that we’ll be spreading out the payments. Something I negotiated over the better part of three years so it won’t come all at once, and I personally intend to use some of the victory monies we have from the Plavix case which I talked about in one of our interviews before. We’ve won a $916 million settlement from them. So a lot of that money will flow to our recovery. Just so people understand this is a huge settlement. We will pay close to 20% the state will pay about that. What this does is it means that Maui will not have to worry about going bankrupt, it means that HECO will not go bankrupt. They’ll pay just under $2 billion but with them not going bankrupt that means we won’t see someone come in like a vulture and take them out, raising all of our rates. I’m very sensitive to make sure our energy grid stays in tact, that people don’t take advantage of our state. There were investment bankers and others that were on the periphery that had no special interest in Hawaii that would’ve gladly come in and take advantage of us. So I’ll explain in great detail exactly why each party paid what, but mainly the focus was that we’re able to heal and most of the money goes to the victims,”
Governor Green said he doesn’t expect big impacts on the state’s budget.
“By keeping it down to around to 20% for our state responsibility which really means state and county if you think about it because anything that happens at the county level the state also has to be supportive of. What it will mean is we don’t have the better part of a $7, $10, or even $12 billion settlement. In the early days of the negotiation, the numbers were astronomical and I was able to get it down to $4 billion. At the same time, I want all of that money to go to local people. I don’t think you’re going to see any significant impact statewide on budgets because it’s spread out, but we had to heal. I did not want to see us spend a couple of billion dollars litigating all of that money would be wasted and lost. So people will not see cuts in education they will not see cuts in any of our basic services. But I will reiterate my strategy all along from the beginning before the fire was to get some impact fee from travelers to pay for disasters to pay for going forward needs. It was the right thing then it’s the right thing now and I will work with the legislature hopefully they’ll agree with me and come forward with some kind of modest impact fee on travelers because that will pay for these kinds of events. It’s the right thing but again it’s a big political lift,”
He’s optimistic about the recovery process and anticipates more housing inventory to be available this week.
“Right now we’re turning the corner on recovery. The first year was basically survive, get people into hotels, and get them into long-term housing and begin the process of change which is building these houses. We’re building 1,044 transitional houses. We already bought one building that’s 175 units. We’re building 450 units on the state side and 169 on the federal side. You can see some of these houses going up now. People will move in on the 9th which is just amazing. That’s that part of it and then there’s another big policy piece which is at my recommendation and at the mayor’s recommendation moving some of the short-term rentals back into long-term rental status for our local residents. It’s about 7,000 units that would be affected on Maui which would mean rentals for local people on Maui which will bring down the cost to rent and will also help us because it’s going to take years to build permanent housing. We have about 6,000 units of permanent housing tee’d up over the next several years but you know how hard it is to build in the islands and in Maui in particular. Lot’s going on. Great mahalo to Kamehameha Schools who also has participated as an equal partner to the state in this settlement, we’ll get into the details and numbers later. They’ve driven us in a very smart way to look forward to build housing. We’re going to build housing together so I’m in the process of finalizing a memorandum of understanding with the excellent leadership over at Kamehameha Schools. They have a big piece of land there and that will be another place for us to build housing with some of the resources that the county gets. Transitional housing this year, permanent housing in partnership with Kamehameha Schools, permanent housing as people get their permits down in the area that was tragically burned, and settlement for those who lost loved ones or displaced so they have money to choose what they want to do. This will be the year of rebuilding last year was the year of survival,”