Sugimura’s Record: Public vs. Special Interest
Mayor La Costa 2026
La Costa News Center
Accountability • Research • Maui Issues
A Look at the Record
Yuki Sugimura’s Record: The Public vs. the Special Interests
700 promised affordable homes became 288 — and she voted yes. Six building-trades unions and the Realtors Political Action Committee have lined up behind her. On every housing vote that has mattered in nine years, her position has depended on which room she is standing in.
Yuki Lei Sugimura has spent her campaign for Maui County mayor talking about accountability, transparency, and housing local families can afford. Her record on the County Council — where she chairs the budget committee and has served five terms — tells a more complicated story, one written not in speeches but in roll-call votes, every one of them a matter of public record.
But to understand what those votes mean, you have to understand what is at stake.
Bill 9 — Mayor Richard Bissen’s 2025 ordinance phasing out roughly 7,000 grandfathered vacation rentals in apartment-zoned districts — is the defining issue of this race. Its supporters say it returns housing to local families. Its opponents say it is destroying the economic engine that keeps Maui functioning: the small businesses, the property owners, the local families whose livelihoods are built around a hospitality economy that Bill 9 would dismantle.
Sugimura herself cited her opposition to Bill 9 as the reason she entered the race: “That to me was probably the one thing that made me realize it’s time.”
Her opponent, P. Denise La Costa, has been equally unambiguous — but has gone further. La Costa has called for Bill 9’s outright repeal, arguing that the phase-out will cost Maui roughly $65 million in real property tax revenue annually, erase thousands of jobs, shutter small businesses, and drive up the cost of living until local families have no choice but to leave. On that question, La Costa has a position. What Sugimura has is a calculation — and nine years of votes that tell a different story than her campaign platform.
2023: A vote against opening developers’ books
In December 2023, the Council passed Bill 104, which amended the county code to require that before public General Excise Tax money is spent reducing infrastructure costs for a private housing project, the developer must agree in writing to open its records to County oversight. The bill’s own text framed the logic plainly: spending that fund on a developer’s infrastructure is “akin to providing a grant of public funds to the developer,” and so, like other recipients of public grants, the developer “should open their books to the County.”
Sugimura voted no. The measure passed anyway, 6–3, over her objection and those of Council Members Tom Cook and Tasha Kama.
The objection voiced from the dais — by Cook, who voted with her — was that requiring access to “financial records” was too broad, and that administrative rules were a better vehicle than legislation. Sugimura did not explain her own vote on the record. What the record shows is the vote itself: asked to require private developers receiving public money to open their books, she said no. It is fair to ask why a budget chair now campaigning on transparency and accountability would spend a vote opposing it — even a provision its own backers called modest. If the requirement was as harmless as its critics suggested, the no vote is hard to explain. If it had teeth, it is harder still.
2025: 700 affordable homes become 288
In August 2025, after a marathon hearing and years of debate, the Council gave final approval to the Honua‘ula development — the South Maui project long known as Wailea 670 — on a 5–4 vote. Sugimura was in the majority. The two bills became Ordinances 5846 and 5847.
When the project was first approved in 2008, county rules required half its units be affordable: of roughly 1,400 planned homes, 700 were to be workforce housing, including 250 built early and off-site. The bills Sugimura supported eliminated that commitment and codified a far smaller one — at least 288 affordable units out of 1,150 — while adding 162 luxury market-priced homes. Maui Tomorrow Foundation director Albert Perez, who opposed the bills, said the changes meant “a significant reduction in required affordable housing from 700 units down to just 288, along with an increase of 162 luxury ‘market-priced’ homes.” Council Member Keani Rawlins-Fernandez, voting no, called it “a dangerous precedent for all future Maui projects.” Eighty-eight percent of public testifiers opposed the revision. Sugimura voted to advance it at committee in December 2024, on first reading in July 2025, and on final passage that August.
It was not an isolated decision. It was the most visible entry in a pattern that runs back nearly a decade.
The pattern nine years in the making
The Honua‘ula vote did not arrive without warning. Assembled here for the first time in a single place, the record of Sugimura’s votes on affordable housing is a document in its own right — one whose conclusion accumulates with each entry.
| Year | Measure | Vote | Her Stated Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Bill 140 — Fast-track permitting for 100% affordable housing | NO — killed 0–2 | No public rationale given |
| 2019 | Progressive property tax tiers | SOLE NO — 6–1 | Opposed higher-value properties subsidizing lower tiers; separately proposed dropping hotel tax rate, which failed 8–1 |
| 2020 | All 7 charter amendments, including Affordable Housing Fund increase from 2% to 3% | NO on all 7 | Wrote Maui News op-ed urging voters to reject all seven. Six passed over her objection. |
| 2021 | Bill 10 — 75% affordable requirement for fast-tracked 201H projects | NO — 6–3; override failed | “The problem is availability, not affordability.” |
| 2022 | Bill 107 — Maximum monthly payment guidelines for county-subsidized affordable homes | NO — 5–4; attempted to pull bill language | No clear public rationale given |
| 2023 | Pulelehua — West Maui, 100% affordable, fire-displaced families — expedite resolution | SOLE NO — 8–1 | “It’s not like we have it today in the bank.” |
| 2023 | Bill 50 — First-time homebuyer down payment assistance and ohana unit grants | NO — 7–2 | No public rationale given |
| 2024 | Pulelehua — $33M funding allocation | NO — 6–3 | “Unresolved questions about water.” |
| 2025 | Pulelehua — water availability exemption, Phase 1, 240 units, 100% affordable | SOLE NO — 8–1 | Water availability concerns |
| 2025 | Pulelehua — zoning amendment, committee | SOLE NO — 7–1 | “Misleading to the public.” |
| 2025 | Bill 40 — Workforce housing deed restrictions | NO — 6–2; reversed only under procedural pressure | No public rationale given |
| 2025 | Honua‘ula — Cut affordable obligation from 700 to 288, add 162 luxury market-rate homes | YES — 5–4 | Supported developer’s revised plan |
| 2026 | Bill 15 — Factory-built housing for Lahaina wildfire survivors in burn zone | NO — 6–3 | “Preferred locally built housing.” |
The reasons change. The votes do not.
The Pulelehua sequence is the starkest entry. Between 2023 and 2025, Sugimura voted against a 100 percent affordable housing project in West Maui — aimed directly at families displaced by the Lahaina wildfires — four separate times, three of them as the sole dissenter in an 8–1 vote. Council Member Tamara Paltin, representing West Maui, put the stakes plainly from the dais: the lack of available housing in her district was, she said, “the most desperate it has ever, ever, ever been in the history of ever.”
Sugimura voted no anyway. Her reason: water. The water rationale is worth examining in light of the district she has represented for nine years: the Upcountry water meter waitlist has 1,424 applicants. The list has been closed to new applications since January 1, 2013. The average wait is approximately 20 years. If water was truly her governing concern, the record of her own district is the most damning evidence against the sincerity of that argument.
And then there is the Bill 15 vote in January 2026 — factory-built housing for Lahaina survivors rebuilding in the burn zone. She voted no. Her reason: she preferred “locally built housing.” Factory-built homes bypass local contractors entirely. Her six endorsing building-trades unions — the Carpenters, the Laborers, the Plumbers, the Electricians, the Painters, the Plasterers — depend on exactly the kind of locally contracted construction she was protecting.
Bill 9: against it, won’t repeal it, and a vote to hollow it out
No issue has defined this election like Bill 9. And on no issue has Sugimura’s position depended more on the room she is standing in.
She voted against Bill 9 — twice. On first reading in December 2025 and again on final passage on December 15, she joined Chair Alice Lee and Tom Cook in the 5–3 minority. Her stated reason was economic: the phase-out, she said, “represents a significant economic risk while the county’s economy remains fragile,” warning that “the taxpayers are going to be burdened with the tax losses.”
But unlike her opponent P. Denise La Costa, who has called outright for Bill 9’s repeal, Sugimura has not. She describes the phase-out as settled law and frames her difference with the mayor as one of process and tone — that the bill “divided the community” — rather than outcome. That posture lets her hold two audiences at once: she can tell vacation-rental owners she opposed the bill, and tell everyone else she accepts the result.
It is a calculation designed to offend no one and commit to nothing.
The Bill 88 vote is where those two messages collide. In late May 2026, Sugimura voted yes — with the 6–1 committee majority — to advance Bill 88, which would create two new hotel-zoning categories, H-3 and H-4, tailored to match the roughly 4,500 grandfathered units at 104 properties on the Minatoya list. The bill does not repeal Bill 9. What it does is build a pathway for those owners to seek hotel zoning and keep operating as vacation rentals — which is to say, to escape the very phase-out Bill 9 was passed to accomplish. Sugimura did not hedge on it. She called Bill 88 “a great solution” and said it “should probably happen before Bill 9 was introduced, to not cause all this chaos, really, in the community.” It is a revealing pair of votes: against the housing measure, then for the mechanism that would blunt it — while declining to take the political risk of calling for repeal outright. Bill 88 cleared committee and still requires Council readings before it could become law.
La Costa has taken that risk. She has said plainly that Bill 9 should be repealed — that county government should help local families stay on Maui, not keep driving up the cost of living until they have no choice but to leave. That is a position with consequences. It is also a position that can be evaluated, challenged, and held to account. Sugimura’s position is something else: a calculation designed to offend no one and commit to nothing.
The money and the muscle — including the Realtors
These votes did not happen in a vacuum. Sugimura sits in what local reporting consistently describes as the Council’s pro-development majority — a bloc that has included Cook, Lee, U‘u-Hodgins, and the late Tasha Kama — repeatedly characterized by Civil Beat as “supported by the construction industry” and arrayed against the four-member progressive “Ohana” faction.
Her mayoral campaign has made that alignment its backbone. Since pulling papers in February 2026, Sugimura has rolled out endorsements from at least six building-trades unions: the Operative Plasterers’ and Cement Masons’ Local 630; IBEW Local 1260; the Plumbers and Fitters UA Local 675; the Hawai‘i Regional Council of Carpenters — the state’s largest construction union, with more than 6,000 members; the Hawai‘i Laborers’ Union Local 368; and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council 50. The Carpenters’ leader, Ron Taketa, praised her as “the partner our members need.” Sugimura, embracing the alliance, called the plumbers’ backing “deeply personal” because “the word ‘pipes’ is the very first part” of her “pipes, permits and pavement” platform. Her campaign is chaired by Robert Stoner.
The donor record runs the same direction, and it runs back years. In the 2022 cycle, her biggest council-race donors included members of the Goodfellow family, which runs the construction firm Goodfellow Bros., according to The Maui News. In her 2024 council reelection, she took in 89 donations totaling $59,350 — “most of it from the construction industry,” Civil Beat reported — and her full-cycle total of $78,905.96, tallied by Maui Now, was second among all council candidates only to Cook. The same construction-and-trades world supplies more than money: in 2024, a Carpenters-union-funded super PAC, For A Better Tomorrow, spent heavily on Maui council races backing the pro-development bloc — roughly $171,000 in advertising for Kama and $104,000 for Cook, though not, by the record, on Sugimura personally.
Her mayoral campaign is smaller so far but points the same way. Sugimura raised $6,220 and spent $11,125 in the second half of 2025, according to campaign finance disclosures reported by Civil Beat, and entered 2026 with $77,783 cash on hand — a reserve built, like her council campaigns, on the donor base that has backed her for a decade.
Now confirmed: The RPAC endorsement
The Realtors Political Action Committee has formally endorsed Sugimura for Mayor of Maui County — and the council slate RPAC is backing alongside her maps directly onto the pro-development bloc she has voted with for nine years: Tom Cook, who voted no on Bill 9 beside her and whose 2024 council race received approximately $104,000 from the Carpenters’ super PAC; Nohe U‘u-Hodgins; Kauanoe Batangan; and open-seat candidates in Wailuku and Upcountry.
The Realtors Association of Maui opposed Bill 9 throughout its passage. RAM president Lynette Pendergast testified against it, telling the Council the organization was “gravely concerned that Bill 9 as currently drafted will negatively impact Maui’s economy.” Sugimura’s two votes against Bill 9 and her vote to advance Bill 88 place her on the same side of that fight as the organized real estate industry. The RPAC endorsement is the institutional expression of that alignment.
RPAC is not just endorsing a mayor. It is investing in a complete council majority that shares Sugimura’s record — and whose interests run, vote after vote, in the same direction as the votes above.
It is a coherent coalition — the people who pour the foundations, lay the pipe, and wire the buildings, behind a candidate whose signature promise is to build. There is nothing improper about it. But it is worth naming clearly, because it is the same coalition whose interests align, vote after vote, with the record above: lighter oversight of developers who take public money, a smaller affordable-housing obligation at Honua‘ula, and a hotel-zoning escape hatch from the island’s marquee housing law.
The contrast
None of these votes is hidden, and none is, by itself, a scandal. Politicians cast hard votes on close questions, and reasonable people disagree about housing, growth, and how to write a law. But a candidate asks voters to judge her by what she says she stands for — and the public record is where that claim gets tested.
On opening developers’ books to public scrutiny, Sugimura voted no. On holding a developer to its affordable-housing promise at Honua‘ula, she voted to cut it by more than half. On housing for West Maui fire survivors at Pulelehua, she voted no four times — three of them alone. On factory-built housing for Lahaina families rebuilding in the burn zone, she voted no. On homebuyer down-payment assistance, she voted no. On fast-track permitting for 100 percent affordable projects, she voted no. On whether thousands of vacation rentals should become local housing, she voted against the phase-out — and then for the mechanism to let most of it operate anyway.
Behind all of it stands the most construction-and-trades-aligned coalition in the race, now joined by the Realtors Political Action Committee and a coordinated council slate designed to preserve the same majority that produced this record.
Together they describe a record — and it is a record, not a slogan, that voters are entitled to weigh.
P. Denise La Costa has staked her campaign on a different proposition: that Bill 9 is bad law and should be repealed, that county government should help local families stay on Maui rather than drive them out, and that a mayor who has spent nine years protecting developer interests cannot credibly promise to change the system those interests built. Voters will decide whether that argument is persuasive on August 8.
But they deserve to make that decision with the full record in front of them. This is that record.