Three approvals, one program, and a bill nobody has paid yet
Since storm Lala, I have been tracing disaster money in Hawaiʻi. The same theme keeps repeating.
A large number gets announced. The number gets repeated. Months pass. Then more months. And when you go looking for the thing the number was supposed to buy, it is not there yet — and nobody in the chain has said anything false.
That pattern is worth understanding, because it is not fraud. It is structure.
Federal disaster money moves through five stages: appropriated, awarded, obligated, spent, built. The accountability failure in Hawaiʻi recovery coverage is that those five stages collapse into one headline figure. Utility money works the same way, and its ladder is longer.
This piece follows one program down that ladder — Hawaiian Electric’s post-Lahaina wildfire work, described in public as a $480 million program.
Between December 2025 and June 2026, the Hawaiʻi Public Utilities Commission approved that program three separate times. Each approval meant something different. On December 31, 2025, the Commission issued a 260-page order approving the plan, with conditions. In June 2026, it approved roughly $350 million in cost recovery. And Hawaiian Electric still cannot charge a customer for any of it.
Here is why, and it is the sentence that organizes everything below.
The company is barred from putting that recovery into effect until the Commission rules on a securitization application — an application the company had not yet filed as of this writing, and which it has said it is targeting for the third quarter of 2026.
Three approvals. Roughly $480 million of announced program. Three years since the fire. Not one dollar collected from a ratepayer — because collection is blocked pending a decision on a document that had not been filed.
I want to be careful here, because the strongest version of this argument is not the loudest one.
It would be wrong to say nothing has been accomplished. Thousands of poles have been replaced. Cameras and weather stations are up. Crews are in the field, doing real work. The defensible claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: the pace is badly out of proportion to the stated urgency, the public cannot independently verify what has been built, and both conditions have identifiable structural causes.
Those causes are the subject of this piece. Some are deliberate features of utility regulation working as designed. Some are the consequence of a regulator that has lost the capacity to regulate. Telling those two apart is the work.
What has actually been built
Start at the bottom of the ladder. That is where announcements go to be tested.
Hawaiian Electric’s 2025–2027 Wildfire Safety Strategy proposes covered conductor — insulated wire that will not spark if it falls — on roughly 56 miles of overhead line by the end of 2027, at an average near $1.07 million per mile, with more than half the mileage on Maui. It proposes about $41.5 million in vegetation management and inspections, about $54.7 million in asset inspections and repairs, roughly $28 million in situational awareness tools, and an initial undergrounding of about two miles of line in Lahaina, framed as a pilot. Another $89.1 million in wildfire-related grid modernization runs through a separate docket.
Of the $350 million later approved for recovery, the company reports the categories as roughly $240.5 million for grid hardening, $82.7 million for operational practices, $18.5 million for situational awareness, and $8.6 million for other initiatives.
Now the completed work.
In 2024, the company reported replacing or upgrading 2,124 wood poles, testing 5,805 more, replacing over 23 miles of older overhead line, and installing thousands of fault current indicators. Its own risk modeling projects a 68 to 72 percent reduction in baseline ignition risk by the end of 2027. In 2025, it replaced or upgraded more than 980 wooden poles in Maui County.
And then there is Lahaina itself.
In late May 2026 — two years and nine months after a downed line ignited the fire that killed 102 people — Hawaiian Electric began what it called the first targeted area of critical pole hardening in the town. The work: remove 20 wooden poles, install 19 made of steel or composite fiberglass, along a nearly two-mile stretch of Honoapiʻilani Highway between Kai Hele Ku Street and Aholo Road. That phase was scheduled to run through June. The broader hardening project is expected to take two years.
Nineteen poles is not nothing. Nineteen poles, thirty-three months later, on the road out of the town that burned, is a fact that can sit on the page without commentary.
For pace — not scale — consider that Southern California Edison installed more than 3,500 miles of covered conductor in roughly three and a half years, beginning in late 2018. That is five years before Lahaina. Hawaiian Electric proposes 56 miles by the end of 2027.
Here is the part that matters most for accountability. Almost every figure above comes from Hawaiian Electric. The company reports its own progress against its own targets.
The Commission required progress and expenditure metrics for the first time in the December 2025 order — twenty-eight months after the fire. In that same order, it listed the areas where Hawaiian Electric must improve. The list includes timelines and targets for mitigation activities and, stated plainly, monitoring and auditing of mitigation efforts.
That is the regulator conceding, in the document approving the program, that it could not previously verify the program.
What the Commission actually controls
The PUC is a three-member, quasi-judicial state body. Commissioners are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate to six-year terms. Its jurisdiction covers electricity, gas, telecommunications, privately owned water and wastewater systems, interisland water carriers, and a large number of commercial passenger and freight carriers — on the order of 1,800 regulated entities. It does not regulate county water departments.
Five powers matter for following the money.
It decides what customers may be charged
Rates must be “just and reasonable” under state law, and the shareholder-owned Hawaiian Electric generally cannot raise them on its own. So the fundamental regulatory question is never how much the utility wants to spend. It is whether the Commission will let the utility recover that money from ratepayers. If the Commission finds an expenditure imprudent or overpriced, shareholders may absorb it instead. That is the difference between a cost and a recoverable cost, and a great deal of money changes hands on it.
It decides which investments ratepayers finance
Major generation, transmission, distribution, storage, and grid-modernization spending typically requires Commission review, or comes under scrutiny when the utility asks to recover it. This review is called a prudence review, and it is supposed to interrogate exactly the kind of figures listed earlier. Whether $1.07 million per mile of covered conductor is reasonable is a question with an answer. The docket is where it gets argued.
It shapes what gets built and what gets bought
The Commission oversees Integrated Grid Planning — where new generation is needed, what transmission and distribution improvements get built, how much storage, where renewables connect, how fast oil-fired generation retires. It also reviews long-term power purchase agreements, which matter because a twenty- or thirty-year contract commits ratepayers to hundreds of millions in future payments.
It sets the incentives the utility responds to
Traditional regulation rewarded building. Approved capital entered the “rate base” — the pool of investment on which a utility earns a guaranteed return — so building more meant earning more. Hawaiʻi has been moving toward performance-based regulation, which ties revenues, rewards, and penalties to outcomes instead. Whether that changed anything is testable here. Of the $350 million approved, roughly $270 million is capital and $80 million is operations and maintenance. Capital normally earns a return; O&M does not.
There is a wrinkle worth noting. The company’s chief financial officer has said that wildfire costs approved for securitization would not enter the rate base. If that holds, shareholders forgo the equity return on this work — which is a real concession, and one that cuts against the simplest version of the build-more-earn-more critique. It is also why the securitization order matters so much, and why it deserves scrutiny rather than applause.
It regulates reliability and grid access
The Legislature authorized the Commission to adopt reliability standards and interconnection requirements, and gave it jurisdiction over grid access procedures. Those rules will largely determine whether Hawaiʻi’s electricity system stays centralized around the utility or becomes meaningfully distributed.
One office is frequently confused with the Commission and should not be. The Division of Consumer Advocacy participates in Commission cases on behalf of utility customers and recommends approval, rejection, or modification. The Commission decides; the Consumer Advocate argues the customers’ side. Conflating them obscures who is accountable for an outcome.
Who the three commissioners are
Jon S. Itomura, Chair. Appointed January 14, 2026 by Governor Josh Green for a term ending June 30, 2032. Before the Commission he directed the Hawaii United Okinawa Association and served on the Campaign Spending Commission. He brings more than twenty-five years in state government: Senate Ways and Means, the Circuit Court, Deputy Attorney General, General Counsel to the Campaign Spending Commission from 1999 to 2003, and sixteen years as Supervising Attorney for the Division of Consumer Advocacy. JD, Seattle University School of Law; BA, University of Colorado.
Worth stating plainly: the chair spent sixteen years running the legal office that argues the ratepayer side of cases before the body he now leads. That office is the consumer advocate, not a utility or an industry employer, and he left it in 2019. This is movement within Hawaiʻi’s small regulatory world, not a utility-to-regulator pipeline. It is a reasonable bet that he knows where utility filings are soft. He has not yet built the voting record to confirm it.
Naomi U. Kuwaye. Appointed by Governor Ige, confirmed for a term running July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2028. Previously an attorney at Ashford & Wriston since 2012; earlier she worked for then-Honolulu City Councilmember Donna Mercado Kim and practiced in Oregon and Washington. JD and certificate in environmental and natural resources law, Lewis & Clark; BA, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Colin A. Yost. First appointed November 1, 2022 by Governor Ige, re-nominated by Governor Green, confirmed through June 30, 2030. He was part-owner of the Oʻahu solar company RevoluSun, serving eight years as chief operating officer and four as general counsel. He founded the firm Cruise & Yost and practiced at Paul Johnson Park & Niles in energy, environmental, consumer, civil rights, and Native Hawaiian rights matters, including before the Commission. From 1998 to 2003 he was an Assistant Attorney General in the Financial Fraud and Consumer Protection Section of the Oregon Department of Justice, where he led that state’s prosecution of Enron, Duke Energy, and the Williams Energy Companies over the 2000–2001 West Coast electricity crisis, securing settlements worth $32 million to Oregon.
Yost carries the only publicly documented appearance-of-bias dispute on the current commission. Hawaiian Electric challenged his impartiality over his solar-industry background, noting he had been the point of contact for the Hawaiʻi PV Coalition and had filed comments as RevoluSun’s chief operating officer criticizing the utility’s effect on the solar industry. The company pressed those objections even after Yost recused himself for six months from certain dockets. Yost disclosed the relationships, divested from RevoluSun and its affiliates, resigned his PV Coalition and Blue Planet Foundation positions, and volunteered to remain in the background of the performance-based regulation docket. Hawaiian Electric eventually said it considered the matter resolved.
The accurate characterization is a potential conflict disclosed and managed through divestiture and recusal. No ethics body has found a violation.
The commission that made these decisions is under strain
This is where the institution meets the money.
The chair resigned abruptly. Leo Asuncion stepped down effective November 17, 2025, roughly seven months before his term expired. Neither he nor the governor gave a reason. Civil Beat reported the departure came amid a staff exodus and criticism for failing to implement clean energy programs. Senator Jarrett Keohokalole, who chairs Senate Commerce and Consumer Protection, said the commission had lost upward of thirty percent of its skilled staff, including ten departures in six months. They are in the throes of an internal exodus, he said, and now they have no leadership.
Henry Curtis of Life of the Land, who has watched the Commission for thirty years, said that in terms of turmoil, this one takes the cake. Earthjustice attorney Isaac Moriwake said Hawaiʻi had gone from national clean energy leader to a backwater in two years, citing a stalled energy-equity docket and a retreat from the performance-based rate-setting framework. Rocky Mould of the Hawaiʻi Solar Energy Association pointed to a failure to update rooftop solar rules.
The thirty percent figure is a legislator’s estimate, not an audited count, and should be attributed that way every time it is used. It has not, so far as I can determine, been checked against payroll or vacancy records. It should be.
A senior personnel investigation closed without disclosure. An anonymous staff complaint alleged that Randy Baldemor, hired as the Commission’s chief of policy and research, was not equipped for the role and had created a toxic work environment. The Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs announced that an independent consultant had completed a two-month investigation, that Baldemor and Asuncion had violated no state or department policies, and that the matter was closed. The department also disclosed that five of the twenty issues examined were partially substantiated, characterizing those findings as not determinative of the overall claim. The Confidential Workplace Investigation Report was not released, and the department declined to provide further detail.
“Cleared” is not quite the word. Five partially substantiated findings inside a report the public cannot read is a different fact, and it concerns the office that briefs commissioners before they decide.
The largest post-Lahaina decision was made by two people. Asuncion left November 17, 2025. Itomura arrived January 14, 2026. Decision and Order No. 42228 issued December 31, 2025 — squarely inside that vacancy. Under state law, where no other statute specifies a quorum, a majority of authorized membership constitutes one, which for a three-member body is two. A two-member decision therefore appears lawful. The significance is institutional, not procedural. The most consequential utility safety decision since the fire was made by two commissioners, with no chair, at an agency that had reportedly lost a substantial share of its technical staff.
The unresolved question underneath all of it
Hawaiʻi law requires utilities to report accidents connected to their operations, and provides that the Commission shall investigate the causes of any accident that results in loss of life.
Whether the Commission satisfied that duty after Lahaina remains genuinely disputed, and I am not going to resolve it here.
The legislative critique. A 2024 Senate resolution stated that the Commission had failed to investigate the causes of the August 2023 fires and urged compliance with its statutory duty. At the March 22, 2024 hearing, Commissioner Yost told senators that determining how the fires started fell outside the Commission’s expertise. They are not forensic fire investigators, he said, and lack the competency and resources to determine the cause and assign responsibility. Asked why no formal docket had been opened, he said a docket is a slow, laborious process that would not produce quick answers. He also said the Commission was not very powerful and lacked the resources to serve as an effective counterpoint.
The Commission’s position. It opened Case No. 2024-01872 on January 23, 2024 — a non-docketed compliance investigation covering the Lahaina and Upcountry Maui fires plus the Mililani Mauka and Waiʻanae fires, conducted through written information requests. It also dedicated staff to support the federal ATF and Maui Fire Department cause-and-origin investigation. The Commission has maintained throughout that this fulfills its statutory mandate.
The structural problem is that a non-docketed case is, by the Commission’s own description, primarily an information repository that cannot be used for decision-making. Twenty entries and 1,181 pages of utility responses have accumulated inside a container that is not capable of producing a finding.
No court or administrative body appears to have resolved whether that satisfies the statute. That is the accurate state of the record. Stated plainly, it is harder to answer than an accusation would be.
Why the system moves this slowly
Here is the diagnosis. Five mechanisms — some designed, some decayed.
1. The proceedings run in series, not in parallel
Hawaiian Electric filed the 2025–2027 strategy in January 2025. The Commission approved the plan on December 31, 2025 — about twelve months. Cost recovery was decided in June 2026 — about another six. The securitization application, without which nothing can be collected, was still unfiled as of the company’s August 2026 earnings call. Each stage is a separate proceeding with its own record, its own intervenors, and its own timeline, and they run one after another.
Some of this is legitimate. Due process and prudence review are the reason ratepayers are not simply billed for whatever a monopoly decides to spend. But sequencing is a choice, and nothing in the statute requires that safety work wait for the financing mechanism to be litigated to conclusion.
2. The accountability inquiry went into a container that cannot conclude
This is the most important structural finding in this piece.
Faced with a statutory duty to investigate a fatal accident, the Commission opened a non-docketed case. A non-docketed case cannot make decisions. It has absorbed more than a thousand pages of utility responses and produced no finding, no order, and no assignment of responsibility — not because the inquiry failed, but because the vessel chosen for it was never capable of holding a conclusion.
Whether that was prudence, deference to federal investigators, resource triage, or avoidance, the effect is the same. There is no Commission determination about what Hawaiian Electric did or failed to do before August 8, 2023, and the body statutorily charged with making one has structured its inquiry so that it cannot.
3. Regulatory capacity has degraded
A commission that reportedly lost roughly a third of its technical staff, went two months without a chair, closed a senior personnel investigation without disclosure, and issued its largest post-fire decision with two members is not equipped to audit a $350 million spending program in real time.
Capacity is not a side issue in utility regulation. It is the whole thing. A prudence review is only as good as the staff who can read the workpapers.
4. The performance record is self-reported
Nearly every progress figure in public circulation originates with Hawaiian Electric, including the projected 68 to 72 percent risk reduction. The Commission did not require metrics tracking progress against targets and expenditures until December 2025, and its own order lists monitoring and auditing of mitigation efforts as an area needing improvement. Until that regime produces public output, the honest answer to “what has been hardened?” is that we have the company’s word.
5. The financing structure separates payment from performance
Securitization means issuing bonds against a dedicated charge on customer bills. It lowers the cost of money, which is why the company frames it as a customer benefit, and there is something to that. The Legislature authorized it in Act 258 of 2025, for up to $500 million of infrastructure resilience costs, and the same act directed the Commission to set an aggregate cap on utility wildfire liability.
But the bonds get repaid on schedule regardless of whether the underlying work reduces ignition risk as modeled. Once a financing order issues, the obligation is deliberately difficult to unwind — that difficulty is the feature that makes the bonds cheap.
So the securitization order is the rung at which an approved cost becomes a locked-in one. It is the last practical moment to attach conditions, and it has drawn almost no public attention.
Meanwhile the company’s finances have improved. Moody’s upgraded Hawaiian Electric and its parent in April 2026, S&P in July. HEI reported second-quarter net income of $123.2 million, boosted by a non-cash accounting benefit of about $153.9 million from remeasuring the wildfire settlement liability, which fell from roughly $1.44 billion to $1.30 billion after the first settlement payment in April. The $4 billion Maui settlement is being paid in four annual installments, with about $2 billion from Hawaiian Electric, $873 million from Kamehameha Schools, $808 million from the State, and roughly $300 million from other defendants.
And separately from all of the above, Hawaiian Electric is seeking a base rate increase of roughly $170 million, phased over two years, with about $125 million sought to take effect in 2027. The company has asked for an interim decision by December 18, 2026.
A utility whose credit is recovering, whose mitigation costs have been approved, whose payments will be locked in through securitization, and whose regulator has lost a third of its staff is a specific configuration of risk. It is worth naming as such.
The ladder, and where the money actually sits
The framework this series uses, in its utility form:
proposed → plan approved → cost recovery authorized → collection permitted → collected → spent → built → return earned
The wildfire program’s position on that ladder as of late August 2026:
Proposed. A roughly $480 million three-year program, filed January 2025.
Plan approved. Decision and Order No. 42228, December 31, 2025, with conditions and required improvement areas — issued by two commissioners during a chair vacancy.
Cost recovery authorized. Roughly $350 million approved June 2026 through the Exceptional Project Recovery Mechanism: about $270 million capital, $80 million O&M, plus up to $11.5 million of 2025 O&M and $3.9 million annually from 2028.
Collection permitted. No. Blocked pending a securitization order on an application not yet filed.
Collected, spent, built, return earned. Open.
The estimated bill impact, once collection begins, is about $1.05 a month on Oʻahu, $2.86 on Hawaiʻi Island, and $5.41 in Maui County, for a residential customer using 500 kilowatt-hours. Those are modest figures, and they are separate from the $170 million rate case.
The unresolved gap between $480 million and $350 million
Hawaiian Electric has said about a third of the program cost was already funded through existing programs, including a federal grid resilience grant received in 2024, and so it sought roughly $350 million from customers. But the company’s own filing anticipates about $52 million in federal and state grant funding. A third of $480 million is roughly $130 million. Fifty-two million is not that.
These may reconcile. “Existing programs” plausibly means previously authorized recovery mechanisms, with grant money as a subset. But they are not the same claim, and the difference is on the order of $80 million.
Resolving it would also answer a question I have been chasing for months: how much of the federal Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships award has Hawaiian Electric actually drawn down? Cost-recovery regulation should force that number onto the record, because the company must show the Commission exactly what offset its request. That accounting exists. It is simply not indexed anywhere an ordinary person would find it.
What needs to be done
Six things, in rough order of how quickly they could happen. None require new legislation.
Publish a quarterly mitigation scorecard. The metrics regime the Commission ordered in December 2025 should produce a public quarterly report: miles of covered conductor installed against miles planned, poles hardened against poles planned, dollars spent against dollars approved, by island. Not a narrative update. A table.
Attach performance conditions to the securitization order. If ratepayers are to be locked into a bond-backed charge, the financing order is the last practical moment to condition recovery on verified delivery.
Resolve Case No. 2024-01872. Convert it to a docket capable of producing findings, or close it with a written statement of what the Commission concluded and why it declined to go further. An open container that cannot conclude is worse than either.
Release the workplace investigation report, or state the legal basis for withholding it. Five partially substantiated findings about the office that briefs commissioners is a matter of public interest.
Audit the staffing figure and fund the gap. The Legislature should establish from payroll and vacancy records what the Commission actually lost, and fund the technical staff required to audit a program of this size.
Put the federal drawdown on the record. Hawaiian Electric should publish, and the Commission should require, a plain accounting of federal grant funds received and expended against the wildfire and grid resilience programs.
All of it requires someone to ask.
What comes next in this series
The next installment builds the Hawaiian Electric–PUC Money Ledger: every major Commission-approved grid-hardening and wildfire expenditure since Lahaina, tracked across amount requested, amount approved, federal contribution, ratepayer contribution, contractor, actual expenditure, and physical work completed. The starting points are Docket No. 2025-0156 and its predecessor Docket No. 2022-0135, the June 2026 cost recovery order, the forthcoming securitization application, the separate docket covering the $89.1 million in wildfire-related grid modernization, the new rate case docket, and the 1,181 pages sitting in Case No. 2024-01872 that no one appears to have worked through systematically.
Four ledgers, and they must not collapse into a single number called $480 million: what the Commission approved the utility to do; what it approved the utility to recover; what the utility actually contracted and spent; and what was physically hardened.
Right now, only the first two are public.
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