Governor Grounded: Won’t Leave Official Who Told All Visitors To Leave Maui

This week, Governor Green canceled his attendance at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C., and future out-of-state travel for the month, stating he wanted to ensure steady leadership during an active investigation into his lieutenant governor, Sylvia Luke. When Green left the state during the Lahaina fire, that same lieutenant governor served as acting governor and issued a message telling all visitors to leave Maui. Beat of Hawaii has documented what that message cost ever since.

This week, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke acknowledged in interviews that she may be the unnamed “influential state legislator” referenced in federal court documents tied to an FBI bribery investigation involving $35,000 in campaign money. The two checks she received were dated the same day as the exchange described in the filing. The money was not reported to the Campaign Spending Commission for four years. The lobbyist who provided the checks has reportedly left the country. Luke denies wrongdoing and has not been charged. The Hawaii Attorney General is investigating.

Seven months after these allegations were purported to have happened, that same person stood at a podium as acting governor and told every visitor on Maui to leave.

Today, Governor Green made clear through his own actions what that history now means. By canceling a long-planned national trip rather than leaving Luke as acting governor again, Green effectively acknowledged that the person who ran Hawaii during the Lahaina crisis cannot be entrusted with that level of responsibility yet again.

For Maui’s visitor economy, the question that arises is unavoidable.

What would the messaging have looked like if someone else had been at that podium? Would visitors have been told to leave the entire island? Would the pivot back to welcoming visitors have come weeks earlier, rather than never fully arriving? Those are not political questions. They are economic ones, and they land on every Maui business that lost everything and every visitor who was told the island did not need them.

For visitors, August 2023 also became the moment when Maui stopped feeling like a place they were allowed to just be. In the days after the Lahaina fire, the message went out that visitors should leave the island and that non-essential travel to Maui was discouraged. What began as an emergency response meant to clear space and preserve resources quickly widened into something harder to define and even harder to reverse. Even as roads reopened and businesses outside West Maui pleaded for help, visitors were left unsure whether Maui wanted them back at all.

Beat of Hawaii recognized that uncertainty immediately. Longtime readers wrote that they had never felt so clearly told to stay away indefinitely. Some canceled trips they had planned for years. Others said they would wait until Maui explicitly asked visitors to return, not just meekly or economically, but openly. Weeks passed, then months, some say years, and the message never fully corrected.

Maui arrivals plunged, and the impact went far beyond Lahaina. Because the messaging was broad and unspecific, it hit South Maui, Central Maui, and Upcountry nearly as hard, even where roads were open and businesses were pleading for visitors to return. By Christmas, when the island would normally be operating near capacity across multiple resort areas, occupancy collapsed almost everywhere. The damage was clear and showed up in empty hotels, restaurants closing early or not opening at all, reduced work hours, and another lost season for businesses that had already endured years of instability.

The messaging did not come from the Hawaii Tourism Authority or a press spokesperson. It came from the person serving as governor at the moment of maximum uncertainty, when visitors were watching closely for cues about what was appropriate and what was not. With no competing voice and no clear boundaries around geography or timing, the signal landed as definitive. Maui was closed.

Beat of Hawaii saw that interpretation take hold instantly. We were already in Honolulu on Beat of Hawaii reporting when visitors began flooding in from Maui within hours of the message going out. Some were already mid-journey when the guidance changed. Others arrived shaken and confused, unsure whether they were supposed to stay elsewhere in Hawaii, return to Maui later, or leave the state altogether. We heard from people in real time, not days later, who believed they had been told clearly and unequivocally that they no longer belonged on Maui or in Hawaii. For visitors trying to do the right thing, it did not sound like temporary guidance. It sounded like a line had been drawn.

The acting governor’s message went further than the emergency.

At the time of the Lahaina fire, Gov. Josh Green was off-island, and the responsibility for public messaging fell to the acting governor, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke. The emergency proclamation discouraged non-essential air travel to Maui, not to West Maui or the fire zone, but to Maui.

At the press conference, Luke said, this is not a safe place to be. There was no geographic qualifier. No distinction between the disaster zone and the rest of the island. South Maui, Central Maui, and Upcountry were open and functioning, but the message that reached visitors and the world made no such distinction for a very long time.

Beat of Hawaii reported then that the messaging overshot the emergency moment. That was never about the need for clearing West Maui or protecting overall resources in the days after the fire. It was about what happened next. No one followed the proclamation with a message saying South Maui is open, or Upcountry needs you, or here is when and how to come back safely. That pivot simply never came. Businesses outside Lahaina, many of them struggling to survive, found themselves shut down not by fire but by messaging, dependent on visitors who no longer believed that coming back was even appropriate.

Readers said they did not want to be part of the problem.

They did not want to offend or intrude. So they stayed away. Maui emptied out. The collapse in Maui visitor numbers did not end with the immediate aftermath of the fire. Long thereafter, arrivals and spending were still deeply depressed. Estimates at the time put Maui’s visitor spending losses at roughly $13 million per day.

Well into 2025, Maui’s visitor numbers continued to underperform pre-fire levels, even as areas outside West Maui had long been open and actively seeking visitors.

One Beat of Hawaii article last summer about Maui drew more than 700 comments. Many traced the moment they stopped coming back to the days after the fire. Not to the fire itself. To the message. Readers said that once they were told to leave, the relationship changed. They no longer felt confident returning. Maui no longer seemed to want them.

Why this matters to visitors and Maui businesses.

This is not about presuming guilt or relitigating the fire response. It is about how authority and credibility shaped Maui’s relationship with visitors long after the emergency passed.

When Hawaii’s acting governor told millions of visitors and potential visitors that an island is not a place to be, that message carried enormous global weight because of the office behind it. We documented what that authority did to Maui’s visitor economy in real-world consequences that businesses and workers lived with for years.

Now, the person who held that authority is under an FBI bribery investigation entirely unrelated to the fire, and the governor who left her in charge will not do so again. That does not change the necessity of immediate emergency action after the fire. But it reframes the moment for every visitor who was told to leave and never clearly invited back.

Readers have said repeatedly that something broke in that moment and has never been repaired. The economic data supports that. So do the businesses that continue to struggle long after the flames went out.

If someone else had been in charge that week, do you think Maui’s visitor economy would look different today?