Travis A. Liggett, M.S.

Candidate for Mayor of Maui County

The islands of Maui Nui are sentient beings.

The greatest living ships the universe has ever created are the ancient aunties we live within.

There is a way to integrate our relationships with the living ʻāina and kai that lifts all.

I seek the role of Maui County Mayor because I wish to see my neighbors and loved ones here thrive.

We can land on our feet by moving in a way that everyone finds support, their mission and place.

I’m here for it.

PRIORITIES

My top priorities are wastewater disinfection, housing security, watershed and reef ecosystem restoration, with a central concern being the lack of any treatment step that would meaningfully reduce pathogen levels in many major municipal effluent discharges into the ocean through injection wells and groundwater systems on the North and South shores of Maui at the Kahului and Kīhei WWRFs, where no meaningful reduction of pathogen loading is occurring before release into plumes that intersect with popular nearshore recreation areas at Cove Park and Kanaha.

This journey began in 2021, when I set out to understand wastewater treatment and disposal methods by developing the concept for FlushAware.com and proposed a new law mandating municipal wastewater disinfection. I then worked with multiple Council Members and committees to support passage of Bill 52, enacted as Maui County Ordinance 5592 in 2024, which requires municipal wastewater effluent disinfection as part of a universal R-1 mandate by 2039. To me, that is too long to wait for ocean safety in some of Maui's most beloved recreation areas. The Maui concept evolved into a statewide effort for municipal wastewater disinfection in SB2971, which was introduced in the 33rd session but had no hearing.

I formed a nonprofit with some Hawaiian colleagues called Kai Action Institute, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with a central goal of transferring philanthropic funding to the County to advance reef-safe UV wastewater disinfection, such as    CBS-1169 at the Kahului WWRF and CBS-5031 at the Kīhei WWRF. Despite all this effort, and testifying a great many times during the FY2027 budget hearings, I was unable to convince officials to advance work to realize UV disinfection on Maui's beloved North Shore. To me, this cannot wait, so after almost five years of asking for change, I decided to elevate this important core human and ocean ecosystem health issue to the forefront of the public's perception.

PROPOSED LEGISLATION

I have developed a connected body of proposed Maui County legislation addressing land, housing, health, employment, infrastructure, environmental restoration, public participation and government accountability.

The ĀINA BACK Act would authorize the acquisition and subdivision of large underused agricultural holdings to create approximately 30,000 one-acre agricultural-residential homestead lots for qualifying Maui County residents and displaced residents seeking to return home. Lots would be offered at a historically adjusted affordable price, with lawful preferences for Native Hawaiians, economically disadvantaged applicants and local workforce contributors.

The Maui Living ʻĀina Stabilization Trust Act would establish a segregated, donation-funded County program for major investments in essential living systems, public health, cultural stewardship, environmental restoration and community resilience. It creates the legal and financial structure for accepting and administering contributions while preserving the Council’s annual appropriation authority.

The AuntieNet Act would establish an independent local council of cultural practitioners, scientists, physicians, engineers, survivor advocates and other community experts to review major scientific and technological decisions. It would also establish strong personal-data rights, digital protections for keiki, survivor-centered material accountability measures, and a "maternal" standard of care that could help avert catastrophic societal risks from advanced artificial intelligence, including extinction-level scenarios comparable to those imagined in the Terminator film franchise. At the local level, Maui should prioritize water conservation to ensure digital technology installations do not compete for local water resources.

The NĀNI Act would recognize enforceable rights of Maui Nui’s watershed and reef ecosystems and authorize qualified guardians to seek restoration of ecosystem-level harm, placing public-trust enforcement tools into the hands of residents to wield the full force of the public trust doctrine, with new standing to make claims in civil court for the costs of repair of ecosystem-level damage by actions, or neglect, of any party, even external agencies who have failed to regulate practices that led to ecosystem-level damage or collapse.

The United Kindness Health Understanding Network Act would create a voluntary, secure digital and human care-coordination system that continuously asks, “Are you okay, hun?” UKHUN would help residents coordinate healthcare, insurance, telehealth, housing, transportation, nutrition, disability services and other assistance while protecting privacy and integrating with Hānai Kākou. With each resident’s authorization, the platform would help organize diagnostic information, connect residents with providers and improve access to coordinated care to understand our neighbors, "Are you okay, hun?" at a time in human history when some of us have not been checked in on for quite some time.

The BUMPOFF Act would halt installation of harmful non-crosswalk vertical-deflection devices, require their phased removal, preserve properly evaluated raised crosswalks and create an accessible compensation process for physical injury, aggravated medical conditions, emotional distress and vehicle damage. The speed bump scourge is a clear and present public health crisis warranting removal of improper systems as quickly as possible. Legislation approving swift harmful systems removal and prompt monetary compensation to residents will be a priority, and voluntary speed data feedback systems can educate residents on driving habits that will lead to actual improvements, without driving kūpuna and the disabled to a state of dismay.

The Digital Direct Democracy Act would allow secure electronic signatures for County initiative petitions, making citizen lawmaking more accessible while maintaining identity and voter-registration verification, freeing up the citizen initiative petition process from the constraints of gathering thousands of signatures in person to get an ordinance on the ballot, by allowing a digital equivalent of petitioner signatures that could actually be more secure than checking voter registration and identity in person

The WORK Act would establish a right to telework for employees whose essential duties can be performed remotely. Employers could deny or limit telework only for a documented operational necessity, while voluntary alternative schedules such as four-day workweeks could also be offered.

The Maui Meadows Community Facilities District framework would connect Maui Meadows properties to the Kīhei Wastewater Reclamation Facility, phase out cesspools and return R-1 recycled water to irrigate a living greenbelt firebreak around the community.

The Protecting Unmodified Rural Ecosystems Act would prohibit the commercial cultivation, growth or production of genetically modified seeds within Maui County to protect public health, agriculture and the natural environment.

The Hānai Kākou Act, developed in coordination with unsheltered folks, coordinators and Council staff, would establish a Zero Unsheltered Resident Program guaranteeing emergency shelter or financial assistance to an eligible permanent resident who remains without safe shelter after seeking help for at least 24 hours. The Act would codify the community muscle memory of housing many thousands of residents after the 2023 wildfire disaster in a short timescale, with an emergency housing mandate funded by a moderate licensing fee increase on very high revenue businesses that guarantees shelter or a stipend upon any resident notifying the County of being unsheltered who lacks safe shelter despite seeking it for 24 hours or more, regardless of income.

The WAIWAI Act would reduce or eliminate real property taxes on qualifying kuleana lands maintained through responsible watershed stewardship, while moderately increasing rates on ultra-high-value real property holdings.

Together, these laws form a connected framework for returning land and stability to local families, coordinating resident health and housing support, restoring ecosystems, protecting workers and keiki, expanding public participation and bringing new resources into Maui Nui’s shared living systems.

COLLABORATION

Mayor Richard T. Bissen, Jr., seems like an extraordinary gentleman who has been a real rock to the community, especially after the 2023 wildfire disaster. He is beloved by so many and fulfills a niche as the "hugger in chief" and a master of ceremonies that I would appreciate retaining in the ranks of County service, to hold space and support the people in a social and cultural capacity. At the same time, healing alone is not a substitute for measurable progress, and there have been a lot of unforced errors that I believe a systems engineer with expertise in living life support systems and wastewater innovations can overcome, such as lack of action on municipal wastewater disinfection, and housing development milestones that do not seem to indicate when Maui will return to the housing inventory we had when his term began.

I have a vision for an Executive Coalition that would incorporate the expertise, ideas and supporters of all 9 other Mayoral candidates into a body politic that would operate much like an integrated set of organs, because the idea that politics should be “winner takes all” (and shut out the rest) is old and tired. An integrated decision making network would have a branching structure to receive ideas from all voters who would always have their candidate in the loop.

I do not believe elections should be like a surgeon who asks, “well, which organ do you want to keep this year?” Every candidate has ideas that I can integrate into a decision making system that, like any good living island, operates as a balanced whole with a seat for all at the table.

When Maui Nui elects me, you will get all ten candidates… in one.

I represent the 10x force multiplier of leadership, 10/10 and integrating the vibes of fictional characters Captain Picard, Gandalf, a court jester to corruption with a long engineering career, and that certain type of pilot who tells you a joke that puts you to sleep when they bring in the big bird for a landing in a crosswind with a missing engine, and you never worry because they are that pilot.

Having grown up in the same County as Orville Wright, taken flight training from the former Branch Chief for the world-famous wind tunnels at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and piloted an aircraft multiple times without anyone else in the vehicle, the calm pilot with a sense of humor checks out - this is your captain speaking, and we are going to bring in this beauty for a soft landing folks.

I have a place in my administration for all Mayoral candidates, each one has major value to me in my vision for a body politic in which all who have supporters can provide guidance, input and ideas when the task at hand is to unite, turn inward, and reinforce the security of our neighbors.

PUBLIC HEALTH

Human health and nervous system regulation is a subset of our shared living ecosystem health. A systems-level approach to prevention, human and environmental health can integrate all into an integrated model where leaders actually check in on residents through a United Kindness Health Understanding Network platform that actually asks and understands whether or not we are "Okay" instead of enforcing on citizen distress states. All life has value, and most challenges are of systemic origin.

Encrypted and secure integration of health data and care, along with pathways to accessing treatment and services, is the only way we can ensure that residents are actually doing well during a time when it may have been a very long time since some of us have actually been asked, "Are you okay, hun?" Healthcare is presently chronically fragmented, gatekept, and treated as a series of disconnected, discrete luxury items that almost invariably leads to disintegrated fields of diagnostic information and treatment methods that rarely lead to complete recovery, which is by design in any system that optimizes for profit, but not health.

Oral health monitoring and access can be increased through this same integrated approach, connecting residents with providers while continuously improving access to preventive care.

Community Health Workers can play an important role as trusted liaisons between healthcare systems and neighborhoods by helping residents navigate services, coordinate care, translate information, and improve long-term health outcomes. Training, certification, and sustainable funding pathways for Community Health Workers should be expanded. A Hānai Kākou Act emergency housing provision for residents provides shelter as a cost-minimizing prescription in the context of minimizing costs for everyone.

Healthcare should increasingly recognize Food-as-Medicine by integrating nutrition into clinical care through medically tailored meals, produce prescription programs, and nutrition services coordinated with healthcare providers. Orders to import fast food, ultraprocessed products and agrochemical foodlike substances born on hedge fund manager spreadsheets can be cancelled as local food production is expanded from 8% to 80% like our lives depend on it, because they do!

Mental health should be approached holistically. Before treatment begins, residents should have access to appropriate medical evaluations, including consideration of physiological contributors to distress, such as infectious, genetic, environmental, housing, and social factors that may contribute to anguish and impairment. Distress and addiction can be reframed as maladaptation, and translated into informed adaptations built on a foundation of understanding that can only develop from empathy and due diligence.

Access to healthcare should continue expanding through prevention-focused investments rather than waiting until illness becomes more severe and expensive to treat.

AFFORDABILITY

System-level analysis must always account for financial viability at the individual level.

Gaps, when identified, should not automatically be viewed as the result of poor individual decisions, but often as the cumulative result of systemic influences acting over generations.

Affordability is fundamentally a public health issue.

I support approaches that improve long-term financial stability for families, including living wages, free public transportation, Hānai Kākou Act emergency housing guarantees, rapidly expanded food security, and systems that connect residents with available services before small problems become major crises.

Housing security, healthcare access, transportation affordability, food access, and meaningful employment should reinforce one another rather than compete for limited public resources.

EDUCATION

Every child deserves the opportunity to arrive at school healthy, nourished, and ready to learn.

Expanding access to nutritious meals, preventive healthcare, oral healthcare, and supportive family policies creates stronger educational outcomes while reducing future healthcare costs.

Investment in workforce education should extend to healthcare professions where shortages directly affect neighbor island communities.

FAMILIES

Families should never have to choose between caring for a loved one and financial survival.

Paid Family and Medical Leave, support for caregivers, expanded childcare access, and healthcare flexibility all contribute to stronger families and healthier communities.

Tax relief for unpaid caregivers recognizes the enormous economic value provided every day by family members caring for kūpuna and residents with disabilities.

FOOD SECURITY

Food insecurity affects nearly every aspect of community health.

Nutrition should increasingly become part of healthcare itself through Food-as-Medicine programs, while fresh local agriculture, school nutrition, and expanded food access strengthen both public health and local food resilience.

Emergency housing, affordability, and food security should be viewed as interconnected components of one living support system.

TRANSPORTATION

Transportation should improve quality of life rather than diminish it.

Expanding public transportation, reducing unnecessary commuting through a telework requirement where appropriate, and designing infrastructure around people instead of congestion all contribute to healthier communities.

Telework access should be recognized as a workplace right wherever duties can reasonably be performed remotely, reducing stress, traffic congestion, fuel consumption, and emissions while improving family life.

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT

Climate change, public health, watershed restoration, wastewater management, agriculture, and biodiversity are deeply interconnected. The islands of Maui Nui are alive, deserve to be seen and evolved consciously.

Climate-related health impacts include wildfire smoke, flooding, heat, food insecurity, vector-borne disease, mental health impacts, and increasing stress upon ecosystems already under pressure.

Ecosystem restoration efforts should rapidly expand supported by the NĀNI and WAIWAI Acts so ecosystems are made whole quickly to heal and prevent further harm.

The relationship between effluent standards, wastewater disposal methods, and warming environments deserves increasing attention as warming waters and environmental strain interact with public health.

We’re here for the aunties and abs, please hold the scabs!

Protecting reefs, watersheds, freshwater systems, native species, and public health should be managed as one integrated living system rather than separate departments. Island-wide mass balances will be restored to the point of system-wide homeostasis for the ages.

NERVOUS SYSTEM HEALTH

Mental health deserves compassionate, evidence-based, whole-person care.

Housing stability, physiological health, infectious disease evaluation, environmental exposures, community support, meaningful work, and community connection all influence human wellbeing.

Recovery services should continue expanding while simultaneously reducing underlying drivers of chronic stress. Enforcement should refocus on eliminating systemic pathways to so-called crime, and send savings on enforcement through reducing systemic pressures that lead to bad behaviors, to bonuses for officers of the peace who have addressed the sources of systemic strain, rather than citizens who bear the burden of systemic strain in the forms of distress, addiction and personal instability.

Communities heal most effectively when people experience safety, belonging, purpose, and stable access to life's basic needs. Maui can become a mecca for music and healing in a place that becomes famous for its “holy waters” that no longer receive significant municipal effluent pathogen discharges.

HEALTHY COMMUNITIES

Communities become healthier when prevention receives greater emphasis than crisis response.

Strong neighborhoods depend upon universal safe shelter, free public transportation, integrated and results-oriented healthcare, education access, restored ecosystems, meaningful work, actual transparent government, and opportunities for meaningful civic participation.

Human health and ecosystem health will be understood as integrated and inseparable.

SUBSTANCE USE

Alcohol remains among the most harmful substances in society while receiving comparatively little public discussion regarding its long-term impacts.

Public conversation should continue regarding strategies that reduce harmful alcohol consumption while expanding access to healthier approaches for managing stress, trauma, and chronic pain.

Barriers to lower-risk alternatives such as medical cannabis should be examined thoughtfully.

Substance use policy should prioritize prevention, education, treatment, recovery, and underlying social conditions rather than punishment and incarceration. Every life has value, potential and hope; residents are value centers short on investment in most cases, with little value in enforcing on behaviors rooted in distress when most who suffer would appreciate viable pathways to recovery, if made available.

TOBACCO AND NICOTINE

Tobacco and nicotine access should be reduced wherever practical through education, prevention, responsible regulation, and youth protection.

Products intended primarily to create or sustain nicotine dependence provide little public benefit while imposing substantial long-term healthcare costs.

Resources generated through tobacco settlements should continue supporting prevention and cessation efforts.

GOVERNMENT

Government should operate with a presumption of disclosure.

All non-exempt public records should be proactively published online before anyone has to request them.

No UIPA request should ever be denied when disclosure is permitted by law.

A searchable public transparency portal should provide contracts, permits, expenditures, studies, correspondence, water and wastewater information, commonly requested public records, and meaningful progress dashboards. The public can be trusted to look over our shoulder when information is allowed to flow freely by default.

Residents deserve clear explanations of decisions, expanded meeting access, understandable summaries, and simple pathways for providing ideas and concerns.

Transparency is not simply about publishing documents.

Transparency is about making government understandable, actually accessible and accountable.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Long-term prosperity depends upon healthy ecosystems, resilient infrastructure, housing stability, education, workforce development, and innovation. Residents appreciate high employment rates, but what we really want is stability rates, with increasing access to actual free time.

Economic policy should strengthen local resilience while reducing long-term public costs through prevention, planning, and thoughtful investment. Citizens should be increasingly perceived as massive value centers who require cultivation to reach their potential, and less as burdens on government or each other who require support.

Public health and economic health should increasingly reinforce one another rather than compete.

COLLABORATION

Lasting progress requires collaboration among residents, businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, educators, healthcare providers, cultural practitioners, scientists, and community organizations.

Polarization and division can be the most fatal failure mode in any living life support system, and we as locals need to employ military-grade sophistication to respond and defend against subtle attacks on internal cohesion and morale in our small, isolated island communities, so that the simple way of life that brought or keeps us all here can be sustained.

Embracing this paradox is central to my vision for expanding my idea of civilization: waving with curiosity and good will at strangers in the wild because you are so physically supported with such a regulated nervous system that you have genuine aloha to spare, even for strangers.

No single sector possesses every solution.

The strongest communities emerge when people with different backgrounds work toward shared goals through mutual respect and transparent decision-making. Maui Nui has all the ingredients to realize this vision, and the time is now for a captain of this ship who can bring the bird in for a soft and gentle landing.

A LIVING SYSTEM

Everything is connected.

Rather than solving each challenge independently, Maui Nui has an opportunity to become an international model for integrated living systems management, a whole-system model of health where improvements in one area reinforce progress across every other part of the community.

That is my Living Maui vision:

a quantum leap on par with Hawaiʻi's global first in electric lighting at ʻIolani Palace in 1886.

RECOVERY

The 2023 wildfire disaster reshaped this community in ways that will never be forgotten, but must be learned from. Irrigation reuse greenbelt firebreaks can be deployed along the entire length of leeward communities in West and South Maui, to zero out municipal injection wells while protecting lives and property with watershed restoration that leverages native plants to protect communities with vibrant green food forests with ʻulu and other canoe plants as far as the eye can see, as I worked to develop for the Maʻalaea Regional Wastewater Reclamation System project, with sustainable reuse enabled by native freshwater stream limu.

Bill 9 showed the entire world the strength and transformative potential of the Lahaina Strong movement, demonstrating the power, and capacity for divisiveness, of the legislative process, and how housing access is the defining issue of a generation. The passage of the TIG recommendations feels like a game of keep away, a kind of fake out to those of us who have struggled with some form of housing insecurity even before the major reduction in resources after the fires. As a local resident who did not have access to shelter that met the federal definition of housing from 2017 until May 2026, I led the development of FlushAware.com without access to any permitted bathroom to speak of.

MUSIC

Public policy should be developed to increase access to music in all forms by 2x… per year.

2x the concerts, twice the musical education access opportunities, double the concerts, and even find ways to encourage musicians to share the magic and medicine of music on the very streets.

DJ dance parties, outdoor gatherings and in general, the broad recognition that almost all forms of the art and science of sound can be leveraged as a force-multiplier of quality in life that can be increased at all levels of society. Native musical treasures should be supported in their sharing and preservation for generations to come.

ON SOVEREIGNTY

My vision for exploring Maui Nui’s relationship with sovereignty has a few steps.

One, pass the Digital Direct Democracy Act to open the door to widespread access to citizen initiative signature methods on every device, so that ballots with our ideas for measures go to the floor.

Two, get some ideas for potential constitutions on there that define, for the first time, how voters may consciously choose to relate to the U.S. or even… a sovereign nation of Maui Nui?

Three, file away one, two or more such frameworks so that, should sovereignty happen suddenly, or even without warning, we will be prepared with a framework of governance that can endure with or without imports — or even data — from the outside world.

To get there we must focus on the practicalities of such a moment, which could be sooner than anyone thinks. Issues like a functioning intranet, life after fossil fuels, and practical methods of distributing food from farms to people under any combination of such scenarios must be implemented in advance.

The giant body of work that has been developed around long duration spaceflight may become extremely relevant in a timeline after resupply missions, but only if the integrated set of principles is implemented system-wide, and before it is needed.

What I call the "Hawaiian seedbank" is the body of indigenous knowledge, mostly in the minds and spreadsheets of our best aunties and uncles, dutifully preserved through centuries of colonial suppression, that forms the ultimate body of information needed to populate such a system-wide model.

The pieces to this beautiful puzzle are all already there, they just need to be assembled for the first time in human history so the lights come on, and never go out again.

My vision for Maui County is to reinforce shared systems so that every resident has a fair chance to thrive, regardless of circumstance, income or demographic.

I believe we have everything we need to succeed together, now and into the future of our shared ʻāina and kai.

PLEDGES