I guess it is human nature to wait for a crisis to spur people to action. We may have an old roof on our house, but we don't consider replacing it until it starts to leak.

The same thing is happening with Kahului Harbor. Our community has long been on notice that something would have to give at Kahului Harbor, but it took the pending introduction of the Superferry to push us, as a community, into action.

In 2003 I appointed a task force to study the issues brought on by the sudden expansion of cruise ship arrivals at the harbor. After 41 meetings that group found that the state Harbors Division was allowing this major expansion without adequate planning or environmental review.

When the state announced its intention to permit the Superferry, I pointed out in a Sept. 7, 2004, letter to the state Department of Transportation that it lacked an adequate planning and environmental study. The Harbors Division and my administration have since agreed to work together in an effort to resolve the harbor's short-term issues and study the long term together, in a process that will include a thorough environmental impact statement.

The recent decision by the County Council to join a legal action demanding an EIS be done puts the state on notice that we are not kidding: the Superferry cannot just be forced on us. It has to be done right.

The problems caused by the initiation of the Superferry are probably solvable. But it is my contention that the Superferry impacts are just a short-term symptom of a much bigger problem. Like the leaky roof, it is giving us the impetus to focus our attention to a long-ignored, yet critical long-term planning requirement.

The real problem is that Kahului Harbor, our port of entry for 90 percent of our cargo, has outgrown its current design capacity. State officials report that cargo flow through the harbor has grown by 50 percent in the past five years alone. At that rate, we are quickly going to run out of short-term solutions for the cargo space, traffic and other problems occurring at the harbor.

While we do have a number of harbor concerns that require immediate action, it is my contention that both the community — not just the business community but the whole community — and the state must come up with plans that will address the harbor-related needs of this growing community for the intermediate and long term.

That's why I have taken a "work with" rather than "fight with" approach with the state Department of Transportation. Ultimately, it's a state harbor. We must honestly accept each other as partners if Maui is going to end up with the harbor it needs. And, as the DOT presented to us: "The first joint steps of the county/state partnership will be the development of the Kahului Commercial Harbor 2030 Master Plan. Upon completion of the plan, all of its identified changes and improvements will be subject to environmental review and EIS as required."

The reservation I have with suing the state over the Superferry EIS — a study it has already agreed to incorporate into their 2030 Master Plan— is that we need action now. If the state is forced into jumping through too many legal hoops before it can take any action at the harbor, we may not see any harbor improvements for a very long time. We need action now.

I support a comprehensive environmental study, but it has to be done quickly, because we are running out of time. Our goal should not be to just entangle the state in a mire of environmental reviews and court actions; it ultimately must be to get the work of improving and upgrading the harbor under way, now.

We do have a leak in the roof but we cannot simply patch it. We must fix it so that our roof will continue to protect our community and our environment for generations to come.

Alan Arakawa is mayor of Maui County. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.