Staffing debates usually happen in the abstract. This one does not have to. The Maui Fire Department publishes an operational roster, station by station and shift by shift, and it marks every open position with a single word: VACANT. The version effective May 1, 2026 names ten of them on the firefighting line. Read alongside the county's adopted budget, the roster tells a clear story, and it is not the story a low vacancy number alone would suggest.

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What the Roster Says

The Department of Fire and Public Safety's Employee Roster and Phone List, effective May 1, 2026, lists each engine, ladder, hazmat, and rescue company across three watches. Ten line positions are marked VACANT, each tied to an established, funded position number. These are not recruit slots waiting to be created. They are real seats on real apparatus that no one is currently in.

Ten Line Vacancies · Roster Effective May 1, 2026

Engine 2, Paia · Ladder 3, Lahaina · Engine 4, Kaunakakai (Molokai) · Engine 5, Makawao · Engine 10, Kahului (two positions) · Hazmat 10, Kahului · Engine 11, Napili · Engine 14, Wailea (two positions). A separate opening for a Health and Safety Bureau specialist is listed apart from the line count.

Maui Fire Department, Employee Roster and Phone List, effective May 1, 2026

Two of these are worth naming plainly. The Ladder 3 company in Lahaina, the district that lost 102 lives in the August 2023 wildfire, carries an unfilled firefighter position. And Engine 14 in Wailea, one of South Maui's fastest-growing and highest-traffic areas, carries two, across two different shifts. These are not projections or union estimates. They are printed on the county's own document.

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The Honest Math, and Why the Small Number Is Not Reassuring

Here is the part that has to be said straight, because getting it wrong would be easy. The county's FY2026 adopted budget funds 325 positions in the Fire/Rescue Operations program. Ten vacancies against 325 funded positions is a vacancy rate of roughly three percent. On its own, that is a low number, and department leadership has described it that way to the Fire Commission more than once.

So this is not a story about a fire department that is hollowed out today. It is a story about the trend line and the pipeline behind it, and that is where the roster and the budget together become alarming.

325
firefighting positions the county
funds, up from 288 three years ago
10
line vacancies named on the
county's own May 2026 roster
0
recruit classes the department
planned to run in 2026

The number of funded firefighting positions has grown steadily: 288 in FY2023, then 298, then 319, and 325 in FY2026. The county keeps adding seats. The question is whether it can fill them, and the evidence says filling them is getting harder, not easier. Firefighter applications on Maui have fallen roughly 73 percent since their peak, and the department has said that with only a handful of vacancies at a time it does not make sense to run a recruit academy, because a class "costs too much" to stand up for a few openings. So the county is carrying a growing number of funded seats, a shrinking applicant pool to fill them from, and stretches with no new class in training.

The Piece That Does Not Show Up in the Vacancy Count

There is also a category the three-percent figure misses entirely. At an April 2026 commission meeting, the Fire Chief explained that the department had "unfunded some positions" it is "still holding," setting them aside until facilities like new stations are ready. Those held positions are real gaps in the department's designed strength, but they are not counted as vacancies because they are not currently funded. The true distance between the department the county designed and the one that shows up to emergencies is wider than the vacancy line alone.

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Why Ten Open Seats Matter More Than Ten Sounds Like

A fire company is not a headcount. It is a team that has to perform several life-safety tasks at once: advancing a hose line, searching for victims, forcing entry, and ventilating, all in the first minutes. National research on crew size is consistent that five-person crews complete those tasks faster and more safely than smaller ones, and that when crews thin out, the people who wait longer are the residents inside. (The staffing research is laid out on our staffing-data page.)

Every vacant seat on a roster is absorbed somewhere: by overtime, by running a company short, or by a position held open. A three-percent vacancy rate in a growing department that cannot reliably refill itself does not stay at three percent by accident. It stays there because the people already on the job keep covering the gap, on a schedule that already runs well past a standard work week. What the roster shows today is manageable. What the pipeline behind it shows is a system running without much margin, in a place where help is never a county away.

Plain English

Maui's fire department publishes a roster that marks open positions as VACANT. The May 2026 version names ten on the firefighting line, including one on the Lahaina ladder truck and two in Wailea. Ten out of 325 funded positions is a low vacancy rate right now, and that is true. The worry is the direction: the county keeps funding more firefighter positions, the pool of people applying has dropped about 73 percent, the department has skipped running a recruit class, and it is also holding some positions unfunded on the side. The gap is small today and getting harder to close tomorrow.

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Sources & References