SPRECKELSVILLE - Three years after they sat down for what was supposed to be a six-month review of the county's General Plan, members of the Maui General Plan Advisory Committee finally have the finish line in sight, The Maui News reported today.

Committee members are feeling the pressure of a March 1 deadline to complete their review of the plan. With a little more than a month left for their work, panel members have scheduled multiple meetings each week and special Saturday meetings through February.

"We have a lot to do in the next month," said Chairman Tom Cannon. "We just have to get through it."

An advisory committee meeting held Tuesday is scheduled to continue at 5 p.m. today and at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Kaunoa Senior Center in Spreckelsville. Upcoming meetings will be posted on the county calendar at www.co.maui.hi.us/CurrentEvents.asp.

The committee is hearing and discussing reports from breakout working groups tasked with reviewing specific elements of the plan. The panel is tentatively scheduled to start reviewing the plan's "directed-growth strategy," which includes land-use policies and urban-growth boundaries limiting development, on Feb. 10, said planner Dave Michaelson, who has been coordinating the advisory committee's review process. He said he expected the panel's final five or six meetings to focus exclusively on land use.

"That's going to be the portion of the plan that you'll see out your windshield," he said.

While the advisory committee was originally tasked with making recommendations on the General Plan within a six-month timetable, the review has been fraught with delays since it was launched in 2006.

At first, questions about process delayed the start of the review. A legal decision that the plan's two segments had to be reviewed separately stretched out the timeline. The panel asked for and received an extension as it completed review of the plan's "policy" segment last year. Then it took county planners several more months to complete a draft of the next section, the "Maui Island Plan," and present it to the committee for review.

GPAC meetings have often moved slowly, with hours of public testimony, and 25 volunteer committee members each waiting their turn to speak on various issues.

Most recently, the advisory committee received an extension of its deadline from Oct. 31 to March 1, after members said they would not finish on time because of the high volume of public input.

Breaking out into smaller, informal groups, which met in public but did not accept spoken testimony, helped speed the process, Cannon said. The investigative committees met separately to hash out ideas, then reported them to the full committee in a formal meeting.

"It concentrated the effort," he said. "With less people, it made decision-making a little easier. It's easier to get 12 people to agree than 25."

Advisory committee member Warren Shibuya said he was feeling the pressure as the panel's deadline approached.

"There's always more to add, and that is a concern, that we capture all of it," he said.

At a meeting Tuesday, GPAC members again engaged in lengthy debates over the specific wording of individual policy statements within the plan. While some committee members argued that wording is important, others said the group should avoid obsessing over minutiae with so little time left.

Cannon acknowledged that the group was coming down to the wire, but said he believed some tinkering was important, even at this late hour.

"The difference of a word can be the difference between black and white," he said. "Sometimes words are important."

* Ilima Loomis can be reached at iloomis@mauinews.com.