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Kalawao County, Hawaii · Kalawao County — administered by the Hawaii Dept. of Health

Kalawao County — the money trail

Kalawao County has 82 residents and no elected government at all — no county council, no county budget. By state law (HRS §326-34) it is administered by the Hawaii Department of Health, and the DOH Director serves as its ex-officio mayor. It sits on the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokaʻi, a former Hansen’s-disease settlement now co-managed as a National Historical Park. There is no county appropriation to walk; the one public budget figure is a ~$4.3 million line inside the state DOH budget for the Kalaupapa settlement, shown below as a separate government’s spending, not a county total. Click any number to see exactly where it comes from. Where the trail goes dark, it becomes a numbered issue in the docket. New here? Read our story or take the plain-words tour.

Cross-foots ✓ 7/7

The real money is in your city or town. With no county government here, the budgets that shape daily life — schools, police, roads, trash — are municipal. Browse every city and town →, and walk the ones we've ingested line by line.

✓ Sourced○ Cited◐ Partial⚠ Ambiguous✖ Dead end

✓ Sourced = cited to a document and the math re-adds to the dollar. ○ Cited = cited to a document, but the math isn't independently double-checked yet. Hover any mark for what it means.

Beside the county — separate governments, separate ledgers

▶State DOH — Kalaupapa Settlement program$4,300,000 ◐ Partial

Kalawao has no county budget of its own. Its public costs appear as a line in the Hawaii Department of Health budget: about $4.3 million a year for the Kalaupapa settlement (healthcare, administration, maintenance, food service) supporting roughly 33 staff. Figure from the DOH’s annual legislative reports; approximate.