Just about everyone would agree that some hard lines must be drawn constraining future growth in the areas most at risk of future eruptions at Kilauea.

The trick lies in finding ways to draw people away from resettling the freshly laid lava fields of Puna. Some form of land swap could provide an answer, and has precedent. The Kanoelehua Industrial Lots in Hilo and the Waiakea residential subdivision both were developed on state-owned land to relocate homes and businesses destroyed by the 1960 tsunami.

Residents can’t all be forced to relocate, short of the government compensating them for their lots that county and state officials enabled through land-use policies. While the county should restrain development, realistically some provision must be made for those determined to stay put in their established homesteads.

Clearly, a balance must be struck between maintaining a very basic level of service on the one hand, and fiscal responsibility on the other.

Specifically, these are residents who will need access to the larger community, but road projects for such an unsettled area will need careful planning lest they endlessly and fruitlessly drain the public purse.

The bottom line is that the landscape has literally changed on Hawaii island, and the development planning landscape must change along with it. Inevitably, redeveloping Puna will require a carrot-and-stick approach: incentives paired with restrictions.

On the restriction side, a few weeks ago state Sen. Lorraine Inouye proposed that the county ban new construction in the volcanic rift areas deemed most at risk: Zones 1 and 2.

That got some pushback from the mayor and other officials. They observed, correctly, that while Zone 1 hugs the rift lines fairly closely, Zone 2 is far more expansive an area, in which a total ban would be excessive.

More recently Inouye has walked back the idea a bit, saying that the county must weigh where future development makes the most sense.

No argument there. Redrawing the old zone boundaries based on more current data and lava flow patterns should be near the top of the to-do list, once the eruption cycle ends or subsides.

On the incentive side, Inouye, one of the Big Island’s state senators, pointed to a new proposal from the administration of Mayor Harry Kim as having some potential. In this plan, under discussion with land owner W. H. Shipman, the county would provide infrastructure for a Shipman development in exchange for land reserved for evacuees.

This has the advantage of offering fee simple lots that the county could swap for those in the inundation area. Alternatively — or perhaps additionally — the county could opt to exchange leased lots, owned by the state, for the parcels lost to lava. That is an idea favored by state Sen. Russell Ruderman, Inouye’s colleague in the Legislature.

Ruderman, who has an eye on large state land holdings between Hawaiian Paradise Park and Kahakai Boulevard, said some 500-1,000 acres could be leased for residential use. More state land is available for potential lease to farmers who also lost acreage to the lava.

One undeniable advantage of that plan: It would require less of a cash investment by the county. And that’s a critical consideration, given that Hawaii island will lose a great deal of revenue officials had expected to reap in property taxes.

There is also the question of public infrastructure. This has been a sensitive issue in the past in Puna, where some have complained of getting short shrift — in roadways, to cite one example.

In 2000, the Federal Highways Administration sided with petitioners in a civil rights complaint from Puna residents. They had alleged that state and county agencies undercounted the population being served by highways projects — ultimately meaning that these taxpayers didn’t get what they’d paid for.

One of the complainants is Jon Olson, who now has lost his Leilani Estates home to the lava and is rebuilding on a lot in Nanawale Estates. Olson said he agreed with the concept of reducing the population density in the area through consolidating the lots.

But he believes the now-fragmented highways must be rebuilt, largely as they were.

“Are you going to abandon the whole area because you lose a part of road every 50 years?” he asked rhetorically. “Compared to places on the mainland where there’s flooding every year, this is a pretty good deal. This doesn’t happen every spring.”

No, it doesn’t. But the damage done to the highways is complete, and rebuilding to standard is extremely expensive.

And a critical factor must not be forgotten: personal responsibility. Residents of Puna, by and large, were aware of risks and accepted them, in exchange for low real-estate costs.

Hawaii island will continue to contend with the ongoing volcanic threat; guiding this recovery will require flexibility and allowances.

But the old blueprint can’t be the guide, as if nothing has changed — because, in fact, everything has.