Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell, on the eve of his re-election campaign, is worried about the rail project and its run-up costs, now projected at $6.57 billion. That’s a rational concern: Caldwell has championed the project for the whole of his first term in office and, quite rightly, voters do associate him with it.
In his State of the City address delivered Monday evening, the mayor pointedly remarked that his own reputation is at stake where this project is concerned, which is undoubtedly true.
However, that doesn’t make it a good idea to transfer the operation of the finished system to an adminis-
trative agency headed by political appointees.
Part of Caldwell’s proposal — that transit operations, including the bus and rail systems, should be merged into one — makes perfect sense. That change, which requires a City Charter amendment, would enable coordination and management of each system in a way that best serves the public.
But, as Councilman Brandon Elefante noted, the voters have already decided that the rail system should be the charge of a semiautonomous agency, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, which could focus its attention on the task.
Besides focus, a measure of independence enables management to run things with fewer political considerations. Once the rail begins operations that are meshed with TheBus, some hard decisions will have to be made.
Among them will be choosing which bus routes should be eliminated or changed to create a multimodal transit system that makes the optimal use of funds to achieve service goals. Anyone who recalls bus-route changes made in recent years can confirm that they can be contentious decisions. They’re best made on the basis of system efficiency, and not by anyone worried about getting re-elected.
On the whole, Caldwell’s speech covered nuts-and-bolts duties, the maintenance and support of city infrastructure, which the mayor has ranked atop his priorities from the start.
The City Council must drill down into the detailed spending plans, examining, for example, whether all the proposed staffing increases are truly needed. Each hire comes with a long-term commitment in retirement and health care expenses, on top of salary.
But overall, the $834 million capital improvements budget includes the correct array of core needs:
>> Upgrading Oahu’s aging sewer system to meet federal mandates will require an infusion of $490 million.
>> Last year’s E Papa Kakou improvement effort, renovating 27 comfort stations and 16 playgrounds, will be followed by $21.6 million for similar parks projects. They deserve serious consideration from the Council.
>> The city has made needed advances in its goals to repair Oahu’s pockmarked roads, and the administration has, in fact, logged many miles of pothole fixes. Going forward, greater attention must be paid to the methods and materials in use, to ensure the repairs will last and the money is well-invested.
>> Homelessness also has become a primary city concern, and enhancements of the Housing First approach are justified for the coming year.
What’s needed even more than the investment of resources to counter homelessness is better coordination between the administration and the Council, so that resources could be spent wisely. One point of collaboration, for example, could be on the Council’s proposal of a homeless service center on the Kalihi site of the Blood Bank of Hawaii, forced to vacate for rail.
Too often, the lawmakers and the executive have been at cross purposes, and that tension is likely to increase with the political pressures of the looming election.
And political pressure represents a powerful force, difficult to overcome. It can afflict everything government does, and there are cases in which operations work best when they’re somewhat insulated from it.
Transportation operations are among these. If city leaders are wise, they will resist the temptation to micromanage. Whatever shortcomings the rail project has faced to date, adding politics to the mix will not help resolve them.
