Federal transit officials are on Oahu this week asking questions about reducing rail construction to 19 stations over 18.75 miles at a cost of $9.8 billion.
The new updated “recovery plan” has to be approved by the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation’s board of directors and the City Council before going to the Federal Transit Administration by a June 30 deadline — a tight time frame that has Council member Heidi Tsuneyoshi worried she won’t hear answers to all of the Council’s potential questions.
“When we get the recovery plan, it does have to go through committee and then adoption by the Council,” Tsuneyoshi said. “There will be no time. And it’s coincidental that the recovery plan comes when we also have to finalize the (city) budget on June 30. It’s a huge concern for me and for the taxpayers. … This is basically how things have been going from the start, with information that’s not forthcoming. It keeps happening. This is something that we really need transparency on.”
Even as the plan is being written, FTA officials are in town because “we’d like them to get a peek at it … instead of dumping something on them June 30,” Lori Kahikina, HART’s CEO and executive director, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Just getting through the City Council, the plan will require “multiple hearings,” Kahikina said. “It’s an extremely tight schedule. First we have to write it.”
The FTA officials are joined by a project management oversight consultant considering as many variables as possible in a process known as a “risk refresh,” Kahikina said.
The exercise involves “identifying all of the possible risks that you can think of: inflationary costs due to COVID or the effects of the Russian-Ukrainian War, or whether there will be enough contractors, do they have enough employees.
“The questions are: HART, did you capture everything you could? Did you think about this? Did you think about that? We welcome them to give us all their feedback,” Kahikina said.
The answers will affect the construction budget and timetable for completion.
The results of the risk refresh are not expected until mid-April, Kahikina said, but FTA officials “know we’re on an extremely tight deadline.”
At the same time, two unrelated issues between mismatched wheel and track widths appear close to being resolved.
Specialized manganese welders are building up the cross-tracking “frogs” that are too wide by half an inch. And track widths that are one-sixteenth of an inch too narrow appear to be fixed by unbolting the track and nudging it over.
“The track issue is being addressed,” Kahikina said. “Both issues are going to be completed by the end of April.”
The prior rail plan called for a 20-mile, 21-station route from East Kapolei to Ala Moana Center. It was estimated to cost $11.1 billion, with a $1.3 billion deficit and no way to plug it, even with the City Council’s December approval of a new 3% county transient accommodations tax. About 33% of the revenue generated by the new county TAT will go toward rail.
There is expected to be enough TAT and general excise tax revenue to pay for a shortened route ending at Halekauwila and South streets near the Circuit Court building, Kahikina said.
There was no endorsement of the new plan during face-to-face meetings with FTA officials in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. But there was an emphasis from the FTA on meeting the June 30 deadline to provide an updated plan, she said.
The new concept would stop construction by May 2029, Mayor Rick Blangiardi told the Star-Advertiser’s “Spotlight Hawaii” livestream program last week.
If approved, Blangiardi said, $250 million in federal funds would be delivered in each of two years, followed by the remaining $244 million, reducing the city’s financing costs.
But the rail line could potentially push on to Ala Moana Center and the University of Hawaii, and even see a new station at Ka Makana Ali‘i shopping center in Kapolei.
After people begin riding rail, Kahikina said, “the hope is there will be so much positivity and there will be extensions like every other municipality, and people will say, ‘When are you coming to my community, when are you going to UH?’”
