With half the city’s rail line running from Kapolei to Aloha Stadium and the final construction phase through Honolulu starting, directors of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation are plotting HART’s future.
HART is a semi-autonomous agency formed to build Oahu rail. Once operations begin, authority transfers to the city Department of Transportation Services, which reports to the mayor.
There’s interest among board members and others of combining the two agencies; the big question is whether it would happen by giving HART responsibility for operations as well as construction, or folding HART into DTS and leaving the city administration in charge.
Supporters of a merger hope to get the issue before a Charter Commission that will recommend changes in city government for voters to consider in 2026.
A merger is worth talking about, as long as we learn from mistakes of the original organizational structure.
HART was made semi-autonomous supposedly to keep politics out of rail, but mismanagement of the grossly over-budget project ended up stinking of politics.
As HART Chair Colleen Hanabusa explained it at the board’s last meeting, “The people who spearheaded it were (former City Council members) Donovan Dela Cruz and Charles Djou, an interesting combination. … The purpose was to keep the then-mayor (Mufi Hannemann) out of HART. … This is the reason why HART was so weirdly formed in the beginning.”
It proved costly, as the “weirdly formed” agency was miserably incompetent in its execution of the rail plan, which is more than a decade behind schedule, $5 billion over budget and growing, and won’t even make it to the planned Ala Moana Center terminus.
Experience argues against subjecting rail operations to the HART style of chaos. It seems to make more sense to merge HART into DTS and put both in the normal flow of city government, with the mayor and City Council accountable for results.
HART CEO Lori Kahikina said early in her term that although HART was semi-autonomous, she would run it as though it was part of the city administration and work closely with DTS and Mayor Rick Blangiardi.
The result was a successful initiative to negotiate a recovery plan with the Federal Transit Administration to deal with the funding shortage that would not allow rail to finish at Ala Moana.
With Blangiardi deeply involved, a deal was reached with the FTA that gets the line two stops short of Ala Moana, to Kakaako.
It remains to be seen whether overly optimistic financial projections will doom the plan, as some believe, but it was encouraging that the mayor’s involvement produced a businesslike deliberation that averted the slipshod drama usually surrounding HART.
Clearly, there’s a need for change with HART’s history of failure and the project shifting more into operations, but the shape of the change is yet to be decided.
Hanabusa plans to poll the board at an upcoming meeting on whether to name its own working group to make recommendations or ask Blangiardi to create a task force with broader participation.
It’s a wonky issue but worth paying attention to lest we end up with rail operations as poorly run as the construction.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
