We had brief hope the bedeviled Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation might be on track to some measure of stability.
The first leg between Kapolei and Aloha Stadium began running — albeit at a per-ride operating cost probably rivaling the Orient Express — and the Federal Transit Administration resumed funding a recovery plan that gets the train to Kakaako.
But it’s chaos anew with the resignation of a key HART executive and a nasty fight between rail CEO Lori Kahikina and the board, led by Colleen Hanabusa.
Tensions rose after project director Nate Meddings returned to the mainland for family reasons. He was leading the search for a contractor to build the final civic center leg with a tight $1.3 billion budget — all of its $10 billion HART has left after blowing through $5.2 billion in original funding and a like amount from legislative bailouts.
Kahikina said she met with Meddings four times to persuade him to stay, but he’d made up his mind.
A recent HART board meeting became heated when Hanabusa loudly suggested Kahikina could have done more to keep him and accused her of not giving the board timely notice.
The hanging suggestion was that he departed for reasons other than family matters. We can only hope it wasn’t because he concluded there’s no chance bids for the urban contract, expected to be awarded this summer, will meet HART’s budget.
The board also gave Kahikina a tepid performance evaluation complaining of poor board communications and bleeding staff, raising questions about whether she’ll survive expiration of her $275,000 annual contract at the end of the year — especially if civic center bids exceed budget.
Kahikina, an engineer and former city environmental services director whose tenacious style got the trains running despite inherited problems with cracked piers and misaligned tracks, didn’t take the criticism lying down.
She rebutted the performance evaluation criticisms and publicly described her staff as “distraught” and “outraged” by Hanabusa’s blow-up.
Mayor Rick Blangiardi, who worked with Kahikina to secure federal approval of the recovery plan and appointed Hanabusa to the nonpaying board — after a public outcry over the board’s attempt to give the former congresswoman a $1 million lobbying contract — isn’t commenting.
Hopefully, it’s because he’s working quietly to resolve a mess that could shatter rail’s progress during his tenure, and not because he’s hiding in an election year.
Kahikina isn’t the only culprit if numbers for the urban contract go sour.
Tensions between her and Hanabusa began in 2021, when she issued what she felt was an honest estimate of $12.5 billion to finish to Ala Moana Center as planned, $3.5 billion more than HART’s $9 billion funding at the time.
Hanabusa dubiously cut the estimate to $11.4 billion based on a shadowy audit. Blangiardi erased the rest of the deficit by giving HART much of the city’s hotel tax and working with Kahikina to end the line at South Street, two stations short of Ala Moana.
Natalie Iwasa, a nonvoting legislative board appointee, said it best: “Here we are with a HART board battering our CEO and creating this corrosive atmosphere. It is not good for HART, it is not good for the bidders.”
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
