INTRODUCTION

The new train boss is in town — or will be, by the midpoint of this year.

City ordinance sets July 1 as the date when the city’s new transit authority, the semi-autonomous agency authorized by Honolulu voters in November, will be born.

This will be an auspicious occasion: This authority will have substantial powers for an unelected board, an entity created to oversee the construction and eventual operation of the city’s planned 20-mile elevated rail system.

A panel of 10, including one nonvoting member, will manage the budget of the transit project, pursue the purchase or condemnation of land along the route, set fares, draw up contracts, deal with labor issues.

This bothers some people, including former mayoral candidate Panos Prevedouros, the University of Hawaii engineering professor and longstanding opponent of the whole project.

Putting a transit project under the supervision of a separate agency, Prevedouros said, is "essential" in cases where the system crosses county or state lines and therefore can’t be controlled by any one government. But Honolulu is a single city-and-county jurisdiction, he said, meaning that the authority represents an unneeded bureaucratic layer placed between the project and the voting and taxpaying public.

"At the most we would need a separate division at the city within the Department of Transportation Services," he said. "The largest problem is lack of accountability."

Mayor Peter Carlisle disagrees and feels confident this authority will help ensure that key decisions are put in the hands of people with the right professional training and experience, rather than politicians.

In the next few weeks the City Council and administration will put together a list of qualifications needed for the authority posts and put them in a resolution to be heard.

But even though board members won’t be elected, they can’t be babes in the political woods, either. The authority will need to work with people in the Capitol when the project touches on state issues, Carlisle said, and the City Council signs off on land transactions and ultimately holds the purse strings.

"You have to have someone who’s got a good idea of how to deal with the politics of city and county government, that is somebody who knows how to get things done and what hurdles can be brought about by the political process," he said.
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There are semi-autonomous boards and commissions throughout the state and county governments of Hawaii, but none of them with the range of powers to be vested in the new transit authority that will oversee the planned rail project linking Kapolei with Ala Moana in the urban core.

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, as it’s known in the legislation that placed the idea on the ballot last November, is essentially a satellite of municipal government with its own bailiwick and largely fiscal accountability to the city’s elected leaders.

The powers (see box for a summary) comprise everything needed for day-to-day decision-making on the process of planning and construction and, ultimately, on operating the rail line when it begins service.

When the voters passed a change in the City Charter enabling the authority to be set up, they were opting for such matters to be handled by a professional body rather than a political entity that is juggling multiple city concerns with one eye on the public reactions to a constantly shifting landscape of priorities.

The board will consist of 10 individuals, one of them a nonvoting member: the director of the city’s Department of Permitting and Planning, who can help the project navigate county land-use regulations.

Of the nine voting members, two are ex-officio, meaning they are there because they were appointed to another office. They are the directors of the city Department of Transportation Services and the state Department of Transportation.

The rest will be appointed to staggered terms so that while individual members can be replaced over time, there won’t be a wholesale shakeup in any one year, protecting continuity in planning and oversight.

Following the design of many other such panels, here the aim is to keep the board from being under the thumb of any single politician. The City Council and the mayor each will appoint three members. Those six, plus the two transportation directors, will choose the final voting member of the board.

Breene Harimoto, who chairs the Council Transportation Committee, said a list of qualifications are being drafted now, in consultation with the city administration. He declined to release a copy of the draft until Mayor Peter Carlisle signs off on it.

But the mayor did offer a few comments on what he thinks the list should include.

"There’s a number of things that you want," Carlisle said. "You want somebody that has good financial background, because obviously if you’re funding a project that’s the most expensive public works project in the history of Hawaii, you want to make sure the money trail, one, is accounted for but, two, that you’re using your money wisely and are perfectly aware of all the different type of devices and instruments that can be used to assist you in that funding.

"It’s going to be put together in large part by local workers, many of whom are unionized," he added. "You want to have somebody who is very, very highly qualified and skilled in the area of union matters and can help work toward the goal of ‘on time and under budget.’"

Honolulu can draw on the advice of urban planners and other advisers who deal with these policies.

Karl Kim, on the faculty of the University of Hawaii Department of Urban and Regional Planning, agrees that "in addition to understanding of transit development, operations and maintenance, an understanding of debt finance, capital planning, urban development and planning are essential."

The Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization, which takes a look at the big picture of transportation facilities and recommends whether proposed projects are feasible, is revising its long-range plan to incorporate rail.

Brian Gibson, the agency’s executive director, also believes that a project of this magnitude is better off in the hands of those with a technical bent.

"The intent was by creating a separate authority you’re taking the decision-making process out of the political arena and giving it to technical people," he said. "The transit authority wouldn’t have taxing authority; the city controls the purse strings."

Panos Prevedouros is a professor in the University of Hawaii’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, but he’s best known as a vocal opponent of the steel-wheel, elevated rail project itself. He’s also a skeptic of the transit authority’s ability to govern a system operating within a single county.

"For example, Portland (authority) is tri-metro, involving other counties," he said. "Here, there’s no integration involved, no integration of government entities."

Carlisle acknowledges that the idea of the authority is to pull the project free of most political pressures, but that’s where he and Prevedouros, who ran against him in the mayoral special election, part company. In addition to technical expertise and experience with transit systems and their accompanying development plans, Carlisle said, the mix of talent on the authority has to include political acumen.

"You’re still going to have to deal with political entities," he said. "I’m an elected politician; the City Council is an elected legislative branch. You want to make sure that you’re taking that type of control out of our hands and put it with somebody who can work with the politicians but will not ultimately have to kow-tow.

"One of the real big purposes of the authority is to take politics out of the decision-making," the mayor added. "But that doesn’t mean your decisions don’t require some sort of political process to get them accomplished."

The history of transit authorities includes a variety of models. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey governs bridges, tunnels, airports and seaports within the port of those two states. The New York City Transit Authority, which now runs the city’s buses and rapid transit lines, formed when the municipal and two private systems were unified.

The general sense in the transit policy world nationally is that the construction and operation of transportation systems requires oversight by people who can take the long view: Planning involves calculations of future needs and a sustainable funding source that won’t be siphoned off by demands of changing priorities, they say.

Among the chief concerns of those who look at the authority with trepidation is its power of eminent domain, dealing with the acquisition of property needed along the corridor. But Carlisle said they don’t understand that the authority must follow the same legal procedures as any other entity condemning land for public purposes.

"You have to try and negotiate a voluntary sale," he said. "The authority can condemn the property using eminent domain. But first, before they do that they have to submit a list of the properties to be condemned to the City Council, which would have 45 days to object."

Coordination with other government agencies will be needed, too, should a ferry or other transportation modes be launched; "semi-autonomous" does not equate with "independent," he said.

"They’re not independent of ultimately having to sit there and deal with checks and balances," Carlisle added. "They’ll be required to hold public meetings prior to setting the rates and adopting the budget, audits of the transit authority can be conducted by the city managing director or the city auditor, or required by the City Council, and any use of city general funds would require approval of the City Council.

"So you’ve got essentially those checks and balances in line, where they can’t go off on a tangent without ultimately having to answer for what they’ve done."

Although the legal framework is designed to keep everyone accountable, the authority is a human enterprise. And that, Kim said, means the creation of a supervisory body would benefit from public supervision at every step possible.

"The devil is in the details in terms of not just how the authority is set up, but also its responsibilities, administrative rules, governance, appointment of members, and so many other concerns," he said. "Such an authority should be designed to increase accountability to taxpayers, system users, and the people of Hawaii."

Carlisle agreed.

"I think the real key is making sure those of us who have the appointing authority, including myself and City Council, don’t try and make this rewarding friends and punishing enemies but finding the best people we can for the needs of this authority to be effective, well informed and highly regarded in the community," he said. "And frankly, we know that doesn’t always happen."