Since 2009, delays from awarding contracts too early and court-ordered halts on construction have already cost taxpayers at least $116 million to help build Oahu’s rail transit line.

Now, rail officials find themselves in yet another race against time to avoid yet another round of costly delays — this time heading into 2015, when construction on the 20-mile rail line is supposed to ramp up in the heart of Honolulu.

For construction to stay on schedule, project officials say, they must negotiate 146 separate agreements by the end of this year to buy full or partial properties and obtain road easements along the elevated rail line’s easternmost stretch into town.

However, a court-ordered injunction in the federal lawsuit to stop rail, enacted at the end of 2012 and lifted in February, has them far behind where they should be in that process.

In that case, visiting federal Judge A. Wallace Tashima compelled rail officials to reconsider whether a different route, ending at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus, would serve as the more feasible alternative. His injunction barred rail officials from talking with the property owners along their preferred route to Ala Moana Center until February, when rail supporters won that court case.

With the suit resolved, that leaves those overseeing the project a little more than six months to complete about 18 months’ worth of work on those negotiations and deals, according to Dan Grabauskas, executive director of the Hono­lulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

"The challenge we’re facing is we have this compressed time frame," Grabauskas said last week. "This is a critical path for us. If we do not have access to give to the contractor it will impact our schedule."

He called the effort in the coming months "our highest single priority" for the $5.26 billion rail project.

If HART officials award new construction contracts without the access they need to start work, or if they wait until they have the access but then fall behind schedule, many millions more in taxpayer dollars could be needed to cover costs.

Grabauskas said it’s already unavoidable that HART, a semiautonomous agency overseeing rail’s completion, will have to spend at least several million more dollars to hire more staff and increase support from consultants and property acquisition experts to play catch-up before the year ends.

He further criticized the effort to stop the project in federal court, led by retired businessman Cliff Slater, former Gov. Ben Cayetano, and University of Hawaii law professor Randy Roth, as potentially creating a "self-fulfilling prophecy" of more cost overruns due to the delays stemming from the court injunction.

"The negative ramifications of these lawsuits continue," Grabauskas said. "The situation today is property costs more than it did 18 months ago. We’re going to have to pay additional money."

Slater adamantly disagreed that rail opponents are to blame.

"He’s really got his nerve," Slater said of Grabauskas Thursday. "The delay in the lawsuit was only brought about by the city."

The federal lawsuit could have been decided 15 months earlier had transit officials not stretched out the court proceedings, said Slater, chairman of rail opposition group Honolulutraffic. com. "We spent something like five times what we budgeted because the city tried to … price us out of the lawsuit. All that delay, it’s the city’s own fault."

Further complicating matters, HART officials say they still don’t have a list that they can disclose publicly of the contracts they’re seeking to negotiate in town because it hasn’t been finalized yet. They say they expect to have that final list when design work on the town segment is finished, sometime later this summer or early this fall.

They say there are no residential property owners affected in this last stretch of the rail line, from Kamehameha Highway and Dillingham Boulevard in Kalihi to Ala Moana Center. Nine of the 146 or so are full properties that must be acquired and the rest are partial property acquisitions or easements, they said.

It’s also not yet clear how the "compressed" time frame might affect the city’s ability to avoid taking properties by way of condemnation.

"We do not want to go through eminent domain if at all possible," Grabauskas said last week.

HART plans to put out to bid next month — and then award by the end of this year — a new construction contract to build the second half of the rail line, from Aloha Stadium to Ala Moana Center. Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. is building the island’s first 10-mile segment, from the farm fields east of Kapolei to the stadium.

Whatever firm ultimately wins the bid to build the second half will need those properties at the start of the year to start relocating utility lines ahead of the construction, Grabauskas said.

Rail officials are expected to bring a more detailed plan on the effort before HART’s board at its regular meeting Thursday. It will involve prioritizing the parcels where utilities need to be moved first, Grabauskas said.

"We are racing against time," he said. "We’re going to have a real challenge recovering the loss of that time."

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