With two new decisive court wins, Oahu’s rail transit project is poised to take shape along the island’s southern coast without more roadblocks from its staunchest opponents.
A federal appeals court panel unanimously ruled Tuesday that the 20-mile, 21-station elevated rail line complies with environmental law — a decision that went against Honolulutraffic.com, a coalition of several community leaders that sued to stop what’s expected to be the largest public works project in Honolulu’s history. Construction on the rail line has already started in West Oahu.
On a lower court level in the same case, visiting Judge A. Wallace Tashima ruled Tuesday that transit officials followed proper procedures in choosing a rail route to Ala Moana Center instead of a route to the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus.
Tashima also lifted an order blocking most construction and property acquisition in the heart of town.
At separate news briefings, city officials overseeing the $5.26 billion rail project declared outright lanakila — victory — while the opponents leading the charge to stop the project, including retired businessman Cliff Slater, UH law professor Randall Roth and retired judge Walter Heen, said the court decisions would bring their persistent legal fight to an end.
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COURT RULINGS
The city and rail supporters scored two huge legal wins in federal court Tuesday:
>> The 9th Circuit panel of judges unanimously ruled that city and federal transit officials properly followed environmental laws when they chose the rail project over alternative options, such as managed lanes or bus rapid transit.
>> Visiting Judge A. Wallace Tashima ruled that the city and federal transit officials followed proper procedures in choosing a rail route to Ala Moana Center instead of a route to the University of Hawaii-Manoa campus. He lifted an order blocking most rail work in the middle of town.
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"Our preliminary decision is that there is little likelihood of prevailing in any further legal action. Therefore, today’s rulings conclude our legal fight," Slater said. "We didn’t leave any stone unturned."
The two decisions essentially end the federal lawsuit that aimed to kill rail, in which the city reported spending nearly $3 million and opponents reported about $1 million in legal fees. Most of the dollars to fight the project were public donations, Slater said.
Honolulu Corporation Counsel Donna Leong told reporters, "It’s now time to get on with the transit project to provide mobility to those who need it and to complete the rail on time and on budget."
In the past three decades, three previous efforts to develop a new mass-transit system — two rail projects and one bus rapid-transit system — were scrapped because of cost concerns or shifts in the city’s political priorities.
The decision released Tuesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds Tashima’s original 2012 order in the suit, which largely sided with the city but also required that it further study the so-called "Beretania Street Tunnel Alternative" through town to make sure it wasn’t a better option.
That proposed route would have traveled under Aala Park and resurfaced past Punchbowl, then followed King Street and finally headed mauka on University Avenue toward the UH-Manoa campus.
Transit officials overseeing the rail project responded to Tashima’s order by releasing a new study that upheld the Ala Moana route as the best pick. Honolulutraffic.com challenged the new study with an appeal, arguing that it had been tailored to uphold the city’s preferred route, which ends at the shopping center.
Tashima disagreed with the rail opponents’ appeal in his ruling Tuesday.
"Defendants did not act arbitrarily and capriciously by concluding that these factors — the Tunnel Alternative’s cost, severe impact to (public and historic) properties, and harm to non-(public and historic) resources — weigh in favor of the Project," Tashima wrote in his decision.
Meanwhile, the panel of three 9th Circuit judges found that transit officials sufficiently considered alternatives to the rail project as required by federal environmental laws, such as managed lanes and bus rapid-transit options.
The judges further maintained that they had jurisdiction to rule on the matter. During a hearing held in August in San Francisco, the judges spent most of the hourlong session questioning the jurisdiction issue while the Beretania Street Tunnel matter and several other issues remained unresolved in the lower court.
The appellate court decision was an "overwhelming victory" for the city from an ideologically diverse panel, said Robert Thomas, a Honolulu- and San Francisco-based attorney who attended the hearing in August. The panel comprised Judges Stephen Reinhardt, Mary Schroeder and Andrew Hurwitz.
"All three of them agreed. They made pretty short work of the challengers’ arguments on the merits" while spending much of the decision on the panel’s jurisdiction concerns, Thomas said.
Leong said she believed it was "purely coincidental" that the two federal court decisions were released within hours of each other, despite being heard months apart.
It’s not clear whether any other legal challenges will surface, but Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation Executive Director Dan Grabauskas said he was optimistic the toughest challenges are behind the rail system.
"My experience with projects like this, it principally focuses on the environmental documents because they tend to be the most challenging," Grabauskas said. "We appear to have gotten past … those today."
Even with their legal fight finished, Honolulutraffic. com members said they remain deeply opposed to the project and cited worries about potential cost overruns to build the project, annual revenue shortages to operate it, and rail’s impacts on the local environment and its views along the Oahu shoreline.
"We said for the last two, three years that the last thing that was open to us, OK, short of laying down on the rails was the legal issue," Slater said Tuesday. "I’m getting a little too old to be laying down on the rails."
