Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation can blame their own doublespeak for hostile public and legislative reaction to pleas for bonds and more taxes to cover rail cost overruns.
Caldwell and HART say short-term bonds, like the $350 million loan they seek from the City Council, were always planned and suggest extending the half-cent rail excise tax was always inevitable.
You couldn’t tell from their past pronouncements.
For example, HART Chairman Ivan Lui-Kwan seemed to say the opposite at a University of Hawaii forum in April 2013, recorded by documentary filmmaker Marc Delorme (see the clip at youtu.be/kfDINtSKh1s).
Asked about bond sales for rail, Lui-Kwan said transit officials elsewhere "are just in awe of the model that we have here — and the model is one in which we don’t go out and borrow money."
Nor would you have expected from what Lui-Kwan said then for the city to ask the Legislature to extend the rail excise tax beyond its 2022 expiration for construction overruns.
"The plan is to have this project fully paid for once construction is completed," he said. "The plan again is that once this project is completed, because it’s being paid for as you go from our funding from the state of Hawaii general excise tax, once the project is completed there will be no mortgage, no loan."
Caldwell also promised no mortgage in his 2012 mayoral campaign, but if there’s an open-ended tax extension, a rail "mortgage" would carry over indefinitely.
Excuses now given for needing more money were already known when they made the no-mortgage representations.
Costly change orders were already coming as a result of signing construction contracts years before the city was ready to build and other miscalculations.
The city already knew about lawsuit and regulatory delays. The local construction market was already turning red-hot.
Caldwell and HART continue to do business in the same slapdash manner by seeking a blank-check tax extension without offering details on how much they really need or what exactly they need it for.
They muddy the waters by vaguely suggesting that beyond covering cost overruns, a tax extension is needed for operating costs and expanding the rail line to Waikiki and Manoa.
Again, a blank check is sought with no cost estimates for operations and no budget or timetable for new lines that may or may not be built.
Most disturbing, they haven’t detailed options they’ve considered other than more taxes; a recent federal oversight report described HART’s cost containment efforts as "alarming."
The rallying cry for rail advocates is, "We can’t afford not to build it."
They need to add a word: We can’t afford not to build it responsibly.
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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
