Honolulu rail leaders approved an additional $3.6 million in construction change orders this week, with some of them expressing renewed angst at both the mounting costs and their predecessors’ decisions to award building contracts so early on.

“Maybe we didn’t have a clear enough idea what we were doing” when the city awarded construction contracts to Kiewit Infrastructure West in 2009 and 2011, plus another contract to the joint venture Kiewit/Kobayashi in 2011, Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation board member Colleen Hanabusa said at Thursday’s board meeting.

Those three contracts to build rail’s first 10 miles of guideway and its operations center totaled $1.05 billion when the city issued them. But change orders along with delay claims have helped drive those three contracts’ costs up by more than $246 million combined, according to the latest HART reports.

“The city did not have a clear enough understanding,” said Hanabusa, a former U.S. representative for Hawaii who now chairs HART’s Government Oversight Committee.

HART, a semiautonomous agency that took over the project’s construction in July 2011, has weathered the public criticism of the subsequent change orders, she added. “We don’t like it. We don’t want to spend the public’s money. But these are the cards that have been dealt,” Hanabusa said.

Former Mayor Mufi Hannemann, who was in office when the city issued much of that contract work, has previously defended the timing by saying his administration looked to capitalize on a sagging construction market still trying to recover from the Great Recession.

Hanabusa joined the board last year after she was appointed by Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell. Caldwell previously served as Hannemann’s managing director.

The change orders approved this week will cover greater-than-expected costs to relocate continuing-education and workforce development classrooms at Leeward Community College, as well as to provide better construction access near the campus. LCC borders the rail system’s future operations center and a station.

Rail officials always knew they would have to do those relocations and had budgeted nearly $1 million for the job. However, the “general scope in the beginning … was not well defined,” HART deputy director of projects John Moore told the board Thursday.

More than $1.4 million of the latest change orders will go toward improved construction access. HART says the access will enable Kiewit/Kobayashi to finish its work around the LCC station without any overlap when a separate firm builds the station. The move, they said, will help reduce risk and actually help save as much as $5 million in additional costs.

Nonetheless, Hanabusa expressed frustration that the project faced those additional costs to begin with when Kiewit/Kobayashi had been contracted not only to build the rail operations center, but also to design the plans.

“The original contract was a design-build, so why are we here today?” she said Thursday.

Hanabusa is not the first board member to criticize the city’s awarding of those contracts so early. In 2014, when the board approved a lump of change orders to Kiewit totaling $57 million, HART board member Don Horner said the need for those approvals showed “our planning and our designing on the front end was weak.”

On Thursday Horner, who now serves as the board chairman, warned of more change orders to come. “We’ve got a complicated project and a long way to go,” he said.