The Honolulu City Council might further demonstrate its support for another tax extension to rescue the island’s troubled transit project by repealing the rail-spending limit it enacted last year.
Bill 3, which Councilmen Joey Manahan and Ikaika Anderson introduced Wednesday, would remove
a cap of sorts that limits
the city’s rail spending to
$4.82 billion without further Council action. That amount does not include rail’s
$1.55 billion in federal funding.
The Council passed the limit under its previous chairman, Ernie Martin, as an attempt to provide additional oversight. But now that official costs estimates to build rail to Ala Moana Center have soared above $8 billion, that spending limit, part of a city ordinance, could hinder efforts to finish the full 20-mile line.
Both Manahan and Anderson said they wanted to show their counterparts in the state Legislature that they’re working to remove the city’s cap as they also prepare to ask those lawmakers for renewed help. Their bill could take about three months to pass, they said.
The state’s previous five-year extension of Oahu’s general excise tax surcharge should generate some
$1.5 billion for rail, officials say. The city limit would cap rail spending from that at around $1.1 billion, based on official projections.
Rail’s former executive director, Dan Grabauskas, told the Council in January 2016 that the rail agency could work within the spending limit — and that the Federal Transit Administration agreed with him.
Nonetheless, Anderson said the FTA’s acting administrator, Carolyn Flowers, told him during a meeting in Washington, D.C., about three months prior to Grabauskas’ testimony that the federal agency opposed the limit. It was the main reason he voted against the spending limit, he said Wednesday.
Former Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation board member Mike Formby later criticized Grabauskas for telling the Council that the rail agency could live with the limit without getting board approval first. Grabauskas resigned under mutual agreement with the HART board in August.
“I was pretty shocked” that HART agreed to the spending limit, Manahan recalled Wednesday.
On Dec. 1, the Council unanimously approved a resolution supporting a rail-tax extension to get to Ala Moana.
“It’s simply the best of the bad options in front of us,” Anderson said about another surcharge extension. Such a move will “hurt the least,” he said.
“No, I don’t like it,” Anderson added, “but we need to finish this project, and the consequences of reneging on the (federal funding agreement) are huge.”
