When I joined the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) some 5-1/2 months ago, it was for three main purposes.

First of all, I wanted to see this awesome Honolulu rail transit project through to the start of full operations and passenger service. I don’t believe in my 35-plus years of international rail transit-related experience that I have ever seen a project with an initial rail line, a full 20 miles in Honolulu’s case, which is so transformational and will have so many benefits for both residents and visitors alike.

Secondly, I wanted to be able to complete this project, and manage the risks on this project in a much more rigorous way, with much more budget and schedule certainty. I also wanted to bring world-class delivery and world-class participants to Honolulu.

Thirdly, I wanted to ensure that once this rail project is completed, that we set it on a sustainable course for the future.

And that’s why I envision for our project a comprehensive design-build-finance-operate and maintain approach, which incorporates the portion of the rail project that we have already built, and also possibly includes long-term operations and maintenance and, very importantly, capital asset replacement, in a long-term partnership with the private sector.

To that end, HART has teamed with Ernst & Young Infrastructure Advisors LLC to examine the potential for delivering the remainder of the Honolulu rail project with what’s known as a P3, or public-private partnership.

As part of this review, HART and the city hosted an industry forum on Feb. 13-14 and invited some of the key international P3 firms to Honolulu for a two-day conference held at the Blaisdell Center. The turnout was tremendous.

More than 70 companies participated, including those from Japan, Spain, the U.K., Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Several of them asked for one-on-one meetings with HART staff.

We engaged in serious dialogue. We asked them for their honest assessment, not necessarily what they thought we might want to hear.

And we came away with a general understanding of what it might take to make a public-private partnership work for the rail project.

HART and the Ernst & Young team will now further assess the information gathered at the forum and come up with a finding and a recommendation in the next few weeks about whether a public-private partnership for completion of the Honolulu rail project is worth pursuing.

We know that introducing this process, this particular project delivery method here in Honolulu is something relatively new and will bring its own unique set of challenges. But I believe public-private partnerships are designed to overcome these challenges and provide solutions.

And I believe that the global success we have seen with public-private partnerships around the world in managing “mega” projects in a more effective way, gives us the confidence that we can be successful with a P3 here in Honolulu as well.

Andrew Robbins is executive director and CEO of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.