Being Honolulu’s mayor goes from the mundane, such as drafting rules for how many people can sit under a tarp in the park, to the almost unanswerable, as in how will you pay for the overbudget rail project.
Paying for rail has always been tricky, but the easiest answer was to make the tourists cough up the needed bucks through a half-of-1% fee on the general excise tax. But then came the pandemic, the tourists stopped coming and the taxes were dropped by two-thirds.
What to do is the major question for mayoral candidates Rick Blangiardi and Keith Amemiya.
Both profess to love rail, pledge to watch it carefully and want it to go to Ala Moana.
Blangiardi editorialized in favor of building rail when he was running Hawaii News Now, and Amemiya loves calling rail a “multimodal component” in his somewhat rapturous descriptions of how it will transform Honolulu.
When it comes to specifically how the city will pay for rail if tourists don’t come back for two years — or if they just come back in a trickle, not a torrent — is not something either has answered in debates.
To complicate matters, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, the semi-autonomous board that runs rail as of this writing, is on the verge of ousting CEO and executive director Andrew Robbins.
He would be HART’s sixth leader in its nine years and only the second to serve on a full-time basis overseeing the $9.2 billion rail project. On Thursday afternoon, the board pulled back from formally getting rid of Robbins, leaving the fate of both the project and its leader in limbo.
What is clear, however, is that the $9.2 billion project does not have enough money to drive it to completion, plus Blangiardi and
Amemiya have no clear statement on how they would get the needed extra funds.
If there is no more money, there will be no more pile drivers and no more glowing predictions.
As to the subject of no more funding, early in the mayor’s race, Blangiardi said, “I would absolutely want to examine stopping it,” if there is no promised funding.
Amemiya said “everything needs to be done to try to finish rail including modifications to the product to reduce costs, but if we exhaust all alternatives then of course we need to put in a pause.”
Both men, however, issued a caution that they were not in favor of raising property taxes (Honolulu’s only significant taxing power) to bail out rail.
So clearly, we have strong support for rail, no support for “raise taxes to bring home the train.”
If a confident ability to lead defines leaders, we still have more questions than promises and more dilemmas than plans.
Instead, we have two politicians with a demonstrated ability to talk and and talk, struck mute when the question is, “What will you do about rail?”
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
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