David Shapiro: The public has been kept in the dark about the details of Honolulu’s railroad restoration plan

When it comes to money and the Honolulu Rail, we’ve heard it all.

We heard former mayors Mufi Hannemann and Peter Carlisle repeatedly pledge to complete the train from Kapolei to the Ala Moana Center on time and within the $5.2 billion budget set out in the original agreement with the Federal Transit Administration .

We heard former Mayor Kirk Caldwell promise that two federal bailouts totaling $4 billion would be enough to complete, but he walked away with a cost of over $10 billion and the project that’s going under decade too late.

Now Mayor Rick Blangiardi says he can complete a working system for $10 billion, but only if it ends two stops before the Ala Moana Center at Halekauwila and South Streets and drops a parking garage key in the Pearl Highlands to start the system for Open to commuters in central Oahu.

I want to believe it works. I want to thank him for trying to make lemonade out of the lemon he inherited and salvaging something for our money. I want to applaud him for taking charge and involving his entire administration instead of just relying on suspicious accounts from the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

But I always worry about the money.

Blangiardi often says, “If the numbers don’t make sense, then the strategy doesn’t make sense.” In his rail rehabilitation plan, which will be submitted to the FTA this month, he didn’t explain how the numbers make sense.

He says it’s because the FTA, from which the city is seeking $700 million in late federal railroad funding, has directed the city not to discuss plan details until they are reviewed in Washington.

It’s not just the public in the dark.

The HART Board of Directors had many unanswered questions when initiating the remediation plan, but nonetheless quickly approved it before the June 30 deadline to submit the plan to the FTA.

City council members were also unable to get answers to many questions, but approved the plan in a fraction of the time it would take them to approve a $50,000 bike lane.

Major railroad decisions have always been pushed through under the pressure of a specific deadline, and questions have always been discouraged. Look where it got us.

The unanswered questions are important.

A new HART costing that saved $1 billion from projected costs was based on assumption as well as fact and had political overtones. The study was conducted before the massive inflation we are now witnessing.

A proposed diversion through the Dillingham Boulevard corridor, critical to the savings, has not been fully developed or subjected to environmental and other reviews.

HART paints the rosiest picture again, where nothing goes wrong. When did that ever happen in that train wreck? HART CEO Lori Kahikina is already talking about raising money to expand to Ala Moana and the University of Hawaii as if the difficult eight years that lie ahead had already gone smoothly.

We can only hope that the FTA demands more answers than the HART Board and City Council. And shares them with the taxpaying public for a change.

Reach David Shapiro at [email protected].