Oversensitive types might take offense that a new group of business chiefs in Hawaii presumes “to educate the residents of Oahu” about the benefits of the city’s rail project.
Move Oahu Forward’s mission statement imagines that residents remain uninformed about the $5.27 billion project and that those who oppose it or fear it will cost too much to build and maintain merely need to be schooled.
So the organization will raise funds and mount a public relations campaign to bring the unenlightened around to its point of view. Its members apparently believe that citizens just need reassurances — no worries, brah — to embrace rail.
Well, since the city has already spent $5 million or so on public relations to promote rail, the group will need to sell a lot of Zippy’s chili and School Kine cookies to gather enough cash to change opponents’ minds.
Not that the organization will go that route. Move Oahu Forward is composed of leaders in the islands’ heavyweight divisions of industry, including building contractors, developers, hotels, utility companies, banks and trusts, health and other insurance companies, hospitals and lawyers, who can surely scrape up a few dollars to drop into the bucket. (No coloring books, please.)
Even having ventilated the scent of condescension wafting from the group’s announcement last week, its effort will likely add to the conflict over rail because no one — not even the esteemed U.S. senator who has declared that only a third world war will stop this train from running — can say with any certainty how well or how badly the project will affect Oahu.
Which is why the city adminstration under Mufi Hannemann should have been more forthcoming about the project from the beginning. Instead of peddling rail as a panacea, city leaders should have displayed to the public the spectrum of the project — its advantages as a partial solution to a traffic problem that will worsen as more suburbs are allowed to be developed, its visual encumbrances, its consequences for neighborhoods and commerce — before deciding on its form or whether it should be built at all.
As it happened, when bits and pieces of the project’s effects became known, people became increasingly uncomfortable with it and as that discomfort grew, support for rail began falling.
Shutting out public debate, telling people what’s good for them, doesn’t work. That’s why a bill moving through the state Legislature is trouble.
The best thing about Senate Bill 2927 is that it is based on good intentions. Its chief proponent, state Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz who once sat on the City Council, contends that setting aside zoning rules and standards and fast-tracking development near stations could increase ridership, maybe enough to eliminate the need for constant taxpayer subsidies.
But to increase ridership, the system would have to be reconfigured. More trains and cars would have to be added, which would, in turn, increase expenses, negating any possible gain in fare revenue.
The bill then becomes one to simply ease development and sharply limit public participation in making decisions.
Political leaders somehow feel that cutting out the public stifles opportunity, and it appears some business leaders somehow feel that what’s good for their companies trickles down to their customers. It ain’t necessarily so.
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Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.
