Keeping Superferry afloat still doesn’t seem feasible

Mufi Hannemann’s curious opening gambit in his independent run for governor is an oldie that flopped with voters four years ago — bringing the ill-fated Superferry back to Hawaii.

It’s the latest sign that the former Honolulu mayor doesn’t think he made mistakes in 2010; he thinks it was voters who screwed up.

In filing his nomination papers Tuesday, Hannemann promised to work to restore the interisland Superferry "from day one."

He offered few details on whether it would be a publicly funded project or another privately financed venture like the one that went bankrupt in 2009 after acrimonious environmental protests and adverse court rulings.

But he gave a hint when he said, "The process that we did rail by is the same process that I believe can be implemented for the Superferry."

Apparently, it hasn’t sunk in that voter unhappiness with his heavy-handed "process" on the $5.26 billion Oahu rail project was a major reason for his 21.6 percentage-point loss to Gov. Neil Abercrombie in the 2010 Democratic primary.

Hannemann said he’d pursue the Superferry more patiently than the state did the last time around, but patience was hardly a hallmark of his push for rail on a hurried schedule geared to his ambitions for higher office.

The city is now paying tens of millions for rail delays and change orders resulting from court-ordered remediation of city lapses on burial surveys and environmental reviews, as well as Hannemann’s much-criticized rush to sign construction contracts years before the city was ready to build.

Voters also will remember the short-lived commuter ferry Hannemann ran between Kalaeloa and Aloha Tower that was shelved when it ended up costing taxpayers about $120 per round trip.

With the Superferry, it’s unlikely that private investors would step forward again after the previous group watched its $300 million ante swirl down the toilet in Hawaii’s capricious political, legal and regulatory environment.

Public hostility on the neighbor islands, especially Kauai, seems as insurmountable as ever.

While the Hawaii Superferry never got a chance to fully test its business plan, there were clear signs that it wasn’t meeting revenue projections on the routes it was running and that seasickness in rough seas was a serious deterrent to ridership.

Unless another set of private investors with a death wish comes along, Superferry II would likely require heavy state and federal investment and steep public subsidies that could become a sinkhole many times the magnitude of the Kalaeloa ferry.

After we sent packing the private operators who invested their own money, it would be a tough challenge for the former mayor to sell bringing back the Superferry as a public enterprise paid out of the wallets of taxpayers.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.