Audit rail’s PR expenditures

Daniel Grabauskas came to town saying all the right things and now, with some appropriate prodding by the City Council, the message remains: Spend what needs spending on the rail project but take out the waste.

"The goal is that, with the rail line, we’re going to be clearly and squarely focused on coming in on schedule and at or under budget, and that’s been our focus," Grabauskas told the Star-Advertiser after taking over as executive director of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

Primarily he was talking about construction costs, but the latest issue to emerge from Council deliberations is the roughly $2 million in annual expenditures on staff and contractual public outreach work — everything in the public relations, community education and marketing sphere.

Grabauskas said that expense total seems high to him. Most people in Honolulu would agree, regardless of their position on the planned fixed-rail transit project itself. The Council resolution seeking an auditor’s review of the PR and "public involvement" expenditures should be adopted.

Short of having that kind of detailed study of the actual tasks performed by the contractors, it’s difficult to know which ones are reasonable investments in the context of a project with an price tag of $5.27 billion.

But it’s fair to examine how far the outreach extends into the political realm:

» Carlson Communications has a two-year contract for more than $350,000. The primary deliverable seems to be the blog, "Say Yes to the Honolulu Rail System," that PR veteran Doug Carlson produces each day. Its pro-rail content has included posts on the rail debates among the three leading mayoral candidates. "Yes2Rail is not a political blog," he wrote May 23, but it’s hard to see where the boundaries are.

» Red Monarch Strategies has a one-year contract topping $168,000. Its president, Bennette Misalucha, insisted her email urging the group Filipinos for Rail, which pressed Councilman Romy Cachola for rail support, was separate from her city-paid duties.

» One of the biggest contracts, for more than $1.1 million over two years, went to the multimedia firm Lychee Productions Inc., which did work for the mayoral campaign of former Mayor Mufi Hannemann.

Given the political overhang of all this, those in the oversight role are correct in seeking a full accounting.

The concern about public-involvement spending goes back years, with more than a few eyebrows raised within Council chambers. Often the charge that too much is being spent on PR came from those whose orientation toward the rail project ranged from ambivalence to outright hostility.

But now Honolulu is in the midst of an enormously contentious election season, in which one of the mayoral candidates, former Gov. Ben Cayetano, has made his determination to stop the rail project a centerpiece of his campaign.

There are private groups, such as the building-industry advocates of Pacific Resource Partnership, that are spending their own money to counter the arguments by rail opponents, and that in itself is fine.

But the various contractors to HART are being paid with taxpayer dollars, and the city must take particular care to see that its outreach efforts are based on community education rather than political advocacy.

An audit ought to clarify such things in the minds of the voters who are funding the whole operation.

If Grabauskas does as promised, working toward good stewardship of tax money entrusted to the project, he may raise the level of trust from the public — which would be the best PR result possible.