Rush by city, not lawsuits, to blame for rail’s expense

City transit officials are tiresome in their dishonest attempts to blame citizen lawsuits for massive cost overruns that are shredding their promise to build Oahu’s $5.26 billion rail line on time and on budget.

In the latest grim news from the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, bids to build nine of the 20 rail stations came in more than 60 percent over the $184 million budgeted and could add $110 million or more to the project’s cost.

With construction still in early phases, the city has already burned nearly half of its overly generous $1 billion contingency fund.

Another likely under-budgeted $750 million contract is still to be bid this year, with more to follow.

As usual, city rail CEO Daniel Grabauskas tried to shift blame to plaintiffs in two lawsuits who won injunctions that delayed construction for a year, claiming costs turned "volatile" after work stopped.

That’s a cheap dodge; the lawsuits wouldn’t have delayed construction one day if judges hadn’t agreed with plaintiffs that the city violated the law in rushing rail.

City politicians and transit officials cut corners, got caught, and it’s nobody’s fault but their own that we’re paying for it.

The Hawaii Supreme Court unanimously found for Paulette Kaleikini that the city acted illegally when it didn’t survey the entire 20-mile route for Hawaiian burials before construction, causing a yearlong delay to do the survey.

In a federal lawsuit led by former Gov. Ben Cayetano and businessman Cliff Slater, the judge issued a mostly overlapping injunction after ruling the city didn’t adequately study an alternate route to the University of Hawaii or the environmental impact on a Kakaako park.

Blaming higher costs on these honest citizens who had to sue to uphold the law when the city wouldn’t is deceit.

The city hurried rail from the start on a schedule more timed to political ambitions than smart planning, and its bad decision to award hundreds of millions in construction contracts three years before construction was ready to begin is the primary cause of current cost overruns.

The Federal Transit Administration warned in 2009 that the city was putting itself in a "pickle" with "unrealistic dates."

An earlier FTA memo observed, "We seem to be proceeding in the hallowed tradition of Honolulu rapid transit studies: never enough time to do it right, but lots of time to do it over."

So ignore cries to send the bill for cost overruns to lawsuit plaintiffs.

The tab rightly belongs to former mayors Mufi Hannemann and Peter Carlisle for their reckless gambles and phony groundbreakings.

And if current Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the City Council don’t clean up the excuse-making HART hierarchy that’s complicit in the poor decisions, give them a share of the bill, too.

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