Mayor’s race alone cannot decide fate of rail

No matter who the mayor of Honolulu is or will be, the mayor alone cannot unilaterally stop the rail project unless at least four City Council members of like mind join the mayor in that effort.

To explain how to stop the train in its tracks, let’s assume a scenario whereby a mayor no longer wants to expend funds for the rail endeavor:

An anti-steel-wheels-on-steel-rails mayor sends a budget to the City Council for approval and that budget does not include any funding for the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART). Subsequently, assuming the majority (five of nine) City Council members support the rail project, the Council counters the mayor and restores the funding for rail. The Council then sends the budget bill back to the mayor containing funding for HART. The mayor responds with a veto of the budget bill. It takes two-thirds, or a total of six Council members to override the mayor’s veto.

Thereby, if the Council were to have four members in agreement with the mayor, and these four members voted to sustain the mayor’s veto, the budget bill override would be defeated and funding for the rail would come to a halt. The mayor cannot stop the train unless the mayor has a minimum of four Council members agreeing to that position when it comes to the budget season.

There are four Council seats up for grabs in the 2012 election and the remaining five members not up for re-election have all supported steel-wheels-on-steel-rails to come to fruition.

One could deduce then, that in the absence of the five Council members currently in office not changing their position, that all four open seats up for election would need their constituents from each respective Council district to send to City Hall a "stop this train from leaving" candidate to make any anti-rail mayor in office be of value.

What would happen to the money collected for the rail project if the steel-wheeled train were stopped?

The mayor could propose the funds be expended for light rail, monorail, urban maglev or even rubber-tire- on-concrete technology instead, and ask that be pursued. If allowed to do so, HART then could be charged to oversee construction of the new transportation mode. Changes would be presented to the federal government to maximize funding options.

The mayor could also request from the Legislature that Act 247 (Hawaii Session Laws 2005) be amended and allow for the funds to be used for highway technology — bus rapid transit, for example. Another possibility would be to have the money returned to the city — almost a billion dollars collected thus far — and ask the Legislature for redress, and open the discussions for public debate as to what we should do.

In the end, it is important to know that the mayor cannot stop a project by merely refusing to release funds like the governor can do as the executive with the state Legislature. In contrast, a completely different setup exists at City Hall when it comes to funding HART.

HART has a level of autonomy to carry out its operations that in the event a budget bill gets passed to fund HART, the mayor is without the authority or ability to sit on the funds and have them lapse. The mayor is trumped by the language of the City Charter that puts the purse strings for HART in the domain of the City Council, and that battle was already fought last year and the mayor lost.

To put it bluntly, all the chatter about a mayoral race to feature who is for and who is against the steel-wheel rail is moot without first securing four Council candidates in tandem who, too, exclaim the rail project as it stands needs to come to a halt.

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Tom Berg is the city councilman for District 1 (Ewa Beach to Kaena Point).