In Thursday’s State of the City address, Mayor Peter Carlisle restated — more than once — his commitment to transparency in conducting the city’s business.

But based on how some of the particulars about Honolulu’s $5.27 billion rail project have come to light, the administration still hasn’t grasped how to carry out that pledge.

Only weeks after it emerged belatedly that the city is on the hook for a $15 million change-order charge, the Star-Advertiser learned that city Managing Director Doug Chin approved a request to suspend the normal limits on debt service for the rail project. Chin acknowledged that City Council members had not been specifically alerted to the suspension, but he pointed out that the pertinent facts were in budget documents, and that there is no legal requirement that the Council be notified.

That misses the whole spirit of transparency, which should be guided more by public interest than by legal necessity. Officials guiding the rail project should be out front and center, identifying the issues of public concern — and clearly anything connected with associated debt is a concern — and explaining them fully.

In this case, for example, there is a reasonable rationale. The city policy is to limit debt interest payments to 20 percent of the operating budget, which makes sense in ongoing city management. By contrast, rail financial planning is complicated by project-specific circumstances, federal approval timelines clashing with the impetus to seize on lower contracting costs. In the long run, it should save the city money to get contracts rolling, and there is a rail-funding mechanism in place — via the Oahu general excise tax surcharge and anticipated federal funds — to pay off debt service without adding to the property tax burden.

So why didn’t the city simply make that case overtly to the Council? It took a U.S. Freedom of Information Act filing to the Federal Transit Administration by the Star-Advertiser’s Kevin Dayton to obtain the financial assessment.

In Thursday’s speech, the mayor restated the value of communication, a theme that recurred in comments he made to the media later.

"It’s very obvious that we’ve been spending our time trying to build rail and not remembering that what we need to do is assure everybody that it’s going to be done correctly," he said. If this is a sincere assessment, Carlisle must follow through and correct what has been a poor messaging campaign. Public confidence in this project may well hinge on this.

Elsewhere in his address, which underscored the need to be forward-looking, Carlisle made several key points:

» The city seems to be stepping up its use of digital tools in handling some nuts-and-bolts municipal duties. Enabling online permitting and electronic submittal of plans, he said, is streamlining operations, and that’s good news for business and overall efficiency.

» Investments and public-private partnerships in affordable housing and homelessness will include a new "Pathways Project" for the chronically homeless. Carlisle promised details on this in the coming weeks, but it sounds like a sensible resumption of plans, shelved by the previous administration, to care for those with health conditions and disabilities that often keep them out of conventional shelters. The city now is shouldering its role in dealing with Honolulu’s homelessness problem.

» Carlisle has pledged that the city will identify and map Oahu acreage that will have the "important agricultural lands" designation and be eligible for landowner incentives to help protect it for cultivation. The public deserves a firm timetable for this. Carlisle noted the plans for a new agricultural park north of Wahiawa, but several recent land-use approvals suggest that the time to protect Oahu’s agricultural capacity is fleeting.

» The mayor extolled the completion of updated Sustainable Community Plans, including the one for the North Shore. That’s encouraging, but what counts is how the plans play out in reality. Some residents of Haleiwa, for example, are worried that the city’s proposal to sell some undeveloped park land runs afoul of plans the community has made, making such blueprints meaningless.

» Carlisle reminded listeners that the city’s primary project, the rail guideway, should serve everyone by focusing construction along the corridor rather than allowing urban sprawl in all parts of Oahu as the population continues to grow.

"It’s about the future, not the past," he said. That’s true, and it’s the best reason to keep information lines open and clear, starting now.