The city has won federal approval to produce the first sections of elevated guideway for the 20-mile Honolulu rail system.
A letter received Thursday from the Federal Transit Administration authorizes the city to spend up to $21.8 million to build and equip a precast yard in Campbell Industrial Park, and to begin production of 30-foot-wide pieces of guideway.
The guideway will be erected on top of concrete columns to allow the trains to travel from East Kapolei to Ala Moana Center above Oahu traffic.
The city last month began drilling and pouring foundations for the support columns for the first two sections of guideway. Those first sections of the rail project will extend about 10 miles from Kapolei to Aloha Stadium.
"This is excellent news for Honolulu," said Daniel Grabauskas, executive director of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation. "It reflects the further confidence the FTA has in this project. With the work on the columns under way, this approval will clear the way for us to have the contractor begin work on constructing the guideway and helps ensure we keep the project on time and on budget."
The precast yard is a critical support facility for the $5.27 billion Honolulu train system, but the FTA in February would not authorize work on the yard because the city and contractor Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. had not finalized site selection for the facility.
The city compiled an environmental review of the 34-acre site in Campbell Industrial Park, and that review was accepted by the FTA in March.
The precast yard will operate 24 hours a day and employ about 70 workers. It will include a concrete batch plant, 11 segment casting beds, three acres of material storage areas and a 3-acre site for rebar preparation.
The facility will produce 30-foot-wide sections of rail guideway that will be trucked to the construction site and assembled on top of the support columns.
The precast yard has been challenged by rail opponents who contend the facility should have been discussed in the environmental impact statement for the rail project.
Federal officials have acknowledged in internal emails that any precast yards for the Honolulu rail project should have been considered in the EIS to avoid allegations of "segmentation" of the project.
Federal agencies such as the FTA are prohibited from "segmenting" projects during environmental reviews, meaning the agencies may not break projects down into smaller components to make the environmental impacts of the overall projects appear less significant.
City officials said they didn’t include the precast facility in the EIS because "it was not reasonably foreseeable as to whether one would be needed for the Project; or if one was required, where it would be located," according to a 2010 city memo to the FTA on the subject.
HART told the FTA in a March 8 letter that HART had determined the precast yard would have no environmental impacts that are significantly different from those described in the EIS, and therefore the precast facility does not require a supplemental EIS.
University of Hawaii law professor Randy Roth, who is part of a group of rail opponents who are suing to block construction of the rail project, has said the precast yard is an example of improper segmentation during the rail environmental review process.
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‘Kokua line’: June Watanabe is on vacation. Her column returns Tuesday.
