New construction bids show the costs to build Honolulu’s rail transit system are rising sharply — and local transit leaders remain uncertain whether they’ll ultimately be able to deliver the project on budget.

This week, rail officials opened three bids to build the transit system’s first nine stations. Each of those bids exceeded the project’s budget for that work by more than $100 million.

The least expensive bid — a $294.5 million proposal from Nan Inc. — still exceeded what rail officials had budgeted by about 60 percent.

"Clearly our estimates right now are suspect," Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation board Vice Chairman Don Horner said Thursday.

HART Executive Director Dan Grabauskas blamed the difference on a "volatile" construction market, after recent legal challenges to rail halted construction for more than a year.

When he joined the project more than two years ago, "there wasn’t a crane in the sky," Grabauskas told HART’s board Thursday. "It’s a pretty red-hot market today."

The bids to build those nine stations are among the first to be opened for some $1.2 billion in total budgeted construction work to go out this year.

Now rail officials are bracing for the actual costs to be considerably more expensive, and they’re not sure yet whether contingency dollars will fully cover the rising construction prices.

"I’ll be able to answer … in the next few months, when we actually get through these bids," the likelihood of the entire rail project finishing on budget, Grabauskas said Thursday.

HART, which oversees rail’s completion, budgeted some $184 million, including contingency dollars, to build the first nine stations running from a region east of Kapolei to Aloha Stadium, rail officials said Thursday.

In addition to the Nan Inc. bid, Nordic PCL bid $312.3 million, and Hensel Phelps bid $320.8 million to do that work.

Even though Nan bid the lowest, it won’t necessarily be awarded the contract.

Rail officials continued to review the bids Thursday to make sure they complied with what the city asked. Unless there’s some flaw in the documents, the city likely won’t re-bid the station work, Grabauskas said.

HART board member Robert Bunda suggested that rail staff scrutinize the specifications in the contract to see what might have caused the bids’ spike in cost.

Another major contract out to bid, to build the second 10-mile guideway leg of the project, was budgeted to cost at least $750 million, Grabauskas said. The final bids for that contract will be opened in November, rail officials said.

"We expect that it will be higher" than what was budgeted, Grabauskas said. "I don’t know how much higher."

The total contingency fund for rail stands at $563 million, and officials budgeted for a balance of more than $190 million upon completion of the project — a sort of "secondary contingency" that could also go toward the spiking construction costs, Grabauskas said.

However, rail officials don’t know whether those dollars will offset the rising costs.

Grabauskas further pointed to a tighter schedule to complete the work (also due to the lawsuit delays) for helping to cause the bids to be "substantially" higher than what HART expected.

The elevated rail line’s first leg, to Aloha Stadium, is scheduled to open in 2017. The full 20-mile, 21-station line, ending at Ala Moana Center, is set to start running in 2019.

"That timeline is not worth $100 million perhaps," Horner said of the added costs due to the tighter schedule. It’s not yet clear how much the accelerated pace to build would cost.

Nonetheless, Horner said, "we need to look at all the options" to try to keep the island’s rail project on budget.

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