Board members overseeing Oahu’s rail transit project have approved an additional $14 million in cost increases — and nearly half of that expense is due to yet another contract that went out prematurely, project officials say.

In 2009 the city issued construction firm Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. a contract to design the first stretch of the rail system’s elevated guideway. Then, about a year later, it awarded the first design contracts for the stations that would run along that line, rail officials say.

However, those design contracts should have gone out together, or at least close enough together that the guideway and station designs would properly match, Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation Executive Director Dan Grabauskas said Thursday.

Now HART will need to tap nearly $6 million in contingency dollars for Kiewit to make the necessary revisions so that its columns and guideway will be able to sufficiently support the load of the stations. Previously, Kiewit had relied on early engineering assumptions for the stations provided by city general engineering consultant Parsons Brinkerhoff, according to Lorenzo Garrido, HART’s engineering and construction director.

"I don’t know why certain decisions were made in 2009," said Grabauskas, who joined HART as the agency’s head in April 2012. (HART formed in 2011, taking over responsibility of the project from city transit officials.) "The way that we are doing it now is that we are putting out contracts that complement each other, at the same time."

At least one board member was visibly frustrated Thursday with the latest delay-related costs.

"Who the hell designed this project? I think they should be responsible," William "Buzz" Hong said during Thursday’s joint meeting of the board’s Finance and Project Oversight committees. Kiewit should be compensated for the extra work, Hong said, but whoever submitted the original station design details should be held at least partly responsible for the cost.

Grabauskas explained that "assumptions were given" to Kiewit based on what the city’s consultants believed the station loads eventually would be.

Relying too heavily on assumptions, Hong said, "makes an ass of you and me."

It’s not the first time that the island’s public rail project has had to draw from its taxpayer-funded contingency account to cover the consequences for contracts that went out too early.

The city has also paid $76 million in construction-delay costs to Kiewit and its joint venture, Kiewit Kobayashi, for contracts that went out between 2009 and 2011. For that work the firms had to wait as long as 22 months in some cases for the city to get all the proper federal approvals before they could start.

In those cases the city opted to award those construction contracts at an early stage in part because it wanted to "demonstrate to the public that tangible progress was being made" on rail, according to a December 2011 letter from the city to the Federal Transit Administration.

Meanwhile, in the past two years HART has used — or "burned" — about $90 million in contingency funds, according to a Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation report.

Its contingency fund now stands at just under $540 million. Its "burn rate" — how quickly the project is using those dollars — appears OK, being well above the $315 million "buffer zone" recommended for this point, according to a recent HART report.

However, construction is ramping up, and the project faces significant, looming budget challenges. Recent bids to build the first nine stations came in at least $100 million higher than rail officials had originally anticipated, so they scrapped those bids in hopes that issuing new ones will drive down costs. Beside those nine stations, a slew of construction remains to complete the 20-mile, 21-station system.

Also on Thursday the HART board listened to officials from San Diego State University, University of California-San Diego and Arizona State University talk about how rail affected their campuses. The upshot: The lines are popular now, but only after years of careful planning.

At ASU, for instance, parking permit sales fell from more than 28,000 in 2006 to fewer than 17,000 this year.

Oahu’s rail line will pass by the University of Hawaii-West Oahu campus, Leeward and Honolulu community colleges, the UH John A. Burns School of Medicine and Hawaii Pacific University’s downtown campus — but it notably doesn’t end at the island’s busiest campus: UH-Manoa, where more than 20,000 students attend classes.

Rail officials, however, envision eventually extending the line to UH-Manoa.

Grabauskas said it was still worthwhile for those overseeing Oahu’s rail project to get input from SDSU, UC-San Diego and ASU on how rail is working for their campuses and student bodies, because the local rail system will serve students at the other island campuses. HART spent about $6,000 to fly the school officials to Honolulu, HART spokeswoman Jeanne Mariani-Belding said.