Rail board said to be near to hiring new chief

The Honolulu rail board is in final talks to hire as its new top executive a rail technology firm manager who once battled the city over its most expensive rail contract, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

Andrew Robbins has logged about 37 years with Canadian-based Bombardier Transportation, and he’s spent much of that time handling business development, systems projects and sales, according to his resume on the professional networking site LinkedIn.

Currently he’s based in San Francisco, serving as Bombardier’s senior director and head of automated systems business development for the Americas, according to that resume.

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation board is scheduled to resume its closed-session discussions on a new executive director Monday. Terrence Lee, who leads the committee assigned to recruit HART’s new director, said Thursday that he’s fairly confident they’ll agree on a selection then. He declined to comment on whether it would be Robbins.

Robbins did not respond to an emailed request for comment Wednesday.

If the board follows through and hires Robbins, he would become former rail CEO Dan Grabauskas’ permanent replacement. He would also eventually take over for interim Executive Director Krishniah Murthy, who has a yearlong $400,000 deal to oversee HART through December.

Robbins would join HART as train and system testing is expected to accelerate under the agency’s “core systems” contractor, Hitachi-owned Ansaldo Honolulu JV. In 2011, Ansaldo and Bombardier were among the three rival finalists vying for that public contract — the largest in the state’s history. The winner would design and build the train cars, and it would operate the transit line for up to 10 years.

Ansaldo’s bid came in at $1.4 billion; Bombardier’s was $234 million less, but Ansaldo received the contract after the city disqualified Bombardier’s bid. Soon after, Robbins helped lead a protracted protest and legal challenge against the city to overturn the Ansaldo award.

The dispute centered on a proposed liability cap and whether Bombardier’s push to change part of the cap’s contract language, which it found faulty, should have led to its disqualification. Robbins, as Bombardier’s vice president for business development, argued that city officials unfairly disqualified its bid without giving the proper chance to appeal.

“They played gotcha. ‘We gotcha. You’re out,’” he told City Council members in 2011, shortly before they deferred a resolution that called for reversing the Ansaldo award.

However, over the next year the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, a Hawaii Circuit Court judge and the Intermediate Court of Appeals would all rule against Bombardier and find that the city properly followed the state’s procurement procedure. The firm eventually dropped its court challenge.

Under Grabauskas, HART would later blame the Bombardier challenges (plus a DCCA challenge by the third firm that competed, Sumitomo Corp. of America) for costing the rail project more than $29 million in change orders to automate the tracks at the rail operations center in Pearl City, where the 20 four-car trains will be stored and repaired.

The challenges prevented HART from talking to Ansaldo about the project, and previous rail leaders had to choose whether to start the design work without Ansaldo’s input or risk waiting too long if the challenges to the contract award lingered, according to Grabauskas, who joined HART in 2012.

“No one knew how long” those challenges from rival bidders Sumitomo and Bombardier would take, he said in early 2014. Former HART board member Kesli Hui once called those change orders a “very expensive lesson” about proceeding too quickly with design work.

Grabauskas resigned as HART’s executive director in August after nearly four years at the helm. He departed under a $282,000 severance deal with the agency board, at a time when rail officials seemed unable to keep up with the project’s steep cost overruns.

If the board doesn’t announce its selection Monday, it’s expected to resume the closed-session at its Aug. 17 meeting.