Honolulu officials recently canceled their long-stalled effort to award the construction contract for rail’s final 4.3 miles and eight stations into town, opting to start over instead.

Andrew Robbins, who started as the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation’s new executive director this week, said that the agency’s decision last month to cancel procurement eventually could save on cost and time.

It also opens opportunities for the city to finally enter into public-private partnerships for rail, which could help take some of the burden off taxpayers, Robbins added.

However, it remains to be seen whether HART can still deliver the full 20-mile, 21-station line by December 2025 now that it has restarted the selection process to build rail’s most challenging stretch through Honolulu’s crowded urban core.

Chicago-based investment management firm Jones Lang LaSalle has estimated that under a new procurement it could take up to 18 months to award the contract.

“That is a conservative estimate in our world, but we heard from HART folks that here things take a really long time and so we padded it a little bit,” Jill Jamieson, a managing director with JLL, told the rail agency’s board at its Aug. 17 meeting.

Terrence Lee, the HART board’s vice chairman, said Monday that the procurement reset leaves the rail agency “less wiggle room” in its master schedule. Meanwhile, rail’s independent federal oversight contractor already had expressed doubts in its recent monthly reports whether the December 2025 date is realistic.

HART initially froze its selection of a builder for the City Center guideway and stations back in December 2015 amid uncertainty that the city would even have the money to pay for that work.

The agency then canceled the procurement altogether on Aug. 24, according to HART officials — four days before the Legislature met in special session to consider a new, $2.4 billion bailout package for the over-budget transit project. Gov. David Ige signed that funding package into law Tuesday.

Three joint-venture finalists were vying for the construction contract when HART froze procurement, officials say. Last year, the contract work was valued at nearly $1.4 billion, according to a HART report. In the past two years, two of the finalists have run into problems that complicate their proposals, Robbins said.

A proposal from the joint venture Shimmick Traylor Granite, or STG, was complicated after construction giant AECOM, which has done rail design work, purchased Shimmick Construction earlier this summer, Robbins said. STG is building rail from Aloha Stadium to Middle Street.

Another finalist saw some of the joint venture’s companies back out, Robbins added.

“Analysis showed that cancellation would be in HART’s and public’s best interest,” HART spokesman Bill Brennan wrote in an email Monday.

Robbins said he’s considering whether the same public-private partnership approach that JLL recommended earlier this year would make sense to build the City Center section, which runs from Middle Street to Ala Moana Center.

Jamieson has said that taxpayers would benefit if the city used private third parties to pay for the project’s final 4 miles into town plus a major transit hub at Pearl Highlands as that work occurs.

Under that model, known as “design-build-finance,” the private investors wouldn’t be paid back until the project is finished, according to a March JLL report that was funded by the Honolulu-based social investment fund Ulupono Initiative.

Design-build-finance provides an added incentive for the third parties financing the work to control costs and deliver the project as soon as possible, according to Jamieson.

“If they don’t finish, they don’t get paid — and it’s remarkable how that changes and incentivizes different behavior” she told the HART board last month.

Such a model has been used to complete other major infrastructure projects in North America, including the Evergreen rapid transit extension in Vancouver, British Columbia, which saw a 16 percent savings in total costs, Jamieson said.

Robbins said he was going to meet with HART staff on Wednesday to further weigh options on the new procurement.

Executive summary of the Honolulu Rapid Transit Project by Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Scribd