Defeat of HART charter amendment could result in added delays and costs

The chairman of the board overseeing the city’s rail construction project said Oahu voters’ decision to reject a proposed amendment to the Honolulu City Charter might cause additional delays and costs for the $8 billion-plus project now scheduled to open in late 2025.

The six-paragraph ballot question would have made clear how many Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation board members are needed to hold quorum and how many are needed to take a vote, two questions that have been gray areas for the board over the last year or so due to a conflict between a city-created agency and the language in a mandate imposed by state lawmakers.

The measure was defeated resoundingly with 138,594 “no” votes, or 58.5 percent, to 98,463 “yes” votes, or 41.5 percent. There were also 25,476 blank votes.

HART board Chairman Damien Kim said the ambiguity will continue making it more difficult to achieve quorum and to hold a vote. Delays in votes on critical, time-sensitive matters such as change orders and eminent domain actions ultimately “could add more costs,” he said.

At the board’s last meeting, on Nov. 1, there were enough board members to establish quorum and hear presentations but not enough voting members present to make a decision, he said.

Kim said he wasn’t surprised by the results. The board was “a little late” in putting out the word to the public via TV and radio announcements. Absentee mail ballots already had been sent, and “a lot of people vote when the ballots first come out,” he said.

Some voters may have been in the mood to vote “no” on all three questions being asked of them, he said. The two, highly publicized state constitutional questions also were defeated resoundingly.

A proposal to convene a constitutional convention was defeated handily by a more than 2-to-1 margin. The so-called property tax-for-education constitutional amendment was invalidated by the Hawaii Supreme Court, but people chose to mark their choices anyway with about the same number of voters filling in the “no” box.

The complexity of the HART charter question also may have added to its defeat, Kim said. “I guess it being kind of a five-part question may have gotten people frustrated and not want to read the whole thing and understand it.”

Specifically, the amendment would have:

>> Formally increased the number of board members to 15 (10 voting, five nonvoting) from the original 10 (nine voting, one nonvoting).

>> Stipulated that six of the 10 voting board members need to be present for a valid vote to occur.

>> Stipulated that the presence of six board members, either voting or nonvoting, constitutes quorum in order to conduct a meeting but not take votes.

Community advocate Natalie Iwasa, often a critic of HART’s actions, said her main beef with the charter question was that it would have left the board with 10 voting members when there should be an odd number of seats to avoid tie votes.

Iwasa said she believes other voters who rejected the charter amendment were sending a message about their unhappiness with the costs and delays.

“I think there are a lot of people out there who are just tired of the whole thing and used it to express their opposition to rail in general,” Iwasa said.

Kim said some people argue falsely that the amendment was designed to allow the board to operate more secretively. That’s far from the truth, especially since all board meetings are now broadcast live on ‘Olelo community television and its website, he said.

The issue arose when the state Legislature in summer 2017 decided to require that four nonvoting positions be added to the original 10 board members on the HART board as part of Act 1, which granted the rail project a $2.4 billion bailout package to deal with escalating costs.

Since then the now 14-member board has been operating under the assumption that eight (voting or nonvoting) members need be present to fulfill quorum requirements and that eight (voting) members need be present to conduct a vote.

The board has been using those higher thresholds out of an abundance of caution and in the hopes of avoiding lawsuits based on Sunshine Law or quorum issues, Kim said.

In giving the OK for the charter amendment to be placed on the ballot, the City Council added its own wrinkle by proposing to add a 15th member, a voting member, that it appoints.