Honolulu rail CEO Andrew Robbins gets $10,000 bonus but no raise after evaluation

The board of directors of the Honolulu rail authority has granted Chief Executive Officer Andrew Robbins a $10,000 bonus as part of his evaluation, but declined to give him a pay increase today.

Terrence Lee, vice chairman of the board of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, said the decision to forgo a raise for Robbins should not be interpreted as a lack of confidence in his leadership.

“Because the criteria that we used were heavily performance-based, it came down to the simple fact that certain of those criteria haven’t yet been met,” Lee said.

The public announcement of the results of Robbins’ evaluation was made at the same meeting that the board unanimously approved a $160 million settlement of a claim filed by contractor Ansaldo Honolulu JV in connection with years of delays on the project.

That agreement boosts the total for change orders and delay claims on the project to more than $500 million so far. The price of the project has increased over the years from about $5 billion to $9.2 billion including financing costs, but those cost increases were almost entirely caused by events that played out before Robbins took charge in 2017.

Robbins’ evaluation, which he agreed to make public, says he “did a commendable job of getting up-to-speed and taking control of this high-profile, complex program, and had some notable achievements.”

Those accomplishments included launching a new effort to pursue a public-private partnership, or P3 agreement, to complete the last 4.16 miles of rail line and rail stations through the Honolulu city center.

HART is seeking qualified companies to enter into a public-private partnership with the city, and expects to award a contract for that work this fall.

The fact that the P3 effort is in its early stages “has a lot to do with where we ended up” on Robbins’ evaluation, Lee said.

The evaluation says he fell short of the board’s expectations on “external relationships” such as educating the public about using rail and its benefits and costs, and also he relied too heavily on outside consultants without sufficiently scrutinizing their work before it is submitted to the HART board.

Robbins receives a base salary of $316,992 under his current three-year contract, which began in 2017 and is scheduled to expire in September 2020. However, HART Board Chairman Damien Kim said the board intends to extend that agreement by three months so that it would finish at the end of next year.