Editorial: Keep HART on rail transit job

There’s rich ground to plow for those preparing a litany of complaints against the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART). Its controversial rail project is now vastly behind time and over budget, with the most expensive, final segment, the City Center phase, yet to be built.

Federal investigators are combing through documents for signs of malfeasance and, with subpoenas flying, HART has resisted turning over requested records from the board’s executive sessions.

You can see where the impulse to dismantle HART through a City Charter amendment comes from: widespread mistrust, not the least of which emanates from the City Council.

That said, such a move would almost certainly cause more problems than it would solve, and would be especially poorly timed at this juncture.

Meanwhile, HART could do itself and everyone else a favor by demonstrating its willingness and ability to improve now, addressing its various problems ranging from staff turnover to the public perception that it is not always forthcoming with the facts.

On Aug. 7, the City Council is due to begin discussing the idea of dissolving HART. Council Chairman Ikaika Anderson wants the issue of HART’s future to be put to the voters in 2020 when a new raft of charter amendments will be considered.

HART, the quasi-independent agency supervised by a board and led by Executive Director Andrew Robbins, was established in 2011 and is part of the City Charter. Anderson’s resolution would put on the ballot a question of whether HART should be dissolved and its responsibilities for constructing the rail be transferred to the city Department of Transportation Services (DTS).

Let’s examine the proposal, starting with the problems it seeks to resolve.

The pricetag for the East Kapolei-to-Ala Moana rail system, stretching for 20 miles and including 21 stations, has ballooned from $5.3 billion in 2014 to $9.2 billion now. The steep incline of that cost curve has continued to angle upward — but really has its beginnings before HART was even established by a City Charter amendment, ratified by the voters in 2010.

At the start, while under the supervision of the city’s DTS, the rail project already got off on the wrong track, with contracts issued before all the legal disputes were settled. To make a long story short but no less painful, the misfire resulted in added costs. And that was only the beginning.

Earlier this year, a state audit noted a particularly troubled period from 2014 to 2016, when costs far outpaced estimates; HART officials did not publicly disclose the overruns on a regular procedure set by the board.

Conflicts with the Legislature, which insisted on greater state oversight in exchange for a needed tax-revenue boost, led to another charter amendment in 2016 to put eventual operations and maintenance under the city transportation department.

But moving rail-construction duties to DTS at this stage could upend the project at a precarious moment. Surely it could delay releasing the rest of rail’s $1.55 billion federal subsidy, and endanger the pending public-private partnership for building the last segment.

Further, even if one sets aside the early stumbles the transportation department made with construction oversight, DTS is an administrative agency that does not have a board or routine public meetings, so it’s not clear how much more transparent things would be.

Anderson has a high hurdle to clear to outline how the change would yield more than another cause for delay. The focus needs to be on getting rail to its scheduled partial launch at the close of 2020. HART will reach the end of its life cycle at some point — but this is not the time.