The head of the Honolulu rail authority acknowledged Thursday that the entire 20-mile rail line will not actually open as scheduled by the end of 2025, saying the authority now expects the $9.2 billion project to open a few months later, in March 2026.

Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation CEO Andrew Robbins told the HART board of directors that the coronavirus pandemic is to blame for the latest delay. The COVID-19 crisis also has delayed the interim opening of the rail line from East Kapolei to Aloha Stadium that had been planned for later this year, and has already been pushed back to the end of March.

The city signed a formal grant agreement with the Federal Transit Administration in 2012 that included a pledge that the entire rail line and 21 stations would be finished and operating by Jan. 31, 2020, but that old completion date was abandoned years ago.

More recently, the FTA has been projecting the project would be finished in September 2026, and insisted that the city incorporate that later date into its 2019 rail “recovery plan” that is intended to demonstrate HART has the means to complete the project with the resources that it has without further delays.

HART, meanwhile, set its own target completion date of the end of 2025, a deadline that has now slipped.

Robbins told the HART board Thursday that the city’s new, later opening date of March 2026 for the entire rail line is still “well within” the requirements of a rail recovery plan that HART submitted to the FTA last year.

However, there are continuing doubts about when the project will actually be finished. Federal consultant Hill International Inc. noted in a new report that HART’s latest risk management calculations suggest there is only a 65% probability the project will be done by December 2026.

The delays are being blamed on COVID-19 because the new coronavirus has prevented bidders for the rail public-private partnership, or P3, from completing their proposals.

The proposed P3 contract would be the largest in city history, involving an estimated $1.4 billion in construction work. That piece of the contract would include 4.1 miles of elevated rail line, eight train stations in the urban core, and the Pearl Highlands transit center, along with a 1,600-stall parking garage.

The winning P3 bidder also would maintain and operate the entire 20-mile rail line for 30 years.

The P3 bidders had been scheduled to submit their technical proposals for developing the final portion of the rail line in early April, but told the rail authority they were unable to meet that deadline. Robbins has said the problem was that the pandemic prevented the bidders from getting final cost information from their suppliers and subcontractors.

The P3 award date has been repeatedly delayed, and HART now projects the contract will be awarded Aug. 27.

Robbins said in an interview that “the real schedule (for rail) will come out when we get the bids back and we make the award for the P3.” The new P3 contract will set mandatory completion dates for both the construction and the launch of operations for the rail line, and “that will become the firm schedule, if you will,” he said.