Who will head the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit next year, when the troubled rail project is scheduled to begin partial operation, remained in doubt Thursday after the HART board couldn’t decide what to do with current CEO Andrew Robbins.

The board rejected the recommendation of its Human Resources Committee to can Robbins, whose three-year contract expires Dec. 31. Board members voted 4-3 to accept the committee’s recommendation but needed more than four votes to pass it.

Board members did not consider a second proposal, to establish a search committee to find a replacement for Robbins.

What happens next is unclear.

Board member Michelle Chun Brunngraber spoke to the uncertainty created by not making a decision.

“HART without Andy would not run well, right?” Brunngraber said. “You have to bring in somebody else, and we don’t know what that is. … If the contract with Andy is not renewed, if it goes month to month, if it’s renewed, I don’t think we’ve thought through all those future things.”

Vice Chairman Terrence Lee said he had lost sleep over the issue of what to do with Robbins, the city’s highest-paid employee with an annual salary of $317,000, a $55,000 annual housing allowance and a $7,200-a- year transportation allowance plus the possibilities of raises and bonuses.

Lee appeared to change his initial vote during meetings of the Human Resources Committee, which held four closed-door sessions evaluating Robbins in August and September.

In Thursday’s open session of the full HART board, Lee voted against the committee’s recommendation and suggested that he might be willing to retain Robbins on a month-to-month basis, but not on another three-year or five-year contract.

“In terms of Andy’s performance, I will readily admit that there’s some decisions that Andy has made that I disagree with,” said Lee, the longest-serving member of the HART board. “On balance, in looking at where we were with this project and where we are today, not withstanding the problems we have, Andy has done a good job in keeping this project on a more stable footing and a more predictable footing than we’ve ever had in the past. Yes, we’ve got some tremendous challenges, but I don’t fault Andy for creating these problems. These are problems that any CEO would have faced, and, frankly, it’s not surprising for a project of this size and complexity. So going forward, I believe it’s important to have stability.”

But Lynn McCrory, chairwoman of HART’s Human Resources Committee, said the panel reviewed a “multitude of issues that were brought up” concerning Robbins performance.

She declined to discuss them in public but said that “there were many, many issues that were not positive, but were negative in terms of the large projects or the small projects. There is a point in time when change is necessary.”

Robbins is HART’s sixth leader in its nine years and only the second to serve on a full-time basis overseeing the $9.2 billion rail project, the largest public works project in Hawaii history.

Along with the end of Robbins’ contract comes a critical deadline on Dec. 31 for HART to explain to Federal Transit Administration officials how it plans to pay for the final leg of construction with a partner that has yet to be identified under a so-called public-private partnership, or P3 agreement.

Lee and Kika Bukoski, the board’s newest member, derailed the HR committee’s recommendation early in Thursday’s meeting by announcing they planned to vote no on the recommendation to let Robbins’ contract expire.

Bukoski called removing Robbins “probably the worst thing at this stage.”

He called Robbins “very passionate and committed to seeing this project to completion,” and a “creative problem solver” working to overcome unforeseen problems, “which is what we need in a leader.”

Other board members hinted at a laundry list of criticisms.

Glenn Nohara offered praise for some aspects of Robbins’ performance but said Robbins failed to provide timely financial and scheduling information “to give us a clearer understanding of where we actually are”; has not provided a decision on the P3 agreement that was expected in August; and has gotten deeds or access to only nine of 39 necessary parcels of land, among other concerns.

“We are not taking a proactive approach to determine our true financial and schedule duration, but we keep making ‘what if’ scenarios and excuses for not presenting this information,” Nohara said.

Board member Hoyt Zia said, “If you look over the life of this project, any given point in time, there’s never a good time for change. I guess I would suggest that now is as good as any time as there will ever be to move forward. … This isn’t being done willy-nilly. But we did take into consideration a desire to give him as much notice as possible so that he could move on out of fairness to him.”