HART board again voices frustration at Robbins

Rail Chief Executive Officer Andrew Robbins said Thursday that he and his staff will submit to Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the Honolulu City Council in the coming days a report detailing why the city should continue pursuing a third-party partner to complete the troubled $10 billion-plus project.

Robbins said he will submit the report even though he’s been told by the mayor, a majority of Council members and seven of the nine voting HART board members to drop the two-year effort.

A majority of the Honolulu Authority of Rail Transportation board’s members voiced displeasure with the staff position. Board member Hoyt Zia said Robbins would be considered “insubordinate” to their wishes in a private business setting.

Robbins’ current contract expires at the end of the year, and the HART Human Resources Committee gave the strongest indication yet that he will not be retained when committee Chairwoman Lynn McCrory announced that “some names of potential candidates (to replace Robbins) were discussed” by her panel. McCrory said her committee also will move out at its Nov. 20 meeting a recommendation to begin a search for a successor while identifying an interim director.

Members of the board’s Finance Committee, meanwhile, said they’re suspicious that the HART staff is low-balling the cost projections to complete the 20-mile, East Kapolei-to-Ala Moana line and that they want to see more realistic forecasts before they’ll pass the agency’s upcoming budget.

Overall, it was a contentious day of HART board meetings, and the most heated exchange took place when Robbins and HART P3 Project Manager Mike Boomsma gave a Power Point presentation on why they felt it was important that they continue to work with bidders on their effort to secure a public-private partnership.

“The P3 shifts cost and schedule risks and long-term (operations and maintenance) risk to the P3 proponent,” Robbins said, adding that multiple teams continue to want a deal. As in the past, however, he provided no costs or other details citing procurement laws that are designed to protect the proprietary information of bidders.

To shift gears and seek a traditional design-build contract to complete the project at this point would only add more costs, he said.

Earlier in the meeting, city Managing Director Roy Amemiya reiterated Caldwell’s position that the administration considers a P3 option off the table.

”The funds that HART currently expects to receive are not sufficient to cover the remaining costs of the project,” Amemiya said. To date, conceptual plans he’s heard from HART so far “lack meaningful financial and scheduling information.”

But midway through the presentation, board members cut them off, noting that they had not sought a rehash of the P3 argument, but had wanted Robbins to explain how HART and the city could proceed without it.

“We’ve heard this presentation a number of times before,” said HART board Chairman Tobias Martin. The board wanted Robbins to focus on what steps were being taken to “try to figure out how we can build this project” given that recent projections show a significant drop in property and hotel room taxes available to fund it, he said.

Martin also noted that HART and the Caldwell administration would need to work together on a recovery plan to the Federal Transit Administration by the end of the year or risk losing $250 million in funding it had earlier committed based on a 20-mile, 21-­station line.

But board member Terrance Lee said he doesn’t believe the P3 discussion is over, pointing out Mayor­-elect Rick Blangiardi will take over from Caldwell on Jan 2.

“As far as I understand, that new city administration is open to rejoining the P3 notwithstanding the fact that our current administration is not,” he said. “We as board members owe a fiduciary obligation to the taxpayer to make sure that whatever decision we make is going to be the most cost-effective decision … and to say that ‘because this administration has decided to pull out, and that’s the end of it,’ I think is shortsighted and irresponsible.”

Zia said the failure of the board to muster up the eight votes needed to get Robbins to “cease and desist” troubled him.

“It sounds to me like the idea is to basically wait out this administration and get to a new mayor and hope that the new mayor and administration … want to resurrect the P3,” he said. “You don’t have the support of your city, you don’t have the support of your board, where do you expect to end up? And by the way, I hate to remind that at the end of the year … your tenure will be over, too.”

After the meeting, Robbins told reporters that he expected to submit his formal recommendation to city officials in the coming days.

Thursday night, Blan­giardi told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that in recent weeks he’s spoken to Lee, Robbins, FTA Deputy Administrator K. Jane Williams and Caldwell and decided he would “stand down” and let the current players try to figure out the matter.

“It’s one mayor at a time,” Blangiardi said, adding that he informed Robbins of his decision Monday. After talking to the various parties, he said, he decided that “as mayor-elect, I was not going to insert myself into the situation.”

In related news it was announced during the Finance Committee meeting that Transportation Services Director Wes Frysztacki resigned from the city effective Wednesday and that Deputy Director Jon Nouchi, as acting DTS director, would serve on the HART board in the interim.