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Come with me, up the grand staircase at Honolulu Hale, to a small conference room on the 3rd floor. On one side of a long table sit five easels, each with a beautiful rendering of one of the stations planned for the city’s proposed $5.5 billion rail line.

It’s stuffy, but the vision is beautiful. A fast-moving train sliding above the traffic. A sense of neighborhood reflected in the design of each station. An alternative to sitting stuck in traffic.

This is a room full of true believers, people who’ve dedicated a serious part of their professional lives to making this project happen. It’s personal to them.

They are Kirk Caldwell, the city’s managing director and a candidate for mayor if, or more likely when, Mufi Hannemann formally throws his hat into the ring for the governor’s race; Wayne Yoshioka, director of the Department of Transportation Services; Kenneth Toru Hamayasu, general manager of the Honolulu Rapid Transit Project; Bill Brennan, Hannemann’s press secretary; Johnny Brannon, informational affairs officer in the mayor’s office; Scott Ishikawa, public information officer, Rapid Transit Division; and Nalani E. Dahl, public involvement team, Honolulu Rail Transit Project.

It is good for ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ reporter-host Treena Shapiro and me to hear what they have to say. Listen in, as I share some of what we heard.

The Status Quo Is Not Acceptable

Caldwell begins by talking about rail as the mayor’s “No. 1 passion.” He acknowledges that the project is “highly controversial,” but goes on to make the case for why it’s essential, so essential that he left his law practice to work for the mayor to help get it done. After describing the three or four previous unsuccessful attempts to build a rapid transit project for Honolulu — all of which have been ably described by Treena on our special page devoted to rail, he warns, “if this project dies, it’ll be another 20 years” before it’s tried again.

Caldwell is passionate. “The status quo is not acceptable anymore on this island,” he says. He describes the creation of a second city of Kapolei, on the Ewa Plain and the broken promises and broken lives that would result if they don’t provide a better way to get residents who moved there back and forth to their jobs.

He also describes the need to build a city that doesn’t eat into agricultural lands, one where communities are created around transit hubs. He warns that if the “asphalt huggers” get their way, the city will lose $1.5 billion in federal transit funding and that the city’s climb out of the recession will be much slower than it needs to be.

“We’re building a good system,” Caldwell promises.

Yoshioka says that in planning transportation for Oahu there’s always been the understanding that a high capacity transit system would be needed. He describes looking at different options and alignments in 2005 and 2006. The map, he says, “looked like spaghetti.”

Going Over Old Debates

Some of the current debates — elevated or at-grade, for example — were decided by the City Council in 2006 and 2007. The impression the group gives: Those questions are behind us. The job of the staff is to carry out what has been approved by the council, and that includes the 20-mile line under discussion today.

In 2008, the council decided the kind of technology to use — one they say is more off-the-shelf than it is custom — and to the city . In the latter part of that year, the draft Environmental Impact Statement was released. Some 3,000 comments have been received and every one has to be acknowledged. That’s what the city is doing, to make sure that when — not if — the project is challenged in court, no injunction to stop the project will be issued. Because the law will have been followed.

Talk turns to the criticism from city council over the lack of financial information and information about contracts.

Brennan says seven councilors are quite satisfied, and that with the other two it’s “political.” One, Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi, is a former opponent of Hannemann. The other, Councilman Romy Cachola, saw the route moved out of his Salt Lake district to serve the airport. This project, we’re told, was selected by the council in 2006.

is just as much a law that they have to follow as if the council had banned text messaging while driving. In either case, they’d have to carry out the law. The council, with only one different member than today’s council (Councilman Ikaika Anderson), gave marching orders in 2006 after 19 hours of hearings.

We ask about roads. Why doesn’t anybody talk about the need to fix the roads, too? Yoshioka says there $3+ billion in road improvements in the Oahu Regional Transportation Plan. They also point out that the city doesn’t have authority over all the road. It’s the state that’s responsible for the freeways. “We need both,” he says.

The Dispute With The Governor

Then comes the dispute with the governor. She’s clearly an obstacle to the rail project, and from this table it’s obvious that they’re resigned to the fact, if not happy about it, that it could be the next governor who gives the project the green light.

“She is the accepting authority,” Caldwell says of Gov. Linda Lingle. “There’s no requirement that she accept or that she must accept.” But he then goes on to question why she thinks she needs her own financial analysis, when the state isn’t on the hook for the project and financial analysis is not part of the EIS process.

Caldwell points out that there have been three separate financial studies. The Federal Transit Administration paid for them because it will be putting up $1.5 billion.

“All three came back and said we were in the ballpark,” he says. What Lingle should be doing is determining whether the city followed the law and looked at the impacts of the project and addressed them, Caldwell says. Impacts are the issue, not the financial plan. Finances, he says, are not a valid reason for her to reject the project.

The result of the delay? “People are not getting back to work as fast as they could,” Caldwell says. More people are doomed — yes, that’s the word he used — to be stuck in traffic longer. He acknowledges that the mayor, his boss, could be the mayor to start the rail project and the governor to finish it. Sub text, of course, is that Caldwell could be the mayor to make it happen.

In the meantime, says Hamayasu, the projects general manager, they’re “ready to start construction.”

But what about the lawsuit that’s expected from opponents, and a possible injunction to keep the workers idle? “If we follow the process properly,” Caldwell says, “we survive the motion for an injunction. We can defend the process. We won’t ram it through.”

And what about other concerns? Talk turns to the iwi kupuna, or Native Hawaiian remains, and acquiring property, among other challenges. They say the phased approach to archeology will mean they’ll know exactly where the line is going and that the elevated train is much less disruptive.

They speak with respect for the Native Hawaiians and for the process of working with them. Almost reverence, really. An at-grade system would need a trench 30-50 feet wide, as much as 10-20 feet deep, they say. That would be worse. The elevated line will use posts that can be moved to avoid disturbing sites. They also point to the history of construction along the route and the destruction that may have already occurred.

In the end, Caldwell admits, “I drank the Kool-Aid,” speaking of the benefits of rail. It happened when he was a student in Boston and used the train there. But it’s clear he’s drunk deeper this decade, both when he was in the Legislature and now that he’s in city hall.

Finally, they make clear, in Caldwell’s words: “This is not Mufi’s train.”

From this discussion, that’s obvious. The people in the room have dedicated countless hours to studying the rail project, to explaining it, to pitching it and to listening to concerns about it. It’s theirs. They own it.

At the end of our conversation, I can’t say that their plan is the perfect solution. But there’s no doubt as I head out into the now quiet Honolulu Hale that they’re ready to take more slings and arrows, if only they can get construction underway and prove their critics wrong. That, they seem sure, will be certain.