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Acting Mayor Kirk Caldwell says that close to 500 new jobs are on the way to Honolulu’s H-Power plant, which converts waste to energy.

At a mayoral debate hosted by the at the Pacific Club last week, Caldwell said: “We have the H-Power 3rd boiler, a $300 million project hiring almost 500 people.”

To check his figure, Civil Beat first contacted .

“We will probably employ somewhere around 35 to 40 people permanantly,” said H-Power spokesman Rodney Smith.

Sounds good.

We then called , based in Pasadena, Calif., which won the city contract to build the boiler.

Getting an employment answer, though, proved more difficult than one might imagine.

First, we called Parson’s Hawaii number, which was incorrectly listed on google. OK, we’re journalists so we figured it out, and called the boiler project’s supervisor.

This man spoke to us but said he wouldn’t talk for publication. He first said he believed 80 workers would be hired for the construction, then backtracked and told Civil Beat there was an “official” number that we could find elsewhere.

We called Parson’s back and asked to speak to someone who could (and would) comment on the record.

We were directed to Mike Swartz, the project manager for the boiler project. But he, too, would not comment. He directed us to Tom McCabe, the senior vice president for Parson’s.

During our first call with McCabe, he conceded that the question should be a simple one to answer but that he had to discuss it with his client (the city) before releasing any employment information to the media. He told Civil Beat that he would need to contact Marcus Owens, who works for the for the approval.

Owens – at the request of McCabe – then called Civil Beat, giving us permission to get the information from McCabe.

Finally, we talked to McCabe, who said: “370 workers will be on the site at the peak in early 2011.”

Now, if this were the end of the story, Caldwell’s comment would be false as a total of of 40 H-Power workers combined with 370 construction workers is far closer to 400 estimated employees than 500.

But, the fact is that Caldwell emphasized that close to 500 workers would be hired for the project.

So, we asked McCabe how many of the 370 workers were being brought on board specifically for the third boiler. He told us that most of the 370 were already employed by Parson’s and that he did not know how many new hires there would be.

“We’re counting all of our people and all of our subcontractors and I’m sure there is going to be hiring going to staff up to that level,” McCabe said. “I just don’t know, between us and our subcontractors, how many of those 370 people will be newly hired for that project.”

Meaning, to make a very long story short, between 400 and 410 workers will ultimately work on or at H-Power’s third boiler. And fewer than half of the 370 construction workers will be newly hired for the project, given that McCabe said “most” of the workers are already working for Parson’s.

So we feel it is safe to say that no more than 225 new workers — and that number is giving the city every benefit of the doubt — will be hired for the boiler.

Good news, but not as good as Caldwell made it out to be.