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A day after receiving an independent financial analysis of the city’s rail project from Gov. Linda Lingle, Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle chastised the state for what he called an “appalling waste of tax dollars” on a report he described as “shoddy” and “biased.”

Carlisle said the report’s findings on cost overruns and bloated ridership estimates were “wrong.” The city is “99 percent” on track with its local funding source, he said.

“It has been reported that the cost of Honolulu’s rail project will be increased by $1.7 billion,” Carlisle said Friday in a news conference. “This is inaccurate … So far, we have collected more than $580 million since we began collecting the tax in 2007.”

“There are many reasons to be suspicious of the credibility of this review. First, you should always consider the source. A member of the review team, Thomas Rubin is a nationally known anti-rail activist,” he said.

Citing a Civil Beat story, Carlisle said Rubin “advocates that, quote, bus is good, rail is bad.”

The chairman and founder of the financial consulting company that Gov. Linda Lingle hired to conduct an independent review of the city’s rail plan told Civil Beat that he didn’t know about Rubin’s position on transit.

“I don’t think of him as a rail or bus person,” Steven Steckler said. “I actually didn’t know what he was thinking one way or the other. And if he did, it really didn’t matter to us because we weren’t asking him to opine on that. All I cared about was he was very detailed at reading the operational information.”

Steckler said his company, Infrastructure Management Group (IMG), found Honolulu city officials unusually “difficult” to deal with. He said city transportation officials refused to share information that would have helped make the analysis easier.

“We were trying very hard to get information from the Department of Transportation Services, and we weren’t having a whole lot of luck,” Steckler said. “We really, really, really wanted access to the (financial) forecast models. That’s the thing you do when you do these reviews. I don’t know exactly what the rationale was, but it was a surprise. We’re used to getting a very high level of cooperation.”

Steckler said it’s standard practice for cities to give his team what it requests, and emphasized that city contractor Parsons Brinckerhoff was willing to share its models before the city disallowed it.

“That’s the thing you do when you do these reviews. You talk to the planners and the consultants, and you talk to them in an unfiltered way. To Parsons Brinckerhoff’s credit, they really wanted to cooperate with us,” Steckler said. “We know Parsons Brinckerhoff well. We actually work side-by-side with them with the California High-Speed Rail Authority.”

In the end, Steckler said his team built its own financial models for processing the data. But city officials reject his account of what happened.

“We provided all of the information that was available,” said Toru Hamayasu, the city’s chief transit planner. “There was nothing that we held back.”

Hamayasu said Parsons Brinckerhoff was willing to share a non-proprietary version of its financial model with the review team. He said Steckler’s IMG team then asked city workers to do some of their work for them and use those models to perform a portion of the analysis.

“But when we found what they really wanted to do was for us to do it for them, so we said, we’re not going to do any analysis for this group,” Hamayasu said.

The city’s Transportation Services director said he found it inappropriate that a team hired to be independent wanted the city to help it conduct its review.

“Where we had to draw the line is when they were making demands on our staff to do analysis,” Yoshioka said. “They were the ones getting paid to do the work. On top of that, they had their own deadlines. Every month, they gave our guys homework to do.”

Hamayasu hesitated to characterize his interactions with the review team, saying “we treat everybody exactly the same.” But he acknowledged he knew about Rubin’s anti-rail stance from the get-go.

“We knew about Thomas Rubin, but he was their most courteous of all the people there,” Hamayasu said. “He was very good about that.”

The head of the city’s transportation team echoed the mayor in his complaints about the report’s accuracy.

“I think (Steckler) is picking and choosing what he wants to report,” Yoshioka said. “The mayor made it clear that everyone should consider the source of the report and the timing of the report.”

As usual, Mayor Carlisle didn’t mince words when summing up his reaction.

“Spending a third of a million dollars for this shoddy, biased analysis is an appalling waste of our tax dollars,” Carlisle said.

The mayor said he spoke briefly with Gov. Lingle about the report — “We don’t agree,” he said — and has plans to discuss it with incoming Gov. Neil Abercrombie late Friday or as soon as possible.