What if Honolulu Rail Fails?
After decades of failed attempts, Honolulu is closer than ever to building a rail line.
This time, rail planners say they learned from past mistakes: They started collecting taxes for the project four years ago, they’re weeks away from turning over the project to a new rail agency, and they say they’re ready for any and every curveball that comes their way.
Rail planners have said again and again that they have contingencies in place for a slew of “worst-case scenarios.”
But what if rail fails before it can be built?
It’s not a scenario rail planners like to imagine, and they haven’t outlined a plan for how to reverse the years and hundreds of millions of dollars they’ve already poured into the project.
‘We Haven’t Planned For That.’
“I want to make sure that everybody understands that we don’t have a contingency plan for if this project does not go forward,” Wayne Yoshioka, Honolulu’s director of Transportation Services, told Civil Beat. “Right now our Plan A is working, and we intend to move forward, so we don’t even consider the situation. To ask me that question, I don’t know what to say, because we haven’t planned for that.”
In the past six months, Honolulu rail planners have hit milestone after milestone in advancing the $5.3 billion project. They finalized the environmental assessment process, received a critical record of decision from federal officials, hosted U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Federal Transit Administration Administrator Peter Rogoff — both had glowing praise for the project — and in February, gathered for a splashy groundbreaking ceremony in Kapolei.
But the city isn’t actually building the rail line yet. Two rail manufacturers are protesting a key contract award. Federal officials are still assessing a newly updated financial plan for the project, and city rail planners say they are at least months away from a guarantee of federal funding. In the meantime, anti-rail residents last week delivered their most forceful attempt — a federal lawsuit — to stop the project.
Stopping rail would do far more than prevent the construction of a rail line. The end to the project would set in motion a series of steps to undo what’s already been done. Chief rail planner Toru Hamayasu says that the federal rail money that Honolulu has already accepted, for example, would likely have to be returned.
Hamayasu told City Council Budget Chairman Ernie Martin last week that he believes the city would have to use money raised through the GET surcharge — revenue that is raised to pay for rail construction — to return tens of millions of dollars to the federal government. Essentially, he says reversing rail progress could be considered “a capital cost,” just as building the rail line is.
Federal Funds, Strings Attached
Hamayasu is smart to assume that the federal government would want to recoup its money: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — who pulled the plug on a $8.7 billion plan to build a train tunnel that would have connected his state to Manhattan — is in the midst of fighting the Federal Transit Administration over $271 million in federal funds spent on that now-dead project.
about the situation in New Jersey also references hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees connected to the fight over the canceled tunnel. It’s safe to assume that Honolulu would also have hefty legal fees to pay, even if its rail project is defeated.
Paying lawyers and reimbursing the federal government aren’t the only potential costs associated with halting the project. The city would still have to pay a variety of contractors fees for breaking off their business deals.
It’s also unclear what would happen to the full-time, part-time and contracted employees who are working on the rail project. But Yoshioka says the bigger impact would be on the people who are waiting for rail-related jobs — in the construction industry, mainly — to become available.
“There’s been a tremendous investment in it already,” Yoshioka said. “We’re well over $100 million in terms of the fees we’ve paid in terms of getting this thing ready in terms of implementation. But the other point is it would be severe disappointment to all the people who believe that they’re now going to be employed from (rail).”
Ultimately, Yoshioka says the ripple effects attached to stopping the rail project are too wide-reaching to predict, and too extensive to characterize in monetary terms.
“The most difficult to measure is the damage that we would do to the development of Oahu,” Yoshioka said. “If you look at the west side of Oahu and all the congestion that’s there, one of the reasons is because Oahu is developing according to the plan that was developed for it back in the ’80s, but the transportation system is not occurring the way it was planned to occur… That plan was predicated on several transportation assumptions, and one of them was that we would have a high-capacity transit corridor. Now we’re trying to get it in there. That’s the biggest implication of not doing the rail. The land-use doesn’t match the plan.”
Asked about the lawsuit, Yoshioka — who, along with LaHood and Rogoff, is named as a defendant — said he tries not to think about it.
“You can’t get caught up in that kind of worry,” Yoshioka said. “Anything’s possible. The real thing that we really want to say is we are moving ahead on the assumption that we’re going to get this done. We’ve really moved forward and we’re come farther than the previous attempts have come. It would be such a shame if this was — and hopefully this won’t be — strike three. We want to hit a home run on this one.”
