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There is a misconception about who is funding the legal fight against the Honolulu rail project, former Gov. Ben Cayetano says.

Cayetano was one of eight plaintiffs who sued this month to block construction of the $5.3 billion line, saying the rail plan breaks a slew of federal laws.

Cayetano says he can personally account for about $35,000 of the $120,000 that’s been raised toward a $200,000 goal. He and his wife donated $5,000, he says.

“And then I raised about $30,000,” Cayetano said. “None of that came from outside groups. I’ve seen the ledger, and it’s all from people who call Hawaii home. I think that’s the primary misconception, that there’s some kind of special interest behind it.”

But Cayetano and other rail opponents — while they’re adamant that their support is local — will not back up their claim by making public the list of people who donated to pay for the lawsuit, in part out of a concern over any possible political backlash.

A spokesman for the IRS told Civil Beat that tax-exempt organizations are generally to disclose the names of contributors.

Links between the highway lobby – oil, tire and auto interests – and the Honolulu rail opposition have long been a topic of speculation. The issue exploded in a public battle between former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann and former Grassroot Institute of Hawaii President Jamie Story in 2008. (Read Hawaii News Now’s of the fight.)

Rail supporters still today revive those arguments, pointing out that anti-rail leader Cliff Slater is on the board of the institute, but rail opponents dismiss them as conspiracy theory. Although not a plaintiff in the lawsuit, the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii is one of two nonprofit groups accepting donations to help pay for the suit.

Randy Roth, a University of Hawaii law professor who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, says the fight against rail is straightforward. He calls any perceptions that rail opponents have hidden support from special interests “flat wrong.”

“I think I would know if those interests were supportive,” Roth said. “What you see is what you get. This is really driven by the names and organizations that are listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit. I don’t think there’s one or two or three special interest groups… We’re united in thinking that (the city and federal governments) did not follow the law in going through the process and, personally, I think they’ve presented (the rail project) to the public in a basically dishonest way.”

Yet Roth also acknowledges he hasn’t seen details about who’s financially backing the lawsuit.

“I don’t know who’s contributed money and who hasn’t,” Roth told Civil Beat. “My sense is there’s a lot of people who are not happy with the current rail proposal, but I don’t know how many people have contributed, and I don’t know how much.”

Sen. Sam Slom’s nonprofit Small Business Hawaii Entrepreneurial Education Foundation, another plaintiff in the suit, is the other nonprofit agency that’s accepting donations. (Incidentally, Small Business Hawaii was founded in the 1970s by Lex Brodie, the entrepreneur who made a business name for himself with tires.)

Slom says the fundraising effort has yielded a donation from “at least one out-of-state contributor,” but that the vast majority of supporters have been Hawaii residents contributing small amounts, typically less than $50 apiece.

Slater, one of the best-known faces of rail opposition, says there are countless people who can’t voice their disdain for the project because of what he characterizes as intense political pressure to support it. Some of those people quietly donate money to fight rail, he says.

“The small and independent business people don’t give a rip, they’ll give us money,” Slater said. “But when you start getting businesses up to a certain size, they are typically beholden to the government. So anybody that’s tied to land development or construction — that’s the engineers, the electricians, the construction unions, everybody — they’ll play the game for rail. The people who are tied to government contracts and that kind of thing, they just can’t risk it.”

Slater, the now-retired founder of the successful Maui Divers jewelry company, says he contributed some of his own money, but hasn’t said how much.

Slater says he and his fellow plaintiffs have already raised more than half of the $200,000 they’re seeking to cover the costs of the lawsuit. They hired San Francisco-based environmental lawyer Nicholas Yost, who Slater says charges a “frightening” amount. Slater and Yost have repeatedly refused to give an exact billing amount. But Slom says Yost charges $850 an hour. The local counsel, Michael Green, also declined to answer Civil Beat’s question about the fee.

Slater says the diversity of the plaintiffs in the case demonstrates the diversity of those who are fighting rail.

“We have (former Hawaii Gov.) Ben Cayetano, a Democrat, and Walter Heen, a former chairman of the Democratic party, and a very influential guy in the Native Hawaiian community,” Slater said. “Then you’ve got independent people like me — some say radical right, I just believe in the Constitution, the founding fathers, that kind of thing — and (Republican Sen.) Sam Slom. Some of our supporters consider themselves progressive Democrats and some consider themselves center-right Republicans. So we’ve got the gamut. The only thing everybody agrees on is that if this were to be built it would be absolutely disastrous for our town, economically and environmentally.”

Political Ties

Rail opponents tend to emphasize their political diversity as a way to fight the claim that being against rail is a standard conservative position, rather than one based on opposition to a specific project. On the national political stage, fights about spending money on rail have served to illustrate some of the deepest of ideological divides. (The issue sparked a debate between writers at and earlier this year.)

Rail supporters have grumbled about Slater’s involvement with the Reason Foundation and the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, both of which espouse libertarian ideals, and have advocated against rail. The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii and Slom’s Small Business Hawaii are both members of the State Policy Network, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that serves as an umbrella for free-market think-tanks across the country.

The State Policy Network quietly connects conservative groups across the nation in order to help them reach policy goals on a state level. The network refuses to talk about its role on the state level.

“As a service organization, SPN does not engage the media,” wrote State Policy Network President Tracie Sharp in an email to Civil Beat. “State think tanks set their own policy agendas based on what is most relevant to the people of their state.”

The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii’s interim president, Dick Rowland, says the institute pays $500 a year to remain within the State Policy Network.

“With rail, the philosophical basis is shared pretty much throughout the whole State Policy Network,” Rowland said. “The view is an almost universal one, and that is that we focus — as does the U.S. Constitution — on the individual, and the freedom of the individual to choose, and a rail project interferes with the person’s individual right to choose.”

Rowland says ideological rivals are suspicious of such affiliations only because they are threatened by them.

“It’s just a cooperative thing,” Rowland said. “We aren’t making it a secret, and we are saying, ‘Hey, we’re doing this.’ It’s only nefarious in that our cooperation with one another is inconvenient for the other side.”

The State Policy Network’s members include conservative think-tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, both of which have ties to the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers, who made their fortune in oil. Rail supporters point to these connections in trying to make the case that oil interests are fighting rail in Honolulu, but Slater says such reasoning is bogus.

“If you trace links like that, you can uncover all kinds of things,” Slater said. “You could link me to Hitler if you track back far enough, or Osama bin Laden. It’s silly stuff. The fact of the matter is, you’ve got to figure the kind of people who would fund both Ben Cayetano and Sam Slom. Right? It’s just that we’re all in this together on this one issue. Frankly, there’s lots of people who only agree on this one thing: that they’re opposed to elevated rail through town and along the waterfront.”

Donna Wong, executive director of the environmental group Hawaii Thousand Friends, says this lawsuit is a rare example of collaboration between her group and Slom.

“We have different philosophies, and I must say that Hawaii Thousand Friends has not always agreed with Sam Slom and vice versa, but there are things that we do agree on. I don’t think that a good, healthy, clean environment knows the difference between a Republican and a Democrat.”