City Ad Promised HART Would Work ‘Hand-in-Hand’ With Council
A city-sponsored ad campaign last year promised voters that a new rail agency would work “hand-in-hand” with the Honolulu City Council.
Now it looks more like they’re going to go head-to-head.
The council and Mayor Peter Carlisle, who was in power when the ad ran, are in a standoff over who should oversee the agency’s budget.
Managing Director Doug Chin says the administration has never changed its stance.
“Our position was always that the council wasn’t going to have the oversight in the same way that the mayor wasn’t going to have the oversight,” Chin told Civil Beat on Thursday.
Carlisle this week vetoed the council’s attempts to pass a budget for Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, or HART, which officially assumes management of the city’s $5.3 billion rail project on July 1. The council plans to gather in a special meeting on Monday to discuss overriding the mayor’s vetoes.
The standoff comes down to a fundamental disagreement over whether the council should have the authority to amend HART’s budgets.
Last year, the city said it spent more than $40,000 to run newspaper ads about what would happen if voters approved the creation of a semi-autonomous transit agency in Honolulu.
The ad stated: “(The transit authority) would also work hand-in-hand with the City Council and include the public in crucial issues such as setting fares and adopting a budget, further enhancing transparency and accountability.”
Chin says that the reference to inclusion on adopting a budget pertains only to the public, and not to the City Council.
“It might seem clear to interpret it one way but I think there’s another way to interpret this sentence,” Chin said. “It’s basically two complete sentences. It says it ‘would also work hand-in-hand with the City Council’ and, then, it would ‘include the public in crucial issues such as setting fares and adopting the budget.’ The point that I would make is that what’s being described in the second part is the need for a public hearing.”
Check out the complete advertisement:
Voters approved a charter question to allow for the creation of HART in November 2010. The council, which approved the language of the charter question in 2009, has been trying to convince Carlisle that it has the right to oversee the HART budget since Carlisle decided not to transfer it to them when he submitted his executive operating and capital budgets to the council in March.
The Rapid Transit Division 鈥斅爐he unit within the city’s Transportation Services Department that will split off to become HART 鈥斅燾reated a $18 million operating budget and $355 million capital budget that Carlisle insists are not subject to council approval.
But the council took it upon themselves to vet the spending plans anyway. They took the framework from the Rapid Transit Division, made some amendments, and passed their versions of the budget along to Carlisle to be signed into law. Carlisle vetoed the council budgets, and the council is now poised to override his vetoes.
Council members point to this section of the charter question in exerting their authority over HART’s budget: “The council shall, with or without amendments, approve the authority鈥檚 appropriation requests.”
But Chin argues that “appropriation requests” refer only to HART’s use of any of the city’s general fund money. He said he believes HART should decide how it wants to spend any federal grants or money in the transit fund created by a general excise tax surcharge on Oahu. Chin acknowledges that such a distinction does not exist anywhere in the charter.
“But what it does say, it says the authority shall have management and control over the monies made available in the special transit fund,” Chin said.
Ultimately, Chin says the end result for the public will be the same in that they’ll have the opportunity to testify about matters such as the HART budget before a group of people required to follow open-government laws.
“Either way, this all resolves itself,” Chin said. “The transit authority will also be open to sunshine laws and public hearing requirements. The public will have a chance to weigh in whether it’s before the City Council or before the transit authority.”
