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The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation will await a decision on a pending appeal of a billion-dollar rail contract before holding a public discussion of the financial woes of the city’s selected contractor.

A city attorney warned the HART Board of Directors Thursday morning that the appeal, currently awaiting a ruling from the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, puts legal limits on the city’s conversations with the winning bidder, Ansaldo Honolulu.

A decision on an appeal brought by Sumitomo Corporation of America is expected by Aug. 15.

“Right now the process continues, and we should respect it,” Deputy Corporation Counsel Gary Takeuchi told the Board.

HART Chair Carrie Okinaga, the city’s former corporation counsel, asked her colleagues to hold off on Ansaldo-specific questions for a couple of weeks.

“There will be ample opportunities to discuss this matter and monitor it going forward,” she said. Okinaga ditched an earlier idea to hold the conversation in executive session.

The matter to which Okinaga was referring — and the answers the HART Board is clamoring for — is the financial health and viability of Ansaldo. The Italian parent company has been roiled by ethical controversy and financial downgradings in recent weeks.

On July 22, Reuters reported that Finmeccanica’s chairman was being investigated for . Only July 28, the Wall Street Journal said Finmeccanica would , which could include selling off its transportation division, AnsaldoBreda, which is part of the joint venture proposing to build and run Honolulu’s rail system.

This week, international ratings agency Fitch downgraded Finmeccanica’s credit rating from BBB+ to BBB and gave it a “negative outlook”, according to and . And in an article titled “” that will appear in print this weekend, the Economist focuses on the Finmeccanica’s stock price dive.

The legal limitations laid out by Takeuchi and Okinaga’s request didn’t stop HART Board members from dancing around the issue. They asked questions about the procurement process without mentioning Finmeccanica by name, rarely even uttering the word “Ansaldo.”

HART Interim Executive Director Toru Hamayasu talked about procurement in general terms. Board Vice Chair Ivan Lui-Kwan pressed a little bit on whether the city did enough due diligence on the past performance of Ansaldo and whether the city’s Request For Proposals was written properly. He cited media reports that said the city ignored past problems in evaluating bids.

Board member Don Horner said he didn’t care about media reports because the facts of the matter were that 60 points of the evaluation score were based on past performance.

Horner was incorrect. The city awarded the maximum 60 points to Ansaldo, Sumitomo and Bombardier in RFP Part 1, advancing all three as finalists. Past performance was not considered when the city evaluated each company’s Best And Final Offer.

Horner also had questions about the requirement that contractors secure a bond that would help make the city whole in the event of a contractor’s failure to make good on the deal. InfraConsult executive Simon Zweighaft said such a bond would exceed $300 million in value and would comprise about half of the value of the design-build portion of the core systems contract.

It’s not clear what options HART will have if the city prevails and Sumitomo’s appeal is dismissed by the state, leaving Ansaldo as the winning bidder. Technically, the billion-dollar Design-Build-Operate-Maintain contract has been awarded and not yet executed.

Asked about procurement policy in general and not specifically about the Ansaldo case, Hamayasu told Civil Beat, “The award is not the contract. … It’s not binding.”

Still, HART members’ cold feet or rumors about a company’s financial health might not be enough to nix the announced award to Ansaldo. That’s something the board can discuss at a future meeting.

The full HART Board will meet next on Aug. 25 in Kapolei. Lui-Kwan, chair of the Audit and Legal Affairs Committee, said he intends to move his next meeting back from next week until Aug. 18 so he can incorporate Ansaldo into the discussion.