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Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that the contract was worth $1.5 million. It was worth $300,000 in the first year and subsequent years could be worth more or less. Civil Beat incorrectly extrapolated the five-year value of the deal in the earlier report based on the first-year fee.

UPDATED 9/15/11 7:31 a.m. WASHINGTON — Honolulu rail planners agreed to pay a Washington-based lobbying firm up to $300,000 in the first year of a five-year deal, according to a copy of the 2009 contract obtained by Civil Beat.

Lobbyist said the city needs him because matters related to rail arise so frequently that congressional delegates and their staffers would be overwhelmed without additional help.

“If we were to go to them all the time with every issue that we have, we’d be at their doorstep not just every day but every couple hours,” Dwyer told Civil Beat in a phone interview Wednesday.

Dwyer works for Washington lobbying heavyweight , and signed the $25,000-a-month agreement with city rail contractor in November 2009.

A spokeswoman for the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) provided Dwyer’s contract the day after Civil Beat requested it. Dwyer also agreed to a phone interview facilitated by HART a week after declining to tell Civil Beat which company he worked for when asked in the hallway outside of Sen. Daniel Inouye‘s office.

According to the open-government database , Dwyer’s firm was paid $320,000 by InfraConsult last year and $160,000 . Since 2008, the rail contractor has paid Williams & Jensen a total of $840,000.

Dwyer explained his job as necessary for the city’s management of an “extremely complex” rail project, and pointed out that lobbyists are routinely hired to manage local governments’ business in Washington.

“A lot of local governments have people in my capacity either as consultants and lawyers and lobbyists,” Dwyer said. “Or, in some cases, albeit admittedly larger cities have their own staff people that are permanently residents here in Washington.”

A major part of Dwyer’s job is to facilitate communication between rail planners and more than one dozen federal agencies that must be consulted for the project to move forward.

“There are some 16 federal agencies that are involved in the process of developing the project,” Dwyer said. “Much of that occurs in the Environmental Impact Statement process.”

The contract he signed to work on the Honolulu rail project outlines one of his duties as helping to secure congressional appropriations for the project. But rail already has one of the most influential congressional appropriators on its side. Inouye, a long-time rail supporter, chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“Hawaii is blessed by an incredibly diligent, well-skilled congressional delegation, particularly the staff members of that delegation are well-skilled,” Dwyer said. “I think it would be unfair — and, again, demonstrating the complexity of this project — to assume that they would have some expertise in the particular issue that may occur. And for that matter even for them to deal with the time that it takes to resolve those issues.”

The issues Dwyer referred to are often rooted in communications, he said. With so many agencies weighing in on the project, Dwyer said there’s often a need for clarification from one agency to the next.

“There are a whole bunch of issues that come up in the course of that. In some of those cases, those are not — if you will — policy issues or legal issues. They are often what I call communication issues, where the intent on one side is not clear to the other. My role in that is trying to understand what the issue is on the federal government’s side, communicate that as clearly as possible, and in return communicate how the project attempts to address that and to work through project management in terms of bringing those issues to resolution.

Dwyer’s other duties include keeping current with the direction of various policy related to transit. Transit safety, for example, is a growing area of interest on Capitol Hill.

“Rail safety — or transit safety, to be more precise — is a particularly emerging area where heretofore the federal government has not been the regulator,” Dwyer said. “It’s usually been delegated to the states to do that. … There are people on both sides (politically) who are interested, and that would certainly affect the project.”

It Takes Money To Make Money

Another critical part of Dwyer’s job is to help secure a Full Funding Grant Agreement for the rail project. Honolulu officials are seeking $1.55 billion in grants from the Federal Transit Administration. In his bio on the Williams & Jensen website, Dwyer is described as having a record of “significant” federal funding accomplishments in areas including transportation and infrastructure.

Local blogger years of old newspaper references to Dwyer, and found he was doing lobbying work related to mass transit for Hawaii as far back as the early 1990s.

Dwyer told Civil Beat that one of his current clients is the St. Louis Metro, but lists no income for Williams & Jensen from the Metro’s Bi-State Development Agency so far this year. The site shows Dwyer’s firm received $60,000 from the Metro last year. Before that the Metro paid $80,000 per year to Williams & Jensen every year dating back to 2003, except for 2007 for which there is no data.

San Francisco’s was also previously a client, during an airport extension to the system, Dwyer said. But he is reluctant to compare the lobbying process for these different projects.

“I don’t think it’s fair to compare one to the other because they are unique projects,” Dwyer said.

One major difference — in addition to the fact that Honolulu’s rail line is to be elevated whereas St. Louis’ is at street level — is that St. Louis used only local funding. In Honolulu, obtaining federal funding to pay for 29 percent of the project’s construction is a major focus.

Dwyer said that when Mayor Peter Carlisle and some of Honolulu’s top rail officials visited Washington last week, part of the purpose of their trip was “really to get an assessment of where we are in that process, and to move forward.”

But Dwyer wouldn’t say when he thinks the grant agreement will be executed.

In February, one of the rail project’s chief planners — Toru Hamayasu, who now serves as HART’s interim executive director — told Civil Beat that he hoped the federal government would be able to guarantee the full $1.55 billion within 18 months of the completion of an updated financial plan.

That new plan was released in April, which would make October 2012 Hamayasu’s target date for the FFGA.

Dwyer said that although the city is in the “later stages” of rail development, speculation about a timeline for federal funding wouldn’t be fair to the city.

“To nail it down to a month or even a six-month period in a project that thus far has spanned nearly six years is really hard to do,” Dwyer said. “It would just be sort of hard to say whether it’s April or if it’s going to be September or something like that because it’s not a process that the city completely controls, and there are a variety of players in that process. “

Asked what major hurdles he sees on the rail project’s path to full federal funding, Dwyer said he wouldn’t characterize what lies ahead as “hurdles” but rather “qualifications” required by the FTA.

Dwyer acknowledged that seeking federal backing is an “arduous” process, but also pointed out that U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood publicly expressed support for the project during a trip to Honolulu in March.

“It is a challenging process, there’s no doubt about it,” Dwyer said. “But the reason for that is that this is a grant of $1.55 billion, and Hawaii taxpayers as well as taxpayers across America are providing that money. The FTA feels that it is a steward and wants to be sure the money’s being used properly.”