������Ƶ

The Federal Transit Administration’s reluctance to put any more money toward Honolulu’s rail project and its insistence that the project be built as promised is forcing city officials into a very tight position — find more money and finish the line all the way to Ala Moana Center.

Just a day after breaking the news to the public that ideas like ending the line at Middle Street are off the table, Mayor Kirk Caldwell and City Council members were setting aside their political differences and saying the same thing: go to the Legislature and get a long-term extension of the general excise tax surcharge funding the project.

It’s a reprise of the legislative pitch made in 2015 that resulted in lawmakers agreeing to extend the GET surcharge another five years, through 2027.

But lots of promises were made in 2015 that seem to have drifted off into the ether — promises of greater transparency, stronger efforts to get costs under control and to be more publicly accountable.

The promises were convincing enough that the Honolulu City Council, despite lots of grumbling from Chair Ernie Martin, gave final approval for the GET surcharge extension earlier this year.

And then the wheels really started to come off.

In April, a withering report from City Auditor Edwin Young was released. Among its findings: the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation knew for two years that increasing costs were pointing to a looming budget shortfall but didn’t let the City Council know. The audit alleged financial mismanagement, sloppy record keeping and cost estimates based on “professional judgments” that seemed more like educated guesses. And it called into question whether HART leadership had the acumen to rein in the project’s finances.

Then-HART Executive Director Dan Grabauskas bitterly pushed back against the audit, calling its findings overblown and sometimes simply wrong. “I’d say that the so-called audit is a joke,” said Grabauskas at an April press conference.

The next month, new HART Board Chair Colleen Hanabusa released cost estimates showing the project’s price tag had bloated to $6.9 billion from its expected cost of $5.2 billion. Hanabusa didn’t reveal, however, that she had already received a new estimate from the showing that the cost might actually be closer to $8.1 billion and that the project would likely come in two years late — facts she was forced to acknowledge at a hastily arranged press conference days later.

It only got worse the following month, when Caldwell made a surprise announcement at a HART board meeting that he and Martin felt the rail line should stop five miles short of its planned destination, with the remainder to be built at some point in the future.

Feds: No More Time, No More Money

With the project’s future uncertain, pressure bearing down from the FTA and local criticism mounting, Grabauskas resigned two weeks ago, turning over the day-to-day management of the project to Mike Formby, director of  the Department of Transportation Services for the City and County of Honolulu, on an interim basis.

Looking to the FTA for permission to reduce the scope of the project, Honolulu leaders made their case in meetings held in San Francisco earlier this week. To say they didn’t get the answers they hoped for would be putting it mildly.

Local leaders seem to be quickly coalescing around plans to ask the Legislature to extend the GET surcharge beyond its 2027 sunset.

No, you can’t have more time. No, you can’t have more federal money. Build the project as planned, said FTA officials, or give us back the $1.55 billion we’ve invested in the project.

Ouch.

That metaphoric bucket of cold water has had a rather amazing effect on local leaders, who seem to be quickly coalescing around plans to ask the Legislature to extend the GET surcharge beyond its 2027 sunset.

City Council member Brandon Elefante circulated a proposed resolution Wednesday afternoon that would express Council support for a permanent surcharge “to provide an ongoing and dedicated source of funding.”

Martin and Council Transportation Committee Chair Joey Manahan issued their own statements Tuesday, with Manahan calling the FTA’s unyielding position “firm” and Martin saying Honolulu “has no choice” but to extend the GET surcharge.

Even Charles Djou, who faces Caldwell in a mayoral runoff this November and who has made biting criticism of Caldwell’s work on the rail project the central theme of his campaign, said in a press conference Wednesday that the FTA’s new position is a “game changer.” While he’s still opposed to increasing taxes to fund the rail line, he conceded he would consider it other options like recouping the skim the state takes off the surcharge and finding other cost saving through a deeper audit of the project aren’t enough.

Make no mistake, an extension of the surcharge is the same as raising the tax. Whether you increase a tax rate or assess the original tax rate over a greater length of time, taxpayers still end up paying more money than they had been promised.

And that is something neither the Legislature and the governor, nor the voting public who elects them, should agree to until major changes are made — including opening up HART’s books to the city auditor and the public.

As Chad Blair reported Wednesday, Senate Ways and Means Committee Chair Jill Tokuda said legislators still want the same things they wanted when they reluctantly approved the GET surcharge in 2015 — a credible budget and believable plans for how the rail system will be operated, maintained and sustained once it’s in place.

That makes good sense. In addition to its massive cost overruns, one of the reasons that the project lacks budget credibility is its ongoing lack of transparency. HART has only recently provided the City Council with detailed information on hundreds of millions of dollars doled out to subcontractors. But HART officials only made public the past year’s payments which amounted to at least $235 million of the $432 million paid to prime contractors.

Until then, HART had consistently said it had no legal authority to disclose details of subcontractor payments, even though those expenses have been a major driver of project cost overruns. But the numbers are only for fiscal year 2016. So it’s still impossible to tell where more than a billion dollars already spent on the project has gone.

Before any surcharge extension or other tax hike is even considered, HART must put all its cards on the table and start being honest and open with the taxpayers who are footing the bill and with the legislators who will be asked to place even more of a burden on taxpayers to fund the largest — and arguably the most poorly managed — public works project in state history.

Don’t get fooled again.