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Correction: A previous version of this editorial incorrectly stated that Mayor Kirk Caldwell appointed the new interim director for HART. 

Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s appointment last week of a new board member for the  and the hire of a new interim HART director come in the nick of time, as the city and the agency prepare for immediate challenges with the embattled Honolulu rail project after the Nov. 8 election.

First and most importantly, HART hired Krishna Murthy, the longtime former executive director for transit project delivery of the , to serve as interim director of HART. Murthy, whose appointment was approved unanimously by the HART board, will serve for a year, during which he hopes to “get the project going in the right direction,” he said last week.

Murthy, who begins work Dec. 5, replaces interim director Mike Formby, who served briefly as a successor to Director Dan Grabauskas. Grabauskas only stepped down in August, meaning that when Murthy begins, he will be HART’s third top staffer in five months.

That sort of instability would be challenging for even the most trouble-free project — a descriptor few would use for Honolulu rail. So a fundamental element of Murthy’s intention to “get things going in the right direction” will simply be having a consistent, experienced person in the senior leadership role.

Fortunately, he brings more than that to the position. Over a 40-year career, he has worked on major transportation projects around the world, including Los Angeles, where he oversaw $9 billion in rail and highway transit projects. He is said to be well connected in the transportation industry with solid relationships with officials at the Federal Transit Administration, a key partner in Honolulu’s project.

He’s being paid handsomely for his year in Hawaii — $400,000 plus housing, transportation and relocation benefits. That’s about $100,000 more than Grabauskas was receiving in total compensation.

But if he can steer the rail project in a better direction, it will have been money well spent.

Caldwell also tapped CEO Glenn Nohara to replace Colleen Hanabusa on the HART board.

Hanabusa is widely expected to be elected to the U.S. House on Nov. 8, first to immediate service filling the final two months of the late Congressman Mark Takai’s term. She’s also the favorite to be elected to a complete two-year term for the 1st Congressional District on the same day.

In light of that, Hanabusa, whose resignation was made public in the same news release announcing Nohara’s appointment, wouldn’t have had have much capacity for continued work with HART.

Nohara will not necessarily replace Hanabusa in the chair position; the chair is picked by the HART board. But his career as an engineer and licensed general contractor — nearly 20 years as president and COO of Koga for starters — gives him a valuable depth of experience.

Along with their other colleagues at HART, Murthy and Nohara face almost immediate challenges. Collectively, they’re all waiting for a response from the FTA to the interim plan for Honolulu rail that was submitted to the agency last month.

Part of that interim plan is a request for additional time to work out a permanent plan, time that HART and the city would use, in part, to explore additional funding options with the Legislature in a session that begins Jan. 18. The FTA may or may not grant that extension, but if it does HART and the city need to be able to move quickly on both legislative consultation and completion of a formal, permanent rail plan.

Despite his professional qualifications, Nohara is already facing criticism over his rail-related political activity. Nohara and in some cases Nohara and his wife have given in excess of $100,000 over the past decade to politicians at the local and state level, most if not all of whom have supported the rail project —$14,000 of that to Caldwell alone. He and Koga Engineering also gave to the political action committee Go Rail Go in 2008.

But Nohara’s perfectly legal and extensively disclosed contributions, in and of themselves, neither compromise him nor make him unfit to serve on the HART board.

They do, however, mean his board service may face a higher level of scrutiny than others who don’t have the history of political involvement in rail that he does. They also mean that Nohara must be prepared to disclose any instances in which even an appearance of conflict might arise and recuse himself from decision making in any such matter.

We hope he’ll take those concerns to heart as he, Murthy and their HART colleagues get moving on next steps for the troubled project — costs of which have bloated this year to an estimated $8.6 billion — that are likely to take every ounce of focus they can muster in the coming weeks and months.