A little-publicized Senate bill to boost cash flow for the Honolulu rail project has been sucked into a mysterious gambit by Ways and Means Committee Chair Donovan Dela Cruz, who is also a longtime supporter of rail.

At the center of Dela Cruz’s curious maneuver is Senate Bill 934, which in February briefly featured language to help the city get access more quickly to millions of dollars in construction funding for the unfinished $10 billion Honolulu rail line.

That effort abruptly went sideways on Feb. 26 when Dela Cruz announced he was inserting new requirements into the bill that rail officials say are impossible for the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation to fulfill.

The bill as Dela Cruz amended it says HART must build a park-and-ride facility in Pearl Highlands, and must also complete the entire rail line before it can get access to hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for the transit project.

In effect, the bill now says HART won’t get access to the money it needs to finish building the rail line until construction is done.

The perplexed HART board debated that language at length at its March 21 meeting. Roger Morton, a board member who is also director of the city Department of Transportation Services, told his colleagues “there’s no way to meet these conditions.”

“There’s no chance you could make these two commitments for fiscal year ’25-’26,” agreed HART board member Robert Yu. “Zero chance.”

HART Board Chair Colleen Hanabusa, a former Senate president, said the requirements WAM inserted into the bill are a sign something has gone sour between HART and the Legislature.

“The question is, for this bill to have popped up, somebody pissed them off,” she said. “Somebody must have irked them, that represents HART, for them to do this, because for them, this is so out of nowhere that this hit.”

She added: “This is a WAM bill, so somebody upset Donovan. I don’t know who it was, but somebody upset Donovan.”

A Deferred Park-And-Ride Project

When Morton learned the alarming language in the bill was inserted by WAM, he remarked: “That would explain the Pearl Highlands portion of this.”

Dela Cruz did not respond to a request for comment on the bill this week, but he represents Central Oʻahu neighborhoods where some residents likely would have used the park-and-ride facility to link up with rail.

HART indefinitely deferred plans for the Pearl Highlands 1,600-stall park-and-ride facility years ago because it was expected to cost about $330 million, and HART was under extreme pressure to cut costs.

Deferring the park-and-ride was a component of the painful 2022 rail recovery plan, which also required the city to truncate the rail line by stopping the project in Kakaʻako instead of continuing on as originally planned to Ala Moana Center.

Yu said the park-and-ride may never be built, and the rail line won’t be finished until 2031. “That’s not a secret. That is included in the recovery plan,” he said at the March meeting.

Hanabusa told the other board members the bill is probably not a high priority for lawmakers, and suggested HART do nothing and let the bill die.

“What if it doesn’t die?” HART CEO Lori Kahikina asked.

“If it doesn’t die then you have conference to try and do something about it,” Hanabusa replied. “I think it’s going to die, that’s my hunch.”

Dela Cruz did not publicly explain his thinking on the issue during the two brief WAM hearings on the bill, apart from saying explicitly on Feb. 26 the city would need to complete the park-and-ride facility and the entire rail line “in order to access the funding.”

Part of the puzzle is why Dela Cruz, who is a rail supporter and enthusiastic advocate for transit-oriented development along the Honolulu rail line, would advance a bill that appears to threaten the project.

Former Sen. Russell Ruderman, a Democrat who served in the Senate for eight years, said the bill may be an example of Dela Cruz “flexing his muscles and showing somebody who’s the boss regarding some other issue where he’s trying to get his way.”

Ruderman noted that lawmakers often push legislation they don’t really want as a way to get horse-trading material for other bills they really do want. That often happens in conference committee, he said.

It’s Down To The Final Days Of Session

Senate Bill 934 with the language from WAM has now been approved by both the House and Senate in floor votes, and is pending further action in conference committee. No hearing has yet been scheduled but both the House and Senate have named conferees.

Kahikina declined a request for an interview to discuss the bill this week, but last month she submitted written testimony to the House Finance Committee explaining HART’s concerns.

The rail project is not scheduled for completion until 2031, she wrote, and if funding is withheld until then, “it may adversely affect the cash flows of the project and may jeopardize the completion of the approved project scope.”

HART officials are “unable to discuss the bill at this time,” Kevin Whitton, a HART spokesman with Pang Communications, said in an emailed statement. Whitton said the rail board will likely discuss the measure at its April 25 meeting.

Dela Cruz has substantial leverage over HART because the rail authority needs lawmakers to authorize hundreds of millions of dollars in spending on the rail project.

Lawmakers in 2017 approved a multibillion-dollar financial bailout of the city’s rail project, but the Legislature retained control over the flow of the rail funding they provided that year.

The bailout bill known as Act 1 created the state’s mass transit special fund, and billions of dollars in general excise tax surcharge and hotel room taxes earmarked for rail flow into that fund. In the past lawmakers have included language in the state budget or in another bill authorizing HART to tap that money to pay for rail construction.

HART is going through that process again this year by asking the Legislature to authorize the rail authority to draw money from that funding stream.

Gov. Josh Green’s proposed state budget includes provisions that would authorize release of more than $572 million in each of the next two fiscal years for the rail project, and the House has agreed to include that language in the final state budget for the next two years.

The Senate, however, has so far disagreed with that budget item.