Honolulu’s rail plan is “the premier transit project in the entire country,” the congressman who chairs the House transportation committee says.
As chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Jim Oberstar is in a position to know. Via video conference from Washington, D.C., he and Congresswoman Mazie Hirono addressed dozens who gathered for the Summit on the State of Physical Infrastructure in Hawaii, presented Tuesday by the Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs (HIPA).
Oberstar’s public comments echoed what city officials have said they’ve been hearing from Washington.
“This is vastly safer transit project than anywhere else in America,” Oberstar said. “It’s exceedingly well designed, and it has received the highest rating from the Federal Transit Administration.”
When it comes to local discussion of infrastructure, the $5.5 billion rail proposal is inescapable. The project’s critics focus on the cost as one of the many reasons building rail is an absurd course of action during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Its supporters argue the recession only reinforces the need for rail, as it’s estimated to create more than 10,000 jobs a year. In a meeting after the summit, the vice president of transportation for one company bidding to build the rail project said related job opportunities extend far beyond the construction phase.
“This project can get people jobs, and not just temporary,” said Gino Antoniello, vice president of transportation systems and equipment for Sumitomo Corporation of America. “We’ll recruit them, we’ll hire them, we’ll train them to work at all levels.”
Antoniello said, if awarded the contract, his company would pursue local assembly of train cars. Materials would be shipped to Honolulu, where assembly, testing and commissioning of cars would take place. He emphasized that there’s always “a little bit of pain,” during the early phase of a project of this magnitude.
“When everything comes together,” Antoniello said, “I can’t think of one city that says, ‘I regret building a transit system.’”
While Honolulu’s current focus may be trains and traffic, the state of Hawaii is poised to pour $14.3 billion into local infrastructure in the next six years, including rail. The researchers from the Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs who made that estimate say it’s extremely conservative.
“A more likely scenario is not $14.3 billion, but is probably somewhere more about $20 billion,” said Jeanne Schultz Afuvai, HIPA’s interim president and CEO. “At this point, looking at the next six years, people at different agencies have just listed what they think they can get funded.”
Afuvai’s research comes from her work on the institute’s Report on the State of Physical Infrastructure in Hawaii. The report was funded primarily through a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, with additional funding from a number of local corporations, including construction companies. Researchers say one of the report’s primary goals is to demonstrate the need for a uniform method of reporting on local infrastructure.
The emphasis on infrastructure in Hawaii reflects a national trend, as cities and counties across the United States begin to prioritize what elements of their aging and, according to Hirono, “steadily declining,” infrastructure most desperately need to be fixed or replaced.
In the 1930s, the New Deal created a national emphasis on infrastructure as a way to stimulate the economy, something that’s on the mind of lawmakers today. Oberstar said Hawaii ranks among the top 10 states with projects funded by federal stimulus monies already underway.
“These are massive investments given the population size for Hawaii,” Oberstar said. “And with 80 percent federal funds, 20 percent backed by the states, this will be a very substantial investment for the state of Hawaii.”
Of course, infrastructure — and Hawaii’s most urgent infrastructure needs — include more than the rail proposal. According to HIPA’s report, infrastructure investments in Hawaii over the next six years include:
Not surprisingly, 73 percent of those projects are slated for the state’s most populated island: Oahu.
The report also raises some concerns. For one, $14.3 billion — remarkably — is not nearly enough given the scope of Hawaii’s infrastructure needs. For example, less than 1 percent of the total estimate goes to energy, and less than 1 percent goes toward emergency systems. The last massive hurricane to hit Hawaii, Hurricane Iniki, cost more than $2.7 billion in 1992. The report finds the state’s 256 public emergency shelters have the capacity for just 30 percent of the population.
Further, the report didn’t assess any technology infrastructure (its authors say they hope to do so in a follow-up report assessing the state’s longer-term infrastructure to be released in January 2012).
Another concern is management. More than 20 agencies are coordinating — and by all accounts, not very well — oversight of the state’s infrastructure.
“For all intents and purposes, Hawaii’s infrastructure planning mechanisms operate with very little coordination, collaboration and integration at the state and county levels,” the report reads.
“Clearly there needs to be more coordinating of efforts,” said Hirono in an interview after the summit. “The report said they have to try to get information from 20 different entities, and they all don’t keep records the same way, and it was quite a job to even come up with the assessment for this report.”
The report’s authors say it is such a challenge that the report itself is incomplete. For better or worse, Hawaii is not alone. Other states have similarly disjointed infrastructure oversight. Even the federal government is restructuring for a more streamlined, efficient approach.
“The fact is, we’ve just scratched the surface of addressing the needs of this country,” said Oberstar. “The key word for the future of transportation is intermodalism, and we should have been there 43 years ago when the Department of Transportation was created … We’re going to transform the future of transportation, create a Council on Intermodalism, and require all the modal administrators to meet monthly, to develop a national transportation investment plan so that highways can learn from aviation, railway can learn from aviation, and all of them can learn from one another.”
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