Message from the Chair

Carrie Okinaga, Chairwoman, HART Board of Directors

All of us serving on the board of directors for the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) understand the great responsibility before us. We are here to ensure the Honolulu Rail Transit Project comes in on time, within budget, and that your taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely. We look forward to working with the public on this historic project.

As the voters clearly stated last November, and as U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye has reminded us more recently, HART's mandate is clear: oversee the construction and operation of the City's fixed guideway system in a well-managed and transparent manner.

As a taxpayer myself and as HART board chair, I am very grateful for the time and commitment made by all of our HART board members, volunteer and ex-officio alike, as well as for the depth and breadth of their collective expertise and experience.

During our first meeting on July 1, the Board adopted operating and capital budgets so that no time or money was lost in transition. The Board also appointed Toru Hamayasu as Interim Executive Director/CEO, and initiated procurement of a search firm with international reach to assist us in selecting a permanent Executive Director.

We organized ourselves with five standing committees: Audit/Legal Matters (Ivan Lui-Kwan, Chairman), Finance (Don Horner, Chairman), Human Resources (Keslie Hui, Chairman), Project Oversight (Damien Kim, Chairman), and Transit Oriented Development (Buzz Hong, Chairman).

To maximize transparency, HART board members have met publicly and discussed issues nearly every week either in committee or as a Board. The agenda for and minutes of all of our meetings are posted online at www.honolulutransit.org . And every other month, we have committed to holding a board meeting in Kapolei to encourage public participation.

This is a major public works project involving the work of thousands of people, billions of dollars, and City, State and federal governments, not to mention non-governmental entities and businesses. Yes, there most certainly will be challenges along the way. But the environmental impact process has been completed, and one-by-one the lawsuits are resolving themselves. There are no other traffic solutions of this size that have the support of the voters, elected officials, and the Federal Transit Administration, along with dedicated local funding and Congressional funding on the order of $1.55 billion.

The board will provide guidance to the HART staff in anticipating, preventing, and dealing with issues as they arise. We will work with our partners in the community and government and will hold HART, including ourselves, responsible for outcomes.

We will continue to work with the sense of urgency with which we began. Not just for the construction workers in need of jobs and for the people who spend hours in their cars commuting every day from and to West Oahu. But also for all of us who believe that there is a fundamental fairness issue at stake here: When a part of our community (has been and) is suffering and we know that their situation will only worsen over time, we pull together to do what we can to help out.