 I'm Jay Fiedel, this is ThinkTech, and we're doing Community Matters with Russell Hanma. He is a transportation consultant, very steeped in experience of our rail. And we're talking about a big week for rail. We have talked earlier, just in the previous segment, about the week in the legislature. And it looks like, although we don't have the final word on it because it's happening right now, it looks like the bill 4 will pass, and we'll have an increase in the TAT, and we'll have an increase in the GET around the state. And the net result will be 2.4 million dollars, I think that's billion dollars more than we have now in the tail at heart. So we're calling this, you know, looking at the future of rail, now assuming this passes. Let's make a wild assumption and say it will pass, you've predicted that. So what does it look like going forward? What's, may I say, down the track, Russell? Well, if you look down the track, I think if we don't get derailed or anything, if we stay within the track with our plan, I think, you know, generating that 2.4 billion dollars additional fund in combination of transit accommodation, tax, and GET. Because right now it's budgeted at 8.2 billion dollars just to go to Middle Street, and they ran out of funding with their contingency fund. So they have to generate 300 million dollars additional, which the city council passed a bill to generate obligations and bonds. I know to meet the threshold, to go out to Middle Street. So additional that 2.4 billion that the legislature is going to be passing the Senate bill for is going to be used from Middle Street all the way to Alamona shopping center. And my think is somehow that 300 million dollars of general obligation bonds, we'll have to pay that back. Yeah, definitely. And when you do that on the spot basis like that, the interest rate is higher. So the cost of those bonds is higher than it would be ordinarily. And they'll have to raise that money from us to pay it back. Yeah. Okay. So I think the city has a wishful thinking that soon as a tourism picks up economy, picks up, there'll be additional increase of GET, the transit accommodation tax, because you see more tourists coming here. The tourists are spending more. As you know, our projections today, I think about a week ago, the Hawai'i tourism authority came up with the numbers with the DBET statistics division that there's an increase of roughly about 17% that tourists are spending. And there's roughly 7% of increase in tourists compared to last year, which were the state revenue council projected 3% increase. So we're in a boom time. Exactly. So that's what a mayor and the city should be happy that the legislature gave this kind of mixed kind of a combination of GET, TAT. So I got to ask you a really big question. We cannot go a step further in this discussion until I ask you my big question. Now, they're going to have to go back to the legislature for more. Are they going to have to do some more general obligation bonds and some more taxes? They're going to have to do increases in real property taxes. Is this the end of it, or is there more in the future? Let's just have our fingers crossed that I hope that they don't have. I think the legislature did say that there's going to be a check and balance, that the controller is going to have to issue the checks of what payments are going to be to the contractors or whatever they, the service is going to be rendered. And I think that both the House and the Senate want to have a check and balance, so they're hiring two ex-officials from both the House and the Senate to sit on the board. The ex-legislators. I don't know who they're going to appoint, but they won't have a voting rights, but they get the seat to listen and sit on the hardboard as observers. Ex-officio. Exactly, and they can report the findings to the legislature. That's a good idea. And another thing is that the auditing that the state auditor is planning on doing. And I guess they're concerned about doing a forensic kind of auditing. What is a forensic audit? According to the rule of law, when you define forensic, it means people use that to look for criminal activities or wrongful doing. And if there was any white collar crime, and there was an injustice. Corruption, for example. Exactly, and they can submit the findings to the police department and to the prosecutor's office. And the prosecutor can prosecute them for a white collar crime. Yeah, well, how will it affect the development of the rail, though, if that happens? Oh, yeah, that would be a shame. Somebody will lose a job, so that's a shame. Yeah, that would be a shame for it. It would be very embarrassing for state of Hawaii. So I think maybe that's why, and there was a concern that they don't want to proceed with the forensic. But I think what the heart and member, a council member, Henry Felix, who belongs to the board member, he will have to see the forensic kind of approach. And the council members and the city council is talking about forensic auditing right now. You think it'll happen? I don't know. Whose decision is it? Is it the city or the state? I don't want to get, you know, I would say it's the city's decision or the state, too. Because the FDA already did their auditing already. They didn't find anything forensic, did they? All they said was, you know, if they were going to do the risk test, they should have it. What is that, Rosa? Just to have an additional contingency, cushion for if the things that didn't go according to the plans and the project that... That'll probably be used up, won't it? Every time you look, there's an overrun on this thing. Yeah, I think, you know, what we should have done from day one was that we should have remembered my good friend, Frank Doyle, who worked on the H-Power. And he was the old project manager on the 1990 project. You know, he'd been a civil engineer, PE, homeboy, understand with DTS. So he came up with a scorecard, they call it, which analyzes the change order and the cost overruns based on the projection of the construction cycle. It's like a PERT, it's like a professional engineer is used for using the construction cycle with how much time and man hours are included in certain project scope of work. And we're going to do this, but it was very cumbersome and detailed. So I think at the time before the hardboard was established, they took it out and said, we don't want to do the scorecard kind of approach. Maybe it'll happen now, though. I think that there's another kind of program, I'm sure, of software that approach. But then they fired, they get rid of Frank Doyle. And Frank Doyle was, you know, he was good. And I liked him, and he was a guy that would do a due diligence. That relates to the subject about whether this legislation is happening probably right now, as we speak, is going to affect the membership of the hardboard, affect the contractors going forward. You know, you mentioned about Kiewitz departure, it's really too bad. You think there'll be other changes in the hardboard or in the contractors? I think the hardboard is like, to me, it's like a musical chair. Every time we get somebody in there, they learn the concept, they're all volunteering. So they leave and, you know, they don't want to pursue their interests, what they, you know, first they got into. I think we only have one person. When I started, matter of fact, I got this thing. They gave us a ton of real trends. It's a memorial, like a medallion that's made of koa, which is groundbreaking ceremony of February 22nd, year 2011 at Kapolei. And this is where Senator Danny Noah was there. And I matter of fact, I escorted him. And Senator Danny Noah was a very supportive of this project. And even when the hardboard was established, he told everybody on the hardboard when Don Horner was a chair, before that was Kerry Onaga was a chair and told them, you guys got to be a good steward of this project. And he testified at the Kapolei Halley over there and he came to the groundbreaking. And after the ceremony at the groundbreaking, I escorted him because he was in his cane. He was holding my hand and he was walking, I was going to his limousine and I opened the door to him and he got in and I closed the door and I bowed to him with respect. And that was the last time I saw him. And two weeks after he passed away. Oh, he's symbolic. Yeah, two weeks after he passed away. But he told me to be a good steward and keep up the good work. And he knew that I was doing the... He wanted to see rail built. Yeah, on top, yes. He wanted to see rail being success and that we were going to do it with Pono. That, you know, wanted to do it for the future of our Kekies here in Hawaii. Well, one last question that we're going to go, Russell. And that is, give me five years. What does it look like? Five years down the line, I think, we'll probably be breaking down from that. We might be able to get to Middle Street. I hope to come from Middle Street. It's going to go through Dillingham Boulevard. That's where all the utility location, I think there was an estimate like $200 million utility relocation. I remember when I was working under the last project in 1990 as a state coordinator, we had all the utility companies and that was my main... I was a chairman of the utility relocation and we had our utility people. They were going to do it from a good gesture. Aloha, they weren't going to charge us for the utility relocation because it was in their plans to do the... They were behind it, yeah. Yeah, so in other words, if we somehow work a deal with the utility company and check their schedule out... So somebody has to negotiate these things. Exactly. We can negotiate the contract again. And if I had to guess, I would say that the condemnation is required for the path of the rail. They haven't been negotiated either or paid for. Exactly. So I don't know if that's budgeted or not, but gee whiz, there's a lot of land involved, a lot of people who want to be paid for their land if it's taken for a rail. So we've got a long way to go here. Yeah, this is the time maybe we've got to use that Donald Trump kind of concept making the world of a deal where we've got to renegotiate something and kind of squeeze the contractors. Need leadership. Who's going to lead? I think we've got a new executive director, Randy Robbins. I guess he's taking after Murphy. I can't. He's going to be... He's a musical chef. Yeah, and as you know, Randy Robbins, I knew him from a long time, matter of fact. When he was a represent Canadian Bombardarian prior to that, he was with AEG Westinghouse, the People Move system. And when I first met him in Yonkers in New York when I was working with Kawasaki, having a Kawasaki rail car and we started the Yonkers plan in New York City with General Electric and Nishoiwara Trading Company to assemble and develop a construction and manufacturing plan for the subway cars for the New York City Transit Authority and the path trains. Oh, wow, you've been around. So then Andy was one of the Westinghouse guy and he came for the Westinghouse air brakes because in order to do the first article inspection when you got all these suppliers and parts material there's a lot of people in the country who are in this business. I mean, there's a lot of money flowing one way or the other unless Donald Trump stops it unless he stops money flowing. And there's another possibility that this administration is going to cut off further funding and we're going to be left high and dry looking as we have in this week of legislation, looking for money locally from our people. You know, originally people bought into this whole thing with rail on the assumption that the better part of the cost would be borne by the federal government. That hasn't happened. And it isn't happening now and to the extent that anything could happen from federal money, that's in question. Yeah, I think it from day one, it wasn't planned right. It was a poor planning. I think, you know, good example what we should have done from going from the clock center that when we first initiate, we should have first stations should have been right behind the judiciary building by the newspaper building or by the bus depot. Downtown. No, in Kapolei. Because, you know, how are you going to get from downtown Kapolei to clock center or UH West? There's so many mistakes made in the way that's really been laid out. Another thing I would like to see extension from Ala Moana shopping center to UH. What I worry about is that the hard board volunteers and these musical chair executives, you know, they're not going to be able to get their hands around this. And so we raised this $2.4 billion. And we have a big shake out and the public settles down, the hotels settle down, the county settle down, and we get back into another iteration of problems. And it costs more money, new people coming through, new failures, new contractors dropping out and all that. So you think it will successfully get to Middle Street in five years? Is that your answer? I think it's a short term. I hope so. I hope the projected plan and what we awarded the contract to a Semictator and Grant, they better make it within the five years. Parsons Brinkeroff is still the general. No, the Parsons Brinkeroff caught in Douglas. They pulled out, as most of my good friends and engineering consultants, they all work for Parsons Brinkeroff when I first started working for DLT and a member of a guy named Mark Scheibe who was one of the guys that orchestrated the EIS for the past 30 years, the Environmental Impact Statement for this Honolulu Rail Project. So who's the general now? So the general analysis is infrastructure consulting company. So what happened was a key wet, didn't get the engineering consulting contract because they wanted half a billion dollars to manage it. Nobody was gonna pay him that. So what happened was they all left and some of them started their own engineering company. Some of them went to the mainland as well. This is in shambles, isn't it? Yeah. Who's gonna pull this together? And what was the worst scenario is when Parsons, they brought all these, when they did the selection for the, there's a selection committee when they were to award a contract for the prime contract or the core systems contract and the subcontract. And the Parsons brought all the specialists, evaluators from the mainland. And these guys, strictly what they do, they're specializing evaluating contracts for. Okay, well, so it seems clear we got a long way to go on this. They left after that. And so what happened this week in the legislature, what is happening right now and where it looks, at least on the surface, is not gonna be what happens ultimately. There'll be more twists and turns and ebbs and flows and issues. And you gotta come back and tell us about it. Yeah, the main thing, Jay, is we have to be positive. We need to move forward because we already have the infrastructure. We got the columns. We already spent billions of dollars. There's no way of turning it back. We gotta find a way, manage a way to get to Alamon Shopping. The only thing we can do is the private sector has gotta be a good corporate citizen. Yeah, I agree. I think if they can shave like 10% of the estimated cost, that would help a lot for Hawaii. Well, thank you, Russell. It's great to talk to you. Thanks for coming down. You have to come back and fill us in as things go forward. Thank you, Jay. Aloha.