 It's Tuesday, it's noon, and that means it's time for moving Hawaii forward. I'm your host, Tim Appachella. The rail project is $3 billion over budget. Currently, there is a full court press from Mayor Caldwell to plead to the state legislature that they must pass an extension of the half percent general excise tax. An excise tax is not a sales tax, it's far worse. An excise tax affects the cost of everything that residents and tourists pay for. A tax not immediately noticed, but certainly felt later on. Felt especially by those who can least afford to pay it. The most recent bill introduced has been referred to as a Christmas tree bill, a bill that promises to collect enough tax dollars to pay for not just the rail budget shortfall, but also for schools, highway projects, and affordable housing. A bill which gives some elected officials a reason to smile about, but for those who are trying to support a family, little reason to be happy. A small part of the rail budget is tied to what Hart expects to get back from the public in the form of fair revenue. Today's show is titled, Hart's Rail Ridership, Projections, Fantasies, Fairytales, and Alternative Facts. We're going to look at some of those ridership projections that Hart has desperately clung to since the inception of rail project. With me today is Cliff Slater, who co-authored with Randy Roth last week's civil beat article titled, The Impending Honolulu Rail Ridership Debaco. The article questions the wildly inflated rail numbers that Mayor Mufi Hanuman pushed out to convince the city council, the state, the tax paying public that the rail project is the magic silver bullet to solve all our traffic problems. And again, with me is Cliff Slater. Thank you, Cliff, for joining us. I very much appreciate it. Welcome. Thank you. Before I start the program, I've never met you before, and I want to render my heartfelt appreciation and thanks for you and Randy Roth and Governor Cayetano and Mr. Providoris for standing up and trying to make a difference. It's not easy, and you're doing it because the general taxpayer, your fellow residents, are and have been paying for this rail project. And so thank you for standing up, trying to make a difference, and trying to bring some sanity to the public airways about what this rail is and what is not. So thank you. Thank you. Like to ask you a little bit about how you got involved with this and a little bit of your history? Well, I got involved first in 1985 or 1986 when Frank Fasche had been elected mayor again and he resurrected his favorite elevated rail deal, which is almost identical to what we're looking at today. And I initially thought, in my innocence, that the problem was that the legislators just didn't understand that this was a disaster, a fiscal disaster, until I went around meeting with various senators and representatives and quickly came to the conclusion and they knew full well, but it was a political issue that was going to generate a lot of campaign contributions. And so then I gave up on that and we essentially took to the streets and the newspapers to warn the public. And this was, we managed to defeat that in 1992. And we were then called cost committee on sensible transit. And that was a very successful thing and I thought at that point that was all over. And then subsequently was resurrected, 2004 when Murphy Hanuman got elected as mayor. And what was obviously looking to be elected governor of the next gubernatorial election. And so he needed to raise a lot of money and there's nothing more to generate money campaign contributions than a rail line. That's just known. That's why people choose light rail over buses. There's nothing more functional than a bus. But the rail line, because they tend to be non-bid situations, or when I say non-bid, there's a lot of discretion involved. And so political discretion. And so then we were back in the rail thing again. But this time around they were much more prepared to deal with us. And they brought in some people who really knew how to deal with the PR, how to load up the neighborhood boards, etc. And so it was a different animal. So that kind of brings me to the question of how did we get here. And I'm not just talking about how through the many years, but through this great, great extension of the budget that we're currently in when we started off at $4 billion to give or take. And now we're north of, well, Mayor Caldwell says we're now at $10 billion. And he's understanding it. And he's understanding it still. I'll tell you, I was always saying it's going to be north of $7 billion. And this was way back when they were coming up with the $5 billion number. And that was primarily because I knew that once you start going down Dillingham Boulevard and along the waterfront that you're in a quagmire. Okay. There's so many things that can go wrong that that's what we said was that's where the cost overruns are going to occur. We thought, you know, they were starting this thing out in the country first because there would be no obstructions. There's no, there's no burial sites out there that got a clean. You're a lot of agricultural land. Yeah, you couldn't go wrong. So and what they would do is they would try and build as much as they could so that you the courts wouldn't want to stop them. You've already touched on the subject. I was going to discuss a little later, but since we're on it, let's let's go forward with that. And that is the Honolulu Transit Task Force has estimated that the first third is already 76% over its costs. So in order to complete the second third and the third third, they just took a simplistic calculation of saying, well, the next, the next third will be 76%. And the next third, the last third will be 76%. Right? So you take all that, it's 228% times the original budget. I mean, they're now calculating around 12.4 billion. But I suspect that that's such a simplistic approach because when you get to Dillingham, you get along the waterfront, you've got fill, you don't have solid rock down there. You don't have bedrock down there. You're going to have businesses to contend with. You're going to have the utilities, of course, which has been in the paper to contend with. You've got a whole pyramid of issues that I think the last third is going to far exceed that 76% cost overrun. So you're absolutely right. It's just amazing on where we're at. And so people are gasping and, you know, clawing for air at 10 billion. And I have to say that I'm not quite certain we're done with that. No, Dr. Pervedores, he thinks he's going to be more like 13. And I think he may be optimistic, you know, as they say about these large public works projects, okay, but the smartest guy in the room, you can tell, is the guy who thinks it's going to cost the most and take the longest. There you are. Well, speaking of quotes, I'd like to look at a quote that former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said a couple of years ago, and here it is. I'm going to miss the first couple of ones, but the one that I think is so telling and is so illuminating is the following. In the world of civil projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. I mean, if we just had that on the ballot before you cast your vote, maybe people would see the correlation between a very candid Mayor Willie Brown and the proposal that is in front of him. Unfortunately, we don't. So the next quote is even more illuminating and true to form, and that is, the idea is to get going, start digging a hole and make it so big that there's no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in. Wow. I mean, if that doesn't fit where we're at and where we're going to a T, I just don't know what does. So it's the most appropriate quotation. And I have to hand it to Mayor Willie Brown. Thank you for being so candid years out of office, but maybe you should have said a little bit closer to your engagement with the projects, but it is what it is. There's a term that's been used to describe how we got here as far as our cost overruns and how we got here as far as the voters approving for it and how we got here as far as the city council approving it. And that is a term called strategic misrepresentation. It's quite a term. It's quite a term. And so I just want to come up with a bit of a definition and see if this matches what you think it is. It's not too far from what we just saw in the quotations from Mayor Brown. And that is, the planned systematic underestimation of costs and overstatements of benefits done to increase support to having a large project approved. And the other one I would suggest is strategic silence. The, for example, the business community, the large business community has been silenced. So any businessman who has a name in the community will not come and discuss rail with us. So you, there's nobody. Why is that, do you think? Are they worried about retribution or? No, they're not. Well, yes. It's down. Yeah. So they're not proponents among the business community. Okay. There was the first time around, but not this time around. It's a game. One of the things they took care of early on, make sure that none of the business people, either A, would come out against rail or B, even be seen discussing it with us, okay, on radio, TV. I've tried to contact those that represent Hart and I've gotten nowhere with my requests. Yes. Well, it's the same with, you know, our problem has been with public television, for example, is we've said, you know, can you set up a discussion thing with the pro-rail people? And they can't get anybody from the city to come on the show. There's really been very limited debate from the very start. Yeah. In fact, the last time around, in the 1991 when it started, the city did show up for one thing, discussion with us in front of the Waikiki Improvement Association. And we just, it was just pitiful. I mean, we just really wiped the floor with them. Right. They learned something. And the mayor came out and it was headlines, tag order. Wow. Okay. We're going to get back to your Writership Report. We're going to take a commercial break. Sure. I'm Tim Apachele. This is Moving Hawaii Forward. We'll be right back. Hello, this is Martin Despang. I want to get you excited about my new show, which is called Humane Architecture for Hawaii and Beyond. And it's going to be on Think Tech Hawaii from downtown Honolulu on Tuesday after noon's 5 p.m. And we're going to talk about to make architecture more inclusive on the islands, which is one of the definitions of humane, which is being tolerant of many people, of nature, of many other influences. So we're going to have some great guests, like today's guest, for example, my collaborator, David Rockwood, who's the author of the awesome manifestation of humane architecture in the background. So see you on Tuesdays, 5 p.m. I look forward to looking to energize your Friday afternoon. Tune in to Stand the Energy Man at 12 noon. Aloha Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back. I'm Tim Apachele, your host for Moving Hawaii Forward. This afternoon, we're speaking with Cliff Slater and we're talking about his article and Randy Ross article about the overinflated Writership Project for the rail project amongst also how we got here in this mess to begin with. Cliff, thank you very much for joining us again. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what I would consider as voter apathy. And I don't know if it's burnout or not, but we're going to take a look at a quote by the recently former Senator Sam Slom. And basically he's saying at this point, a lot of people in the community have just given up. They've given up trying to make any kind of change whatsoever. Many of them have been involved in the past battles, the rail or the general access tax or something else. And those who haven't moved away just feel that you can't fight city hall. Now before the commercial break, you just said something known as a term you just came up with called strategic silence. And that is if they won't engage with you, does it feel like you're just banging your head against the wall as you're trying to alert to what some of the obvious shortfalls are to the project to begin with? Yeah, it's very difficult. I wonder if my dream of dreams, if it would be so nice to say if there's a proposal going before the ballot, particularly for rail, to have a little disclosure saying if the project is 25% over budget, this will be your new tax for car tabs and weight fees and general excise tax or sales tax. And if the project's 50% over, this will be your new cost estimations per capita, per resident. And if it's 100% over budget, would that be lovely just to see in dollars and cents what a cost of a project would be over a certain percentage? Well, you know, just in government projects, there is no accountability. They all run over. I mean, whether you talk about the stadium or the infamous baseball field that they built or the rail deal. I mean, public works projects run over, maybe double, but nobody has ever held accountable for them. Do you think the public realizes and understands that quotation from former mayor Willie Brown? Do they think that there's built-in misrepresentations from the very start? I personally think the public has a belief in their leaders and their elected officials that they have good faith in moving projects and agendas ahead. Well, most people have never heard that comment before. They're not going to read it in any of the standard media. I think it doesn't pay for a standard media to oppose the political establishment. And so they're not going to hear that. They're not going to hear anything that's really negative about the rail. It's just not allowed. Well, my last few shows, I did go into specific detail about what the cost per resident is and going to be for the life of the project. Family of five, you could come up with a number around $25,000 from start to finish, and that's at Alamoana. That doesn't even talk about going to University of Hawaii. Well, there's two other things after the construction is complete. You've got the annual operating costs. This is going to cost, I think they're talking about $140 million. But it's going to be more than that because they're not going to get the revenues, as we show in our article. There's no way that they're going to get the revenues they're projecting. And then in addition, the big issue is that the typical thing is that you are going to spend, when you get to the 40, 50 year mark, you're going to have spent as much in real dollars, you will have spent as much in refurbishing and replacement as you spent in the first place. Right, because we have a very salt salinity air quality and things rest a lot faster here. Well, it may be more for us, but I'm talking about the average across the mainland when most of which are not subjected to salt. So the FDA has suggested that people people are building these things. It would be a good idea. They haven't made it mandatory, but it would be a good idea if they put aside the sinking fund. In other words, you start putting your money away, money right away so that when you come to the 50 year mark, you've taken care of it. Because a lot of the fashion capital reserves, that's all it is. You have to. For us, it would mean putting aside an additional $100 million a year now and that would have to get inflated. I'm sure that's one of the reasons Mayor Caldwell is desperately seeking the half percent, the general excise tax to be put forth in perpetuity, that this will be an ongoing expense. Certainly, they didn't want to discuss that during the campaign to get the vote out and approve this. Most people don't seem to realize that when you take that much money out of the community, that that's going to hurt. For example, the people at the UH economics department have calculated that half a percent tax takes a thousand jobs out of the community. And which is about as many jobs as was created for the rail line. Despite the inflated promise of $10,000, we're sitting around $900? Well, there's a lot of jobs in Italy. A lot of jobs in the mainland, but they're not local jobs. That's correct. And that was kind of touted as one of the benefits. Let's look at the other benefits touted, and that was that the traffic was going to be east, that we're going to have 116,000 people writing this daily. Yet, that's just during the peak hour. We just talked about jobs and the $10,000 that was promised to be local jobs, but certainly didn't. So that didn't pan out. So the traffic projections didn't pan out. The job projections didn't pan out. But even if the ridership panned out, the forecast still shows clearly that traffic congestion will be far worse in the future than it is today. That's if you get the ridership, if you don't get the ridership, then it's going to be even worse. Well, it's going to be worse because based on those very aggressive projections, you have projects like the Hope of Pili, almost 12,000 units that's now going to have 12,000 households going to try to get into downtown to work. It has to, by definition, get worse. So maybe they're trying to build enough developments out there to actually get to their 116,000. I don't know, but it certainly is mystifying to me. And I want to talk about your article. The title of that article was published in the Civil Beat on February the 13th. The title was The Impending Honolulu Rail Ridership Tobacco. And let's show the last slide. And what this clearly shows that Honolulu at the very bottom would have a population, the lowest one, the lowest populations of a million, yet we have one of the highest projections of ridership. I find that fascinating. Yes. It's obvious that that's an outlier and that's not going to happen. So this project mostly resembles that, which was in Puerto Rico, San Juan. That was an elevated rail system. They estimated, I believe, 114,000. And in reality, their ridership was 76,000, 76% off. Yeah, 76% off. If Parson Brinkenhoff used and they were the consultants on that project as well, as well Miami. And the question is, if that's the experience of San Juan, why would that not be the experience here in Honolulu? Well, that's one of the things that I used to beg the city council to send somebody to San Juan to look at that rail line, find out why they went 78% over budget, okay? After their full funding grant agreement budget. Find that out and find out why their ridership, in fact, their ridership was so bad that their bus and rail ridership combined is less than what they were getting from the bus alone before they built the rail line. And I begged them to go and investigate, have sent somebody. And I could not get any response at all. So in your estimation, how is it that this glaring overestimation has stood the test of scrutiny? Is it just because we have the silent misrepresentation that is known it will address it and that the walls are built? It's like, for example, the data, as I've seen before, the data shows that if we don't have a build a rail line and we get all the ridership, okay, oh, excuse me, we don't build a rail line, we'll have a 23% increase in automobile traffic. And if we do build a rail line and we get all the ridership that they promise, okay, we'll still have a 21% increase in automobile traffic. So the difference is 2%. And that's if you get the ridership. So 10 billion dollars, probably 12 billion dollars, divided by 2%. From the get go, the whole thing has never promised anything, okay? But again, see the whole, you don't read in the final EIS, except in an obscure document in one of the comment areas, that it is not made clear at all that traffic congestion with rail will be worse than it is today. That's a statement they do make in responding to my comments, okay, but it's buried in a 3,000 page document. FTA hints at such things as well. Oh, FTA, but later on, right, right. Certainly not before the only vote we've had on it, okay, that was, in fact, the vote for the four rail was on a Tuesday and the draft EIS came out on Monday, plenty of time to digest it, right? Well, we're wrapping up here pretty quick. I wanted to ask you, where do we go from here? Voters just seem to be taking this on as a matter of fact, not realizing the financial impact to their families, and not only for this year, but years and years and years to come. Where do we stop? I mean, do you support the idea that we bring the rail down to the street level, try to save about 3 billion dollars by an alternative line or? Well, we've, you know, here's where it is. We're somewhere around four billion dollar mark, okay, is what we have into the thing, cancel all the contracts, pay off what's necessary, we're in for about four billion dollars, okay. It's going to take, you know, whatever the forecast they have, they're absurd, and unless they've got a cast iron, fully bonded bid, okay, which they're not going to even ask for, because that would be, that would be embarrassing. But I think it's going to cost us another eight, nine billion dollars, okay, to finish it, and to finish it, it's, you know, it's going to Alamoana Center. Well, Alamoana Center's got nothing to do with rush out, right, and the stores don't open until 10 o'clock in the morning. So you're not helping. You're not helping anything. Right. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you for coming here and raising this. I wish we had an hour on this program, but unfortunately I only have 29 minutes. Okay. And I'd love to have you back on again to finish our conversation, because we barely scratched the surface. So thank you very much for coming. And let's hope that the voters try to realize and call the representatives about the extension of this get tax. So with that, thank you.