When Colleen Hanabusa announced after a heated dispute with railroad CEO Lori Kahikina that she would at some point step down as chair of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, reporters qualified it with words to the effect of “whatever that means.”
Well, now we know: it meant she was just licking her wounds and not actually resigning.
The board voted 6-2 to keep Hanabusa as chairman, and our misguided $10 billion rail project is left with a chairman and a newly hired $336,000 CEO side-eyeing each other like boxers walking around the ring waiting for the bell.
To be fair, Hanabusa didn’t wait for the thankless, non-paying job. Opponents led by Vice President Kika Bukoski were unwilling to take it on and could not persuade anyone else to act.
Ultimately, it came down to money and politics, as board member Anthony Aalto noted that the board’s main challenge is convincing the Legislature to commit more money to complete and expand the line.
He said it would be “insane” not to take advantage of the “political weight” of Hanabusa, a former Senate president who also served in Congress.
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Almost as if on a good sign, Hanabusa’s political weight grew heavier last week when Gov. Josh Green announced that she was one of seven appointed members of the state Commission on Salaries, which regulates the pay of lawmakers, the governor, lieutenant governor, cabinet members, recommends their deputies and judges. .
So HART’s chief lobbyist, who is asking lawmakers and administrators to throw billions more dollars into the bottomless pit of rail, will be a big player in determining the next round of pay raises for those lawmakers and administrators.
There’s no conflict of interest here, folks…just keep at it.
Hanabusa knows her trade when it comes to implementing generous statutory wage increases. In the Senate, she was an architect of the 2006 constitutional amendment that created the Pay Commission, which could give lawmakers pay raises they didn’t have to vote on. As Senate president, she championed a 36 percent pay increase for lawmakers in the midst of the Great Recession, outraging the public at a time when other state workers were facing layoffs, pay cuts and “furlough holidays.”
The newly appointed state salary commission will have a lot of leeway following the recent precedent of a 64% raise for Honolulu City Council members. Fellow statesmen may try to invent anything less than that as evidence of heroic restraint.
It’s human nature that lawmakers whose paychecks are getting fatter with Hanabusa’s help will be more generous in responding to her plea for more money for a rail project that has already blown through two legislative bailouts and cost nearly twice its original budget of 5 spent $2 billion.
HART could also lobby to relax accountability measures imposed by the Legislature, including the elimination of non-voting state officials on the board, such as watchdog stalwart Natalie Iwasa.
These machinations are examples of the misguided and self-defeating political dynamics in Hawaii that cause so many efforts, like rail, to fail.
The powerful continue to appoint each other to new positions of power in an endless dance of privilege designed to ensure that insiders playing the game are always served first.
