Aloha Executive Director's Message

The Pacific Resource Partnership (PRP) strongly believes a future without rail isn’t one we can afford. Nor can future generations.

These aren’t easy economic times. Few cities or states are as fi scally comfortable as they’d like to be. Most are far worse off than Honolulu, which has a unique and major opportunity to build a solid economic future with rail.

Rail’s budget stands at $5.3 billion, a significant sum. More signifi cant are the opportunities that construction spending will create. Rail planners learned from the overruns encountered in building the H-3 Freeway. For starters, the rail budget includes $1 billion of contingencies designed to address potential cost increases.

More importantly, building rail will create 10,000 new jobs a year. That is equivalent to 1.6 percent of Hawaii’s workforce, and will go a long way towards drastically reducing unemployment in the state. Related development work will contribute to even more jobs. Simply put, rail means getting Honolulu where it needs to be and putting Hawaii back to work.

Our traffi c has reached a point of no return. Honolulu commuters already face some of the most punishing congestion in the nation. Planning for our interstate highways began in 1960, when the island’s population was barely half a million. Our roads aren’t equipped to serve the island in 2011, and the situation will be even more dire in 2030.

That is why we’ve been dedicating our efforts towards getting this historic and vital project on the right track, and will continue to do so.

Beginning with this issue, you will fi nd a rail column in every Ho’oku, which will provide construction updates and highlight recent milestones, such as the Honolulu City Council’s decision to issue $104 million in general obligation bonds to fund rail and their approval of HART’s operating and construction budgets. We will also be posting the latest updates on our recently launched Facebook and twitter pages; I hope you will connect with us via our social media outlets.

It is too late in the game to be creating unjustifiable delays to stop rail. For the last 30 years, we have studied and discussed transportation options. The process hasn’t been perfect, but little in life is. What is clear is that efforts to further delay the implementation process will penalize us all.