VIDEO: How your tax dollars are being wasted on a railway in Hawaii

From Fox News March 17, 2017

The city low-balled the cost and construction is five years late; William La Jeunesse has the story for ‘Special Report’.

$15M Change Orders: Redesign Rail Columns so they Don’t Collapse Under Weight of Stations

SA: Under earlier plans rail was supposed to have started running from East Kapolei to Aloha Stadium in September 2016, but that interim opening has now been pushed to July 2020….

More than $6 million will go to Kiewit Infrastructure West, as the firm building the system’s first 10 miles continues to make revisions to its columns and elevated guideway so it will support the load of the rail stations…..

The city awarded Kiewit contracts to design and build the guideway in 2009 and 2011 — before the contracts to design the stations went out.

Those station and guideway contracts should have been awarded together, former HART Executive Director Dan Grabauskas said in 2014 when the rail agency approved an earlier $6 million additional payment to Kiewit to address the issue. (Grabauskas joined HART in 2012 and resigned in August.)….

Kiewit’s latest $6 million will also go toward reinforcing underground sections of the West Oahu guideway near a channel that’s more susceptible to erosion than originally thought, HART officials said.

The remaining $8.7 million awarded Thursday will cover delay impacts to Ansaldo Honolulu JV, the firm contracted to design and build the train cars as well as the communications and controls system. Delays in building stations have kept the firm from running the proper tests, and delaying those tests then pushes back rail’s opening, Deputy Director for Core Systems Justin Garrod said in his board presentation Thursday.

The $9 million is a preliminary figure that’s expected to grow, rail officials said.

The project’s contingency fund, with a reported balance of more than $450 million, will cover all of the costs, officials say. HART has already approved more than $284 million in change orders to Kiewit to build the first 10 guideway miles and an operations and maintenance center, according to the agency’s most recent reports. The agency has approved nearly $27 million for Ansaldo in change order increases, the report further stated…..

A former rail consultant who left the project last year amid disagreements with HART has said that Kiewit expects to lose about $100 million on its contracts to build the first 10 miles of guideway….

The consultant, Bart Desai, questioned how those overseeing the project handled the early contracts.

“One could ask a question: Could HART have designed stations without much or no impact to the guideway elements? Or should HART have waited to delay issuance of Notice to Proceed (NTP) of the guideway project and give time to complete 75-90 percent design of station structure elements?” Desai, who dealt with claims on the project through subcontractor PGH Wong Engineering Inc., wrote in his letter. “Such option(s) would have saved the taxpayers multi-million dollars.”….

Hanabusa, then a rail board member, said, “Maybe we didn’t have a clear enough idea what we were doing”….

For the next stretch of rail construction, from Aloha Stadium to Middle Street, the stations and guideway are being designed and built as part of the same $875 million contract. The joint venture Shimmick/Traylor/Granite is expected to start that work later this year….

read … Change orders totaling $15 million approved for rail

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