Don’t miss the stories on the rail negotiations by Star-Advertiser reporter Gordon Pang and Kevin Dayton. They’ve captured the tension as Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell and city officials attempt to make the problem of paying for rail a state problem.

Pang reports on a Wednesday night meeting during which details of the proposal agreed to by legislative leaders were disclosed to the city.

Caldwell was summoned to Senate President Ron Kouchi’s office Wednesday evening to discuss the proposal.

At the meeting, House Finance Chairwoman Sylvia Luke asked him to accept the terms and conditions of the package, the mayor said.

He took that to mean that there was no room for negotiation, that state lawmakers were offering a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposition, the mayor said.

Caldwell responded that he would need to take the proposal back to be analyzed by financial officers in both the Department of Budget and Fiscal Services and the Honolulu Authority of Rapid Transportation.

Tempers flared, and after some yelling, Caldwell said, he and Gary Kurokawa, his chief of staff, walked out of the room abruptly.

“It ended up with me and (Kurokawa) leaving after, what, an hour and a half?” Caldwell said. “But it ended with one of the members, I think who had maybe drank a little too much, was getting belligerent. And I listened for a while, and then I said, ‘I don’t need to take this.’”

Caldwell declined to identify the lawmaker.

And Kevin Dayton reports on Caldwell’s response to the proposal, contained in a letter to lawmakers on Thursday.

Even after that extra funding is provided, “by our calculations, the gap is somewhere between $600 million and $900 million,” Caldwell wrote. “To fund the gap with city operating revenue would place an enormous financial burden on the residents and taxpayers of Oahu well beyond what a straight forward extension of the (general excise surcharge) would do.”

Well, isn’t that something that Caldwell should have figured out years ago, either while serving as managing director or as mayor? It seems belated recognition that the city can’t really afford the rail system, but has at the same time refused to consider modifications that have the potential to cut those costs significantly.

Senator Laura Thielen took to her Facebook page to vent about Caldwell’s attitude.

The nerve of this man! Last week at the briefing I asked Mayor Caldwell 3 times if he was going to ask for more money for Rail if costs went up. Three times he said he stood by the City’s projected $8.2 Billion construction costs.

He was so angry at our questions that he walked out of the hearing early and didn’t come back.
Today he sent us a letter saying the Legislature has to give an extra $545 million. And if we don’t, then WE’RE not adequately supporting the project.

So today it’s $8.7 billion and we have yet to see the bids for the most expensive section of Rail, downtown.

No trust. No credibility. No shame. Outrageous!

Why are we holding a special session for this man and his project that he refuses to manage?

Meanwhile, my Civil Beat column for the week appeared yesterday, “Ian Lind: Don’t Be Fooled By ‘Friends Of Rail’“.

After last week’s release of a new survey by a new “grassroots” group, Friends of Rail, part of a broader pro-rail public relations push launched by the group, I got curious about the groups status and composition.

It looks like rail proponents have what is essentially took an inactive “shell” nonprofit corporation, Committee for Balanced Transportation, and resurrected it with new directors and a new trade name.

While working on the column, I was unable to reach Ryan Akamine, who is the president and a director of the Committee for Balanced Transportation. I did reach a former director of the group who identified himself as a personal friend of Akamine, and who agreed to forward my request to speak with him. I did not get a response.

I was able to find more information, but not in time to include it in the column. Akamine is a former staffer for now-Senator Stanley Chang, back when Chang sat on the Honolulu City Council. In 2015 testimony, Akamine said he now offers “equity investments, tax, and accounting services through GENIUSfiIe, L.P., and Boeckmann CPAs, in Honolulu, Maui, and Kauai.”

Another former Stanley Chang staffer, Rebecca Soon, responded to my inquiry emailed to Friends of Rail this week, as I described in the column.

In any case, the Civil Beat column is no longer behind a pay wall.

My column this week comments on the state’s latest craziness, a new program to promote and prepare for a North Korean nuclear attack targeting Honolulu (“Ian Lind: Hawaii’s Nuclear Preparedness Is Same Old Fear Mongering“).

It’s all out of the 1950s-1960s playbook. Been there, done that. Certainly there are better things we can be spending our tax dollars on. And I suggest that’s true, even if you’re very concerned about the possibility of North Korea’s aggression.

I’ll let you read the column, if you’re interested. But in the process of pulling thoughts together for that column, I ran into the strange case of Senate Concurrent Resolution 169.

Back in April, Hawaii News Now reported on a resolution passed out of the House Committee on Public Safety “state officials to update plans for coping with a nuclear attack as North Korea develops nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that can reach the islands.”

HNN did not identify the resolution by number, but a search of the legislature’s database shows it must have been referring to SCR 169. More specifically, a House draft of the resolution, referred to as SCR 169, SD1 HD1. It appears HNN was reporting based on a press release or tip from the committee’s vice-chair, Rep. Matt LoPresti, who claimed credit for the resolution.

Last week, USA Today repeated the reference to the House resolution last week in a story on the state’s new emergency preparedness plan.

In April, Vice Chairman Matt LoPresti said he wanted to re-equip Cold War-era fallout shelters after the state House Public Safety Committee unanimously passed a resolution calling for an update of emergency plans.

Further, state emergency management agency documents disclosed to journalist Sarah Emerson in response to a Freedom of Information request to the state Department of Defense also reference the need to respond to the House resolution.

Well, this is an odd tale.

First of all, it’s important to note that the resolution was a concurrent resolution which did not pass, although it did pass out of the House. It died after conference committee negotiators never convened to even consider it.

So SCR 169 SD1, HD1 probably got more press, locally and nationally, than any other bit of failed legislation during the session.

Normally, resolutions are generated in pairs. A concurrent resolution is typically accompanied by a resolution of the house where it is introduced. Typically, an SCR 169 would be accompanied by a Senate Resolution with virtually the same wording, except that the SR version would not require House agreement. Concurrent resolutions carry more political clout, because they reflect agreement between both House and Senate on a a matter.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 169 began as a resolution dealing with the state’s planning for construction of a new correctional center.

REQUESTING THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY, PURSUANT TO THE RECOMMENDATION OF THE TASK FORCE ESTABLISHED TO STUDY EFFECTIVE INCARCERATION POLICIES TO IMPROVE HAWAII’S CORRECTIONAL SYSTEM, TO DELAY PLANS TO BUILD A NEW CORRECTIONAL FACILITY ON OAHU UNTIL THE TASK FORCE ISSUES ITS FINAL REPORT THAT WILL PROVIDE A COMPREHENSIVE ROAD MAP FOR REFORMING HAWAII’S CORRECTIONAL SYSTEM.

It was amended in the Senate to limit its scope by simply requesting “the final report of the task force established pursuant to H.C.R. No. 85, H.D. 2, S.D. 1, Regular Session of 2016, to also identify sites ten acres or less in size.”

The resolution was introduced by senators representing the Mililani area, near one of the sites initially identified as suitable for a new prison.

SCR 169 SD1 passed the Senate, along with SR 83, a Senate Resolution with the same intent.

When the concurrent resolution went to the House, it was referred to the Public Safety Committee chaired by Rep. Greg Takayama, who is a key member of the task force studying “best practices” for a new prison facility.

It would appear that Takayama did not support the resolution, at least in part because it would suddenly place additional unfunded responsibilities on the committee, which had already produced a draft final report. It could also be that state emergency management officials were lobbying for some clever way to get their resolution into play, although the cutoff for introducing substantive resolutions was March 10, a month before the HD1 version surfaced.

But instead of simply killing the resolution, Takayama appears to have authorized his vice-chair, Lopresti, to carry out a classic “gut and replace” on it. Lopresti then introduced his proposed HD1 dealing with nuclear preparedness, with not only new content but an entirely new title as well (“REQUESTING THE STATE TO MODERNIZE ITS DISASTER PREPAREDNESS PLANS.”). The rewritten House draft of SCR 169 contained not a single trace of the original Senate version.

It came as no surprise, then, that conferees appointed to work out differences between the House and Senate versions never even bothered to meet, and SCR 169 in all its versions died.

But even after death, the resolution lived on in news reports about our new bomb shelter planning.

So goes the strange world of Hawaii state government.