One more note on rail and then we’ll try to move on to some other pressing city matters, for at least a little while.

You might have noticed that Civil Beat‘s article about “bells and whistles” published Thursday night didn’t have an exact number for the value of the expected change order from Kiewit Pacific due to construction delays. The pertinent graf read:

HART interim executive director Toru Hamayasu declined to speculate about how much a Kiewit change order might cost. But it could be in the millions of dollars. The price of that contract was $90 million lower than HART’s consultants had projected it would be.

Yet the Honolulu Star-Advertiser this morning has the figure right in their headline — Delay has city paying $15 million for change in rail plan (subscription required). What gives?

Well, it turns out the number was staring us in the face the whole time. We just needed to do some subtraction.

We previously wrote about HART’s Dec. 27 letter to the Federal Transit Administration asking for a Letter of No Prejudice. You might remember the Jan. 6 headline “Honolulu to Feds: OK Rail Work Or Costs Rise $100M.”

The letter, which we shared for the world to see, includes total prices for the major contracts awarded so far. The total price for the “West Oahu/Farrington Highway Guideway” was listed at $502 million — $19 million higher than the $483 million original price tag for the work. (The new figure, according to a footnote, only includes change orders executed as of Nov. 1, 2011. We have a call out to HART to clarify that point.)

Subtract the $4 million change order approved when the contractor paid for its own insurance rather than relying on HART’s yet-to-be-finished insurance program, and voilà: $15 million.