At today’s Budget Committee meeting, Council Vice Chair Ikaika Anderson asked HART interim chief Toru Hamayasu if the rail authority would respect the Council’s wishes if it passed a resolution urging that rail construction be delayed until after a Full Funding Grant Agreement is complete with the FTA.

It was a hypothetical, and Hamayasu said he’d do his best to convince Council members that’s not a good idea. He said it’s actually less expensive to build columns and the fixed guideway and tear everything down than to wait to start. (I have questions in with HART asking about the financial calculations that led to that counterintuitive conclusion.)

I asked Anderson in the hallway if he was serious about introducing such a resolution. He said he’d make a decision by the end of the day, after consulting with staff and thinking more about what happened in the budget meeting.

Later, while I was meeting with new Board of Water Supply manager Ernest Lau, Anderson left me a voicemail indicating he won’t introduce such a resolution at this time. He left open the possibility that he might do so in the future.

Here’s what he said in his message:

Just wanted to let you know that I will not be introducing a resolution at this time regarding the Council asking HART not to proceed with any construction of fixed guideways until the Full Funding Grant Agreement. And I reached this conclusion because during today’s budget deliberations, HART did commit to showing the Council their financial data that they say shows it would be more financially feasible to pay contractors to erect the guideways and go ahead and take them down if necessary versus paying contractors to sit idle. And being that HART made that commitment to the Council to show us that data, I feel that I owe it to them to be presented with the opportunity to show us the data. And if the data does not show what HART says that it will show, then I will go ahead and re-evaluate and possibly move forward with such a resolution. But again I feel that I owe HART the opportunity to show us the information that they committed to providing.