One more interesting nugget from the rail lawsuit hearing this morning: The plaintiffs conceded the argument on four of the historic sites that had been included in their claim.

Attorney Nicholas Yost said that when his clients finally got their hands on the administrative record, they agreed that the facts “did not give support to what we believed to be the case when we filed the complaint.”

The city’s lawyer, Robert Thornton, said the Environmental Impact Statement for rail identified 42 historic sites, known as “4(F)” sites, and that plaintiffs raised issues about nine of them specifically.

Thornton said plaintiffs failed to establish “standing” for some of those and had previously waived their right to bring up some of the others when they didn’t raise them during the administrative process. He said any sites not specifically mentioned in the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment should count as being waived, too.

Unlike the first hearing in the case back in November, neither Cliff Slater nor Ben Cayetano attended this time around. Randy Roth was there, and told Inside Honolulu after the judge left the courtroom that the city’s motions to narrow the case affect just a “sliver” of the underlying lawsuit.

“Part of our lawyers’ plan has been to narrow our 4F claims,” Roth said. And Yost said today’s hearing served a “useful function” in narrowing the case, though he’d “prefer to have every possible site considered.” 

That’s a subtle pivot from last time, when opponents told assembled media that the government’s attempts to narrow the lawsuit were a waste of the court’s time and part of a systematic attempt to bleed the plaintiffs dry.