Hawaii Freeway 25 Years Overdue as Costs Spin Out of Control : Environment: Critics call it a 16-mile road to nowhere. Backers contend it will ease traffic congestion. But the price tag is more than 17 times the original estimate.

It may be the mother of all federal highway cost overruns.

When it first hit the drawing boards in 1963, the estimated cost of the 16-mile H-3 freeway in Hawaii was $50 million to $70 million. When completed in June, 1997, it will have cost $1.23 billion.

Critics say it’s a wasteful road to nowhere. Supporters say it’s vital to ease traffic congestion between Honolulu and the windward side of Oahu.

In the early 1960s, the United States was locked into the Cold War with the Soviet Union and had started sending military advisers to help combat Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.

State and federal planners said there needed to be a quick route to move troops and equipment across the island from the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station to Pearl Harbor and Hickam Air Force Base to embark on ships and planes to trouble spots.

That justified the use of Federal Interstate and Defense Highway System funds for the six-lane highway with two mile-long tunnels through the Koolau Mountains. The scheduled completion date was 1972.

In June, 1997, officials hope to open to cross-island traffic the four-lane H-3--25 years late with two fewer lanes and at a cost more than 17 times the original estimate.

After spending $5 million a mile for the first six miles built between 1970 and 1972, it is now costing $120 million a mile for the remaining 10.1 miles. The federal government paid 90% and the state government paid 10%.

Unlike most freeways, the H-3 has long tunnels, climbs very steep mountains and makes extensive use of viaducts to lessen environmental impact, said Jim Pinkelman, a spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration.

“Whenever you’re tunneling or have extensive mountainous terrain, the cost of construction rises tremendously,” he said. The tunnels alone cost $275.1 million, according to state contract figures.

Although popular with the military, politicians, business leaders, labor unions and most Oahu residents, the project slammed head-on into a new player on the scene in the early 1970s--the environmentalist.

“It’s a monument to stupidity and waste,” said Tony Hodges, an environmental activist and leader in the legal and political fight against the project. “It’s a road to nowhere.”

The freeway was bogged down with stop-work injunctions for 17 years; the legal fights resulted in two U.S. Supreme Court rulings, an extraordinary act of Congress and several expensive realignments. The project is 80% complete and headed into the 1.2-mile home stretch of construction in June.

“I suffered through all that period,” said E. Alvey Wright, a former state Department of Transportation director who was the state’s beleaguered point man for the project. “It was no fun, but it was necessary.”

Wright, 86, agrees the freeway “used too much money,” but said that was largely due to three decades of inflation during the legal fights.

Tetsuo Harano, who retired recently as state highways administrator, guided the H-3 project from its inception. The H-3 tunnels will be named after him.

The contract for the six-mile first stretch of the highway in Kaneohe was awarded in 1969, but work on the tunnels never began because the low bidder said a mistake had been made on the bid. The state started the bidding process over in 1970.

By then, the National and Environmental Policy Act of 1969 required a full environmental impact statement on all major projects.

Hodges, founder of the environmental group Life of the Land, and other opponents filed a lawsuit in 1972 to require the state to prepare the environmental impact statement. They then filed a lawsuit claiming the study produced by the state was inadequate.

The federal court agreed and sent the state back for a redraft.

Hodges’ early success in getting the project halted galvanized a small but vocal coalition of residents and organizations who saw the freeway as a catalyst for unwanted urban development of their lush and scenic windward side.

“I don’t think anything could have been done differently to change the outcome, but if it were to be considered today I doubt it would be done because of all the complications,” Harano said.

The H-3 was not a victim of bureaucratic bungling but of unforeseeable circumstances, Harano said.

The new freeway is expected to move an average 19,000 vehicles a day across the island and back, relieving the traffic congestion on the Pali and Likelike highways. They are the only other routes between the suburban and rural areas of windward Oahu and Honolulu.

The legal fights in the early 1970s involved the adequacy of the environmental impact statement and sending the freeway through pristine Moanalua Valley, owned by the Damon Estate and overseen by the Moanalua Gardens Foundation, which said it wanted to turn the valley into a 3,000-acre public park.

While the state was waging the environmental battle, the foundation and H-3 opponents used a huge rock bearing ancient and supposedly sacred Hawaiian petroglyphs to get the valley entered into the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an appeals court’s injunction against the freeway. The appeals court had ruled that the secretary of transportation erred in not issuing a statement that there was no feasible and prudent alternative route for the freeway than through the Moanalua Valley.

The state in 1977 changed the route to the North Halawa Valley, taking the freeway several miles farther west of downtown Honolulu. A new environmental impact statement was prepared.

The resumption of construction was blocked again in 1984 when the U.S. Supreme Court left intact an appeals court ruling that transportation officials had not adequately justified building the freeway through Hoomaluhia Park.

Ironically, the 450-acre park--built as part of a federal flood-control project--was conceived years after the freeway route was chosen.

U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) won congressional approval in 1986 of an extraordinary environmental exemption for the H-3, making it immune to future lawsuits based on environmental concerns.

Inouye’s considerable political clout on Capitol Hill kept federal funding for the freeway alive. Some call it “Danny’s Highway.”

Discovery of Hawaiian archeological sites in the path of the freeway and its interchanges during construction resulted in several expensive realignments.

In 1992, Bishop Museum archeologists, working under a contract with the state, came upon two brush-covered sites in North Halawa Valley. A museum cultural historian, Barry Nakamura, contradicted his superiors and went public with his belief that the sites included a rare women’s heiau, or temple. He was fired.

Some native Hawaiians, stirred by a cultural reawakening and a quest for federal recognition of a sovereign Hawaiian nation, protested and staged sit-ins at the sites, resulting in several arrests.

While experts concluded the finds probably were only residential and farming sites, they recommended their preservation. The one-mile realignment cost $10 million.

The Bishop Museum, the primary repository of Hawaii’s history, ended up as a major beneficiary of the H-3 project. It was given two contracts totaling $700,000 in 1987 to survey and catalogue cultural sites on the route. As the work progressed, the scope of that assignment swelled and the contracts were repeatedly amended to a total $14.8 million.