A meeting was scheduled today, and Jeffrey A. Bell, the museum's senior vice president and chief financial officer, said he hoped contract differences could be resolved.
Highways Division Administrator Hugh Y. Ono sent Bell a letter May 13 directing that all H-3 work be halted except for monitoring highway construction. The state has paid the museum $17.3 million since the work began in 1984. The first contract was for $700,000.
The Department of Transportation now wants agreement on a lump sum to complete the work, said spokeswoman Marilyn Kali.
"We all want that," Bell said.
Kali also said the archaeology project was to be completed next year and the museum now says it will be 1998. The work has fallen behind schedule because of construction delays, legal problems, questions about historic sites and a constant turnover of museum archaeologists.
The state Historic Preservation Division, which reviews the reports, is concerned because the museum has another new crew for the archaeology work.
"There has been a real migration of people away from the museum," said state archaeologist Tom Dye. "All the field directors no longer work for the museum." Three new archaeologists hired to manage the project and oversee write-ups for Windward and Halawa archaeological work are from the mainland.
Dye said the division is trying to keep archaeologists involved who directed the field work, although they no longer work for the museum. "Otherwise, the reports just get written up from notes. It is much, much more difficult to write up an archaeology report when you haven't been out in the field."
Kali said the DOT has been negotiating with the museum since last year on work and cost involved to finish the project.
The DOT had been paying the museum $240,000 a month during the negotiations, she said. "We just felt we couldn't continue making payments until we finalized the scope and final cost." Most of the remaining work involves analyzing and writing reports, she said.
The Historic Preservation Division wrote to federal officials last year because of lack of progress on the archaeology reports.
Dye said about seven reports must be written. He said a history of Halawa Valley and some site reports have been finished. A history of the windward side has been substantially completed, he said, and some subsidiary reports.
But a North Halawa Valley inventory survey is about three years behind schedule, he said. The fact that the project leaders are new to Hawaiian archaeology and haven't been out in the field "can't help but slow them way down," he said. "It's a tough job.... We're looking for high quality and we're not getting that yet."
While there are some new people, others have been with the project a long time, Bell said. "When there is a 12-year project, you're going to have a lot of turnover."