State to give taxis
impartial treatment
at airportThe concessionaire will no longer
be connected to or run by a cab firm
State officials want to make sure that taxi service at Honolulu Airport is no longer controlled by taxi companies.
The Department of Transportation is seeking a new concessionaire to manage airport taxi service. In the past a taxi company ran the concession, and drivers from competing companies complained that the concessionaire's drivers would get preferential treatment when it came to assigning passengers to cabs.
To avoid this problem, the state's new pre-qualifying restrictions for the position say that the airport Taxi Management Concessionaire may not be an owner, operator, manager or have any other ties to any taxicab or other ground transportation business.
Transportation officials described it as a new approach to help solve an old problem of taxi companies playing favorites at the airport.
"We are looking at a system that would create a level playing field for all taxi operations at the airport," said Transportation Director Rod Haraga. "We are trying to do something creative in which everyone is entitled to provide taxi service there."
The search for a different kind of management comes after the last cab company to run the concession, SIDA of Hawaii Inc., closed last month. SIDA's void idled hundreds of its drivers and left the state short $732,572 in delinquent concessionaire payments and interest.
It also left some questions to be answered about how taxi service is run at the airport. Vendors are supposed to pay the state a guaranteed fee each month for managing the taxi operation, regardless of the number of trips. The company, in turn, charged each cabbie a fee of either $400 monthly or $4 a trip.
But the state does not have a system to verify that number. Instead, it has relied on the taxi concessionaire to give the state the information -- basically an "honor" system for determining payments totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of the contract.
Proponents for a non-taxi-related concessionaire said honest-bookkeeping skills will be more important than cab company experience.
"The problem for the state is that we need a way to count the trips, an accurate and verifying system," said Dale Evans, owner and operator of Charley's Taxi, who sat on the committee that came up with the new restrictions for the concession. "The contractors have always hidden the ball. The system is deliberately obscured."
But the new restrictions have drawn fire from Thinh Nguyen, president of the Honolulu Cabbies Association. In a May 28 letter to Gov. Linda Lingle, Nguyen said the proposal "stifles competition by eliminating the necessary bid and gives the right to award the concession to the sole discretion of a government executive."
Instead, the Cabbies Association proposes that they enter the bid process with their own company, made up of independent drivers.
The legal notice for a Request for Qualifications was posted in Oahu newspapers on May 25. Interested parties have until 4 p.m. today to submit their proposal.