When Colleen Hanabusa announced after a heated dispute with rail CEO Lori Kahikina that she’d step down as chair of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation at some future point, reporters qualified it with words to the effect of “whatever that means.”

Well, now we know: It meant she was only licking her wounds and not really stepping down.

The board voted 6-2 to keep Hanabusa as chair, and our misbegotten $10 billion rail project is left with a chair and a newly rehired $336,000 CEO side-eyeing each other like boxers pacing the ring waiting for the bell.

To be fair, Hanabusa didn’t grub for the thankless, nonpaying job. Opponents led by Vice Chair Kika Bukoski weren’t willing to take it on and couldn’t cajole anybody else to step up.

In the end it came down to money and politics, as board member Anthony Aalto noted the main challenge before the board is to persuade the Legislature to put up more money to finish and extend the line.

He said it would be “insane” not to take advantage of the “political heft” of Hanabusa, a former state Senate president who also served in Congress.

Almost as if on cue, Hanabusa’s political heft grew weightier last week when Gov. Josh Green announced she was among seven appointees to the state Commission on Salaries, which recommends pay for legislators, the governor, lieutenant governor, Cabinet members, their deputies and judges.

So HART’s chief lobbyist asking legislators and administrators to throw billions more dollars into rail’s bottomless pit will be a big player in determining the next round of pay raises for those legislators and administrators.

No conflict of interest to see here, folks … just keep moving along.

Hanabusa knows her business when it comes to enacting lavish legislative pay raises. In the Senate she was an architect of the 2006 constitutional amendment creating the Salary Commission that could give lawmakers pay raises they wouldn’t have to vote on. As Senate president she championed a 36% pay raises for legislators in the middle of the Great Recession, outraging the public at a time when other state employees were facing layoffs, pay cuts and “furlough Fridays.”

The newly appointed state Salary Commission will have much latitude after the recent eyebrow-raising precedent of 64% raises for Honolulu City Council members. State counterparts can try to spin anything less than that as proof of heroic restraint.

It’s human nature that lawmakers whose pay checks get fatter with Hanabusa’s help will be more generously inclined to her appeals for more funds for a rail project that’s already blown through two legislative bailouts and spent nearly twice its original $5.2 billion budget.

HART might also lobby to ease accountability measures imposed by the Legislature, including elimination of nonvoting state appointees to the board such as steadfast watchdog Natalie Iwasa.

These machinations are examples of the misguided and self-defeating political dynamics in Hawaii that cause so many efforts like rail to go awry.

The powerful keep appointing each other to new positions of power in an endless dance of privilege intended to assure that insiders who play the game are always served first.