New Talk of a Santa Ana-L.A. Rail Line Angers Garden Grove

Orange County planners will take a new look this month at reopening a once-thriving railway between Santa Ana and Los Angeles, a move that is sparking protests from Garden Grove officials who thought they had struck a multimillion-dollar deal to buy part of the property for several downtown redevelopment projects.

A $20,000 preliminary study will probably begin within the next few weeks to determine the feasibility of a prospective route that would tie into as many as three other Los Angeles rail systems, Stan Oftelie, executive director of the county’s Transportation Commission, said Monday.

“We’re really talking about the renaissance of the rail in Orange County,” Oftelie said, “and (the proposed Santa Ana-Watts route) is one option in that long-range plan.”

2 New Developments

Confronted by a growing traffic crunch, county planners had considered in recent years the possibility of reopening the Red Car commuter rail line, a popular and successful trolley car run between Santa And and Watts in the first half of this century. But officials rejected the idea as impractical.

Two factors came together recently, however, to make the idea worth another look, county officials said Monday.

These were: the Southern Pacific Transportation Co.’s new willingness to discuss selling a right of way that it owns in the northern stretch of the proposed route, and an October poll by the county indicating that local voters might agree to a sales tax increase to pay for transportation improvements.

Those developments could remove two huge obstacles--access and funding--that had stood in the path of a revitalized county railway.

And, depending on the results of this month’s preliminary study, county officials said the Santa Ana-Los Angeles route could prove a key cog in a broader regional transportation plan that might also include the establishment or expansion of other rail lines through the county and to Riverside and Las Vegas.

The Santa Ana-Los Angeles route “is one pretty exciting possibility among a variety of options that we’ll be considering to plan the next 2 decades in Orange County,” Oftelie said. “We have tremendous airport capacity problems, and this could help solve that if we had a direct line to LAX. That’s a valuable destination.” The proposed line from Santa Ana to Watts would link up with a trolley line running from Los Angeles to Long Beach.

But Garden Grove city officials are less excited about the prospect.

The county’s plans to study the rail route threaten to scuttle Garden Grove’s own hopes to purchase from the Orange County Transit District a 4-mile stretch of right of way in the city for use by private developers.

Miffed by the turn of events, Garden Grove Mayor Walter Donovan said Monday that he had believed the deal for the land was as good as done.

“I’m not too happy,” Donovan said. “We had the Transportation Commission’s approval (in April) to purchase the right of way, and the last we knew we were going to get it. We had a gentleman’s agreement. We just had to go through the paper work and have (the land) appraised to set a price.”

The mayor said he had not discussed the purchase price specifically with transit district officials but estimated it would have been around $10 million. Donovan said transit district officials still have not told him directly that the deal is on hold.

The right of way cuts through a downtown redevelopment area in Garden Grove, and city officials had hoped to buy the 100-foot-wide rail line to allow private developers to move ahead with several large-scale projects. These included a shopping center at Euclid Street and Garden Grove Boulevard, and a commercial and industrial park at Nelson Street and Garden Grove.

But the county’s switch in plans for the right of way “sure changes things a lot,” Donovan said. “This may kill the projects.”

James Reichert, general manager for the county transit district, denied that the district and the city of Garden Grove had ever a set deal for the right of way, and he said that transit officials had told Donovan’s staff--if not the mayor himself--about the developments.

Rail Officials Not Available

“We had previously said there’s no need (for the right of way), so why don’t we go ahead and sell it,” Reichert said. Transit officials had also begun preliminary talks with Santa Ana officials about selling another part of the rail right of way to that city, he said.

But Reichert said Southern Pacific officials approached Orange County transit planners several weeks ago to discuss the possibility of selling a stretch of right of way between Stanton and Watts.

Southern Pacific officials were unavailable for comment Monday. But Reichert said it was his understanding that the company had decided to halt a freight route that it runs through that area, prompting a reconsideration of the Orange County Transit District’s longtime interest in the line.

Reichert said that while the route would replicate the Red Car rail line, county planners would have to start from scratch in trying to lay the foundation for an above-ground, modern-day rail system that would probably include several overpasses.

But Donovan vowed: “If (transit officials) are going to use that right of way for a transit line, they better be prepared to go underground in Garden Grove, because they’re not about to go through our city without a real fight.”