76.5 Miles of Southern Pacific Rail Lines Go on Sale for Public Transit

Southern Pacific Transportation Co. on Tuesday offered to sell 76.5 miles of unused railroad lines to local governments for three public transit routes that would link Santa Monica, San Bernardino and Santa Ana with downtown Los Angeles.

“This is a bold initiative that needs to be answered by a bold response,” said railroad Vice Chairman Robert Starzel, who announced the offering at a Los Angeles news conference.

Promptness, he stressed, is more important to the company right now than price.

“We would like to have a sense of the public interest by mid-June,” Starzel said. “If you don’t set deadlines, you don’t get responses.”

Starzel said Southern Pacific, which merged with Rio Grande and reorganized six months ago, could sell the property more easily to individual developers than to the public and probably would do so if government entities drag their feet about expressing interest.

Offered for Public Transit

He said the company’s new chairman, Phillip Anschutz, insisted that the rail freight lines first be offered for public transit in order to ease traffic congestion in the Los Angeles Basin.

Starzel refused to venture a guess on the ultimate cost, saying the price was open to negotiation. He said the deal could be finalized by the end of the year, with transfer of the property occurring by the end of 1990.

“We think a fair market price can be determined,” he said. “We do not have any set price targets.”

Neither did the designated buyer, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea what the price will be,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, a former developer and an advocate of purchase who serves on the commission. “It is a difficult property to appraise, a long skinny piece of real estate.” The three rail line parcels offered for sale encompass:

* Fourteen miles from Santa Monica along Exposition Boulevard past USC and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which could be connected to the Long Beach-Los Angeles light rail line now under construction.

* Twelve-and-one-half miles from Paramount to Stanton that would connect with an Orange County line that is still in the planning stages. The line was first proposed when the Orange County Transit District bought Southern Pacific’s rail line from Stanton along Beach Boulevard to Santa Ana in 1982.

* Fifty miles from San Bernardino through Baldwin Park to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

Both Schabarum and Neil Peterson, executive director of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, were enthusiastic about the possibility of acquiring those routes.

“This offers the possibility that perhaps we can get some kind of rail out to other parts of the county in a period of time that is much shorter than anyone imagined,” Peterson said.

Chris Reed, commission president and a member of the Santa Monica City Council, said the commission must “look very seriously at this and not let this opportunity slip through our fingers.”

Schabarum said he expects to meet with Southern Pacific officials within the next two weeks to define exactly what is being offered and how to go about appraising the value. For example, Schabarum said he is unsure whether the deal simply involved authority to use the old railroad right-of-way or the Southern Pacific rolling stock as well.

Peterson said he would schedule a study session on commuter rail in general at the commission’s next meeting May 10 and invite Southern Pacific to make a presentation on exactly what it is offering. He said negotiations could begin soon after that.