6 Cities to Create Monorail Advisory Agency : Transportation: The agreement will give the municipalities veto power on location and design of the light-rail stations within their boundaries.

Zooming along on a sleek Monorail between Irvine and Anaheim is still years away, but six Orange County cities along the route are expected to sign a pact in the next few weeks to oversee the project.

Under the proposed agreement, each of the six cities would have veto power over the location and design of light-rail stations and other physical impacts within its boundaries, but all other matters would be decided by majority vote of a new Central Orange County Guideway Agency.

First proposed more than a year ago by the cities of Santa Ana and Irvine, the 23-mile, $1-billion urban rail line could be a Disneyland-style Monorail or more traditional transit similar to the Long Beach-Los Angeles Blue Line.

The cities of Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Irvine, Orange, and Santa Ana would each have a vote at the new agency, as well as the county, the Orange County Transportation Commission and the Orange County Transit District. Other cities would hold “associate” membership--Buena Park, Brea and Huntington Beach.

“The agreement has to be ratified by each city council, and we hope to have it all wrapped up by the end of March,” said Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young.

The new authority, Young said, will “act as an advisory body, to provide serious, policy-level feedback to the transportation agencies.”

Brian Pearson, county rail program director, said he will ask OCTD on Monday to transfer $540,000 from OCTD’s operating budget to the Transportation Commission to help fund the completion of an ongoing countywide rail study and additional feasibility analyses needed for the central county light-rail project.

The money, said Pearson, will be used to help define the project.

Pearson said the purpose of the joint county-city agreement is to build a consensus among the cities “about what this 23-mile line will look like and how to pay for it.”

“I see this as a one-stop way to build that consensus instead of dealing with each city individually,” Pearson said.

Officials said the effort will need an infusion of capital from private investors, and thus the light-rail system will be built as a public-private partnership venture and not solely as a public works project.

A similar venture was abandoned in Las Vegas last year after several support columns had been built for a magnetically levitated transit system. Investors withdrew their financial support. A separate rail project, the proposed 300-m.p.h. maglev train from Anaheim to Las Vegas, has been delayed until 2002, according to Bechtel Corp., the company licensed to build and operate the line.

Officials disagree, however, about the impact such a delay will have on Orange County’s light-rail system, which was expected to carry thousands of tourists daily between John Wayne Airport and a regional rail station in Anaheim, where passengers could transfer to and from the high-speed Las Vegas train. Officials also hoped that the Las Vegas line would connect with a proposed regional airport at the site of George Air Force Base.

Costa Mesa Councilman Peter F. Buffa said the impact would not be significant because only a small portion of the total ridership for light rail would use the airport-train link. But Santa Ana’s Young said that the absence of the high-speed train “is surely going to affect the numbers . . . logically it would have to.”