County Takes Another Look at Monorail Plan : Transit: Commission approves $207,000 for an environmental study of an elevated commuter line in the Ventura Freeway median.

Nearly a year after settling on a commuter rail route through the San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission voted Wednesday to take another look at building a monorail along the Ventura Freeway instead.

The commissioners voted unanimously to pay a consulting group, Gruen Associates, $207,000 to evaluate the environmental pros and cons of an elevated rail line in the freeway median. In the meantime, they instructed county transportation planners to continue their work on the route chosen last March, a partly underground line along Chandler and Victory boulevards and Oxnard Street.

The elevated line, a pet project of County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, received a public endorsement in June, 1990, when a non-binding referendum placed on the ballot by county supervisors showed that 48% of Valley voters preferred it to either subway or ground-level options.

But county transportation planners and community activists said they feared that reconsidering the freeway monorail would delay the start of rail construction, now tentatively scheduled for 1994. Commission Executive Director Neil Peterson said any changes the study prompts could jeopardize the project’s ranking for federal funding.

“We can study anything we want, but the bottom line is we’ve already gone through a very long process here,” Peterson said. “We have two stations 80% designed and a third under design. . . . We have one mile of track designed.”

The long-debated decision to run a 14-mile line along the Southern Pacific Railroad right of way, from the Metro Rail terminus in North Hollywood to Warner Center, was brought into question by a recent county cost analysis.

That analysis estimated the chosen route would cost $2.7 billion, but an elevated train in the Ventura Freeway median would cost $2.3 billion.

A third possibility, a subway under Ventura Boulevard, would be the most expensive--$3.9 billion--the analysis concluded. But Transportation Commissioner Nikolas Patsaouras, who believes a Ventura Boulevard subway is the most sensible, asked county planners to determine the cost of an environmental study of that option.

Patsaouras, who is also president of the board of directors of the Rapid Transit District, asked that the commission’s Planning and Mobility Improvement Committee investigate the cost of extending a spur of the Valley line through Hollywood to the Hollywood Bowl. Commissioners asked for a report on that possibility at their March 27 meeting.

Elevated trains had been largely dismissed during earlier discussions as too costly. But county transportation planners said two changes in California Department of Transportation policies had since reduced the cost estimates.

Caltrans agreed to allow use of the freeway median if the rail line can be supported by pilings no more than 32 inches wide, Peterson said. Previously, the elevated train option anticipated placing support columns alongside the freeway, requiring the removal of more than 400 residences.

Also, Caltrans agreed to turn over the rights to air space over the freeway, which could accommodate raised platform stations. In the past, Peterson said, the state had wanted to reserve the air rights for possible double-decking of the freeway.

Of the line’s 15 stations, 14 could be built above the traffic lanes, cutting down significantly on the need to buy land along the freeway.

In a separate action, the commission voted to spend $200,000 to entice private firms to bid on a $1.3-billion rapid rail line from Los Angeles International Airport to the Palmdale Airport. In October, the state turned down the route as a segment of a high-speed rail line between Southern California and Las Vegas, but legislation sponsored by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) seeks to give the county authority over such a project.