Railroad Sound Wall Is Creating Quite an Uproar

If Yorba Linda wanted to transform part of its border with Anaheim into what could become a graffiti-strewn eyesore, local officials say they would be hard-pressed to beat the $12.5-million plan their neighbor to the south has cooked up.

Homeowners are usually grateful for a sound wall. But this is no ordinary sound wall. It would be a towering metal presence along 2 1/2 miles of federal land that separates the cities. Its purpose is to muffle the noise from the locomotives that rumble by about 70 times a day.

While Anaheim residents are delighted by the plan, homeowners perched on a small hill on the other side of the tracks in Yorba Linda say their view of the valley and mountains would be spoiled by the honeycombed steel.

Anaheim spent years designing the sound wall, with no objections from Yorba Linda. But when local officials got a look at some sketches recently and saw that the thing would be more than 40 feet high in spots, they said not just no, but no way, no how. They filed suit to stop Anaheim from beginning work on the wall in January.

“Anaheim has to be about one of the rudest neighbors you can ask for,” said Yorba Linda City Councilman John Gullixson. “This plan is the result of complete incompetence. It is absolutely idiotic. The noise is going to bounce right off that wall and back into Yorba Linda twice as loud.”

Such rhetoric has trackside residents in Anaheim steamed. They have been fighting to get the wall built for nearly 10 years. Congress finally heard their pleas in 1996 and gave the city $12 million for the job. That was the time for Yorba Linda to step in with its concerns, residents and Anaheim officials say.

“Now that we are ready to go, they all of a sudden want the plans changed?” said Glenda Bridges, a 25-year resident of Northfield Avenue, which runs alongside the tracks. “No way. They can’t just stay completely uninvolved and then jump in at the last minute.”

The pro-wall camp says Yorba Linda snubbed regular invitations to join in planning the project. “We even built a section of the wall in the Edison Field parking lot to run tests, and they were invited,” said Larry Newberry, Anaheim assistant city attorney. Those tests concluded that the wall would absorb the sound and not deflect it into Yorba Linda, according to environmental reports filed by Anaheim. “They were consulted all along,” Newberry said.

He noted that Anaheim has set aside funds to maintain the wall and keep it graffiti-free.

Yorba Linda’s lawsuit now threatens the entire project. Anaheim officials say if they don’t move forward with construction next year, they could lose the money allocated by Congress.

Meanwhile, the residents of Anaheim’s Friendly Village mobile home park feel their units shake day and night as the freight trains rumble by. Owners of the houses around Northfield Avenue say vibrations from the trains have shaken nails loose from their walls.

Anaheim sound consultants concluded that the volume for trackside residents is the equivalent of standing three feet away from a shouting person. When many of the residents moved in a generation ago, only about 15 trains came by each day. Two more tracks have been built since then. By 2010, there could be more than 120 trains daily.

Trackside residents aren’t kind in their assessment of Yorba Linda politicians. They picket Yorba Linda City Council meetings, and they’ve hung banners on the makeshift walls that now separate their properties from the tracks, encouraging Yorba Linda residents to vote their council members out. At public hearings they play tapes of the trains screaming by.

Yorba Linda officials say the remedy is obvious: Lower the wall and build a grassy, landscaped barrier on the other side so it doesn’t look so ugly. And another thing: They want Anaheim to provide them with a bike path that could cost nearly $2 million.

Anaheim residents say sound consultants concluded that the wall has to be higher than the trains or it will be useless. And they say that although it will exceed 40 feet in height in places, that’s only in areas where the ground dips on their side. The wall, they say, will never rise more than 25 feet above the tracks.

They also want to know what a bike path has to do with a sound wall.

“They are greedy,” said Friendly Village resident Kathy Wright.

Gullixson makes no apologies. “Those little ladies down there are rude and obnoxious and we have let them know it,” he said. “This was not a project we wanted. . . . They should have considered the impact it would have on our side.”