Placentia Must Scale Back Its OnTrac Project

For nearly eight years, Placentia city officials and their team of private consultants have had big plans to spend hundreds of million of dollars rebuilding the busy railroad line through town.

It was a project of national significance, promoters said, one that would become a model for other cities interested in improving the safety and efficiency of vital rail corridors.

Now, the north Orange County town will have to think small.

This month, Congress approved $38.75 million for the city’s OnTrac project -- dramatically less than the $225 million in federal transportation funds that municipal officials and their lobbyists had sought.

The money won’t cover the cost of lowering five miles of track into a concrete trench or to remove 11 railroad crossings from major streets.

At this point, Placentia may be able to afford only a couple of underpasses or overpasses along the line.

“It’s a big disappointment,” said City Councilwoman Constance Underhill. “This is it for the trench, and probably means that only one or two grade crossings can be done.”

Underhill and her council colleagues say the federal allocation will force them to reassess OnTrac, search for other sources of state and federal funds and decide how to better manage the financially strapped project.

For two years, the city has struggled to keep OnTrac afloat during a budget crunch that compelled officials to cut public services, lay off staff, sell parkland and borrow tens of millions of dollars. The council also reduced the project’s almost total reliance on expensive private consultants and took control of the joint powers authority established to run OnTrac.

Today, the project owes the city about $17 million.

“Some might see the glass as half empty, but I see it as half full,” said Mayor Scott P. Brady. “We’re going to get almost $40 million, the most we’ve ever received. This is a great start for a project that has been in deliberations for about seven years.”

As originally planned, OnTrac was among the largest pending public works projects in Orange County -- an enormous undertaking for a town of 50,000 with a $25-million annual budget.

Planners wanted to build a concrete trench from Kraemer Boulevard to Lakeview Avenue and eliminate old railroad crossings along seven miles of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.’s main line. Since the late 1990s, the estimated cost of the project has risen from $350 million to $656 million.

City officials hoped that OnTrac would revitalize the city’s historic Old Town district and improve the movement of freight to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

To help pay for the project, Placentia asked the federal government for $225 million, with the remainder of the construction money to be sought later.

In a strategic move to increase its attractiveness to Congress, OnTrac was packaged with the much larger Alameda Corridor East project, a multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild the Union Pacific Corp. rail corridor through Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

As part of the recent $286-billion federal transportation bill, Congress earmarked only $155 million for the Alameda Corridor East. The amount must be divided among the four participating counties.

Matt Reynolds, a spokesman for the city, said it was unclear when OnTrac would receive the federal money or how much would be available in state or local matching funds to supplement it.

Brady concedes that underpasses and overpasses are probably the way to go given the funding situation.

“This is not good news if you are building a trench,” he said.

Because of inadequate federal support, City Council members said they might explore forming new partnerships with neighboring cities to help select locations for the overpasses.

But those cities -- Anaheim, Yorba Linda and Fullerton -- have refused in the past to participate in OnTrac’s joint powers authority.

Still undecided by the council is what to do about Christopher Becker, the project’s controversial executive director and a former Placentia public works director who was hired as a consultant to oversee the project.

In a confidential memo, Placentia City Atty. Tom Nixon has stated that Becker, when he was public works director, might have violated state conflict-of-interest laws by improperly influencing his hiring as a consultant at $450,000 a year.

The Orange County district attorney’s office has been investigating Nixon’s accusation as well as OnTrac’s books. Becker has denied any impropriety.

For more than two years, Becker’s compensation and the project’s heavy reliance on outside consultants have been the target of community activists who say OnTrac has been poorly run. City records show that at least $10 million has been spent on financial advisors, administrators, lobbyists, grant writers, public relations specialists, video producers and Web page consultants.

“The management of the project for the past five years has been questionable at best,” said Craig Green, a community activist and critic of OnTrac’s expenditures. “Had they been more judicious with their spending from the outset, we might be able to do more than a couple of underpasses.”

Despite the financial setbacks, city officials say they can proceed with efforts to prohibit trains from sounding their horns as they pass through town. About $6.4 million is available for the “quiet zone,” a project to make street, gate and signal improvements at eight major railroad crossings.

On Monday, the city closed the railroad crossing at Bradford Avenue so work could begin on the quiet zone. City officials also are planning to meet with builders to develop a timetable for improving the crossings, Reynolds said.