Placentia City Council to Take Charge of OnTrac

The Placentia City Council will assume control of the OnTrac rail project, which has strained municipal finances and triggered an investigation by the Orange County district attorney.

In an unanimous vote Tuesday night, the council decided to act as OnTrac policymakers, eliminating a separate three-member board comprising the city manager, the mayor and a council member.

“This will give the project better supervision,” said Councilwoman Constance Underhill, a critic of OnTrac’s management. “It will give me more of a voice in what’s going on. There will be more accountability, and the decision-making process will be more public.”

The OnTrac project calls for the construction of 11 overpasses and the lowering of five miles of railroad tracks into a concrete trench. It is designed to revitalize the city’s downtown by pushing noisy trains below street level, accommodate the region’s projected growth in rail traffic, improve safety, and eliminate the need for engineers to sound their horns while passing through town.

The estimated cost for the trench and all the overpasses is about $550 million. But city leaders have discussed eliminating the trench, which could cut costs roughly in half.

During the last 18 months, OnTrac’s budget has been plagued by uncertainty and delays surrounding hundreds of millions of dollars the city is seeking in state and federal assistance.

To keep the project afloat, Placentia has gone about $36 million into debt, postponed bill payments, reduced city services and auctioned parkland.

Meanwhile, the district attorney has been looking into conflict-of-interest allegations involving a lucrative consulting contract for the project’s executive director, Christopher Becker. He has denied any impropriety.

In Tuesday’s decision, the council created the option of adding up to four board members if surrounding cities -- Yorba Linda, Fullerton, Anaheim and Brea -- opted to participate in the project.

So far, those cities have not been interested in joining the joint-powers authority Placentia created more than five years ago to govern OnTrac.

Fullerton, for example, has planned to proceed on its own with a long-term effort to build underpasses and overpasses along the rail corridor.

But Placentia Mayor Scott P. Brady said neighboring towns might be encouraged to participate in OnTrac if the project received federal funding of $200 million or more.

“They stand to benefit too,” Brady said. “This is not just a Placentia project.”

In addition to assuming control of OnTrac, the City Council decided Tuesday to seek a $3-million grant from the Orange County Transportation Authority to help finish the “quiet zone” portion of the project, which would eliminate the need for engineers to sound their horns in town by upgrading all the city’s railroad crossings with new gates, signals and medians.