Placentia’s OnTrac Opens Its First Railway Overpass

In the first visible sign of progress for the beleaguered OnTrac project, Placentia opened a railway overpass at Melrose Avenue on Tuesday, advancing plans to quiet train horns in town and relieve traffic congestion on major streets.

The $18-million bridge in the city’s historic Old Town separates motorists from one of the region’s main rail corridors serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

“We are celebrating a beginning,” Mayor Scott P. Brady said during the dedication. “We are now seeing positive results after many years of work.”

The bridge, which took two years to build, is part of Placentia’s ambitious OnTrac project that has put the city more than $36 million in debt and triggered an investigation by the Orange County district attorney’s office.

The $500-million project calls for construction of 11 overpasses and the lowering of 5 miles of railroad tracks into a concrete trench. It is designed to revitalize the city’s aging downtown, eliminate the need for engineers to sound their horns in town and accommodate the projected growth of rail traffic.

Over 18 months, there have been OnTrac delays and uncertainty about the hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that the city sought from the state and federal government.

Community activists, including a group called Citizens for a Better Placentia, also have criticized the city’s almost exclusive use of expensive private consultants to build the project.

Brady said Tuesday that the city was likely to receive about $12 million in state money postponed by last year’s budget deficit and $200 million to $220 million from pending federal transportation appropriations.

Because the money is not enough for the full project, Brady said, the city might abandon the plans for a trench and build overpasses.

“There might be enough funding to build overpasses throughout our community,” he said.

Critics of the project have been pushing the idea of overpasses for more than a year. They can be built more cheaply than a trench, they say, and as funding becomes available.

Meanwhile, the district attorney is continuing to investigate OnTrac director Christopher Becker for potential violations of state conflict-of-interest laws. Becker has denied any wrongdoing.

Authorities are looking into allegations made by the city attorney that Becker, when he was Placentia’s public works director, illegally used his influence to obtain the city contract to manage OnTrac as a private consultant at $450,000 a year.