Denton city leaders on Tuesday again postponed two decisions vital to the Denton County Transportation Authority’s passenger rail project, as officials with the city and a Dallas transit group sent mixed messages about the status of an agreement over rights to the Denton rail corridor.

For the second time this month, the Denton City Council delayed votes on an agreement allowing DCTA contractors extended access to the corridor and a contract transferring the city’s rights to the corridor to Dallas Area Rapid Transit. All three parties have interests in the A-train project, which would connect Denton to the DART system in Carrollton.

Denton city spokesman John Cabrales blamed the delay on DART. City leaders had expected the DART board to approve the corridor-rights contract at its meeting Tuesday, but the item was inexplicably left off the agenda, Cabrales said.

DART spokesman Morgan Lyons said the contract was in negotiation past the deadline to post a vote on the board’s agenda. An ad hoc committee will consider the contract today, followed by a vote of the full DART board Jan. 26, Lyons said.

The Denton council called a special meeting for 11 a.m. Friday to consider the agreements with the transit groups.

The 21-mile passenger rail will follow the path of the former Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad line. The city of Denton owns the right to use eight miles of the corridor as a public hike-and-bike trail. DART owns the southern end of the DCTA corridor and holds the right from a former railroad operator to revert the Denton corridor to rail use.

In September, DART gave the city 90 days’ notice that it planned to buy back the corridor from Swisher Road to downtown Denton for $10,000. That notice period ends at midnight Sunday, and city leaders want the corridor agreement done before then, Cabrales said.

“We need to make sure that DART has approved all the terms of the agreement before we approve the terms of the agreement,” he said. “Otherwise we are limiting our ability to protect our infrastructure in that corridor. And the only remedy that would be left to us would be possible legal action to stop the reversion of the corridor to DART without a satisfactory agreement that protected our infrastructure.”

Cabrales said DART staff had been unwilling to extend the 90-day period, despite repeated requests from the city. Lyons, the DART spokesman, disagreed.

“We’ve already extended the date of reversion,” Lyons said in an e-mail Tuesday night. “In fact, we used a form provided by the city and notified them of the extension this afternoon. The extension goes to March 2010 or at the closing of the agreement. We view our decision to extend the deadline as an indication of our commitment to a satisfactory resolution.”

Another deadline arrives Monday, when an existing agreement allowing DCTA to build in the Denton corridor expires. The council’s delays would affect DCTA’s construction schedule only if the agreement is allowed to run out, which isn’t expected to happen, said Dee Leggett, DCTA’s vice president of communications and planning.

“Whether the vote happens tonight [Tuesday] or happens Friday, we’re fine,” she said.

DCTA officials had hoped to open the full rail line by December 2010 but abandoned that goal in September, in part because of a lack of agreements with the city and DART. They now hope to start service to south Denton by April 2011 and downtown Denton by June 2011.

LOWELL BROWN can be reached at 940-566-6882. His e-mail address is lmbrown@dentonrc.com .