With a total service shutdown imminent, the Anaheim Transportation Network is exploring avenues for selling off its two properties and 74-vehicle fleet.

The Anaheim Tourism Improvement District, partly overseen by the city, is weighing whether to buy some of ATN’s assets to go toward what could become a new transportation service for the resort area.

ATN’s governing board, made up largely of hoteliers and other resort interests, decided in January that the 30-year-old transportation service that moves more than 8 million riders a year around Anaheim’s popular resort district can’t overcome its budget issues and will go dark March 31.

Ahead of that date, committee members for the tourism district, which finances marketing and transit improvements around the resort area and Platinum Triangle with a 2% assessment fee collected on hotel stays, met this week to consider buying ATN’s properties and buses.

The tourism district’s three-person transportation committee, made up of city, hotel and Disney representatives, decided to proceed with spending an estimated $6.3 million to buy two properties owned by ATN. The properties currently collateralize loans from when the tourism district, in December and January, floated $6.12 million to ATN to help alleviate its mounting budget deficits.

One property, at 1354 S. Anaheim Blvd., valued at $9,500,000 according to a staff report, would cost the tourism district $3.4 million to purchase after accounting for the loan repayment. The 1213-1227 S. Claudina Street property, which already has bus charging infrastructure and is used as a charging station for the ATN fleet, is estimated to cost $2.9 million to purchase.

The district’s transportation committee directed staffers to pursue that purchase, which the district would put up its own money for. The tourism district would use those properties, but the city would own them “because ATID, as a board and entity, is not set up to own property,” city spokesperson Mike Lyster said.

A staff report says the properties would go toward the “future transportation services.”

ATN will also need to resolve what to do with the 74 vehicles in its fleet, which includes the 10 buses that shuttle Disneyland Resort visitors to and from the company’s Toy Story Parking lot.

“ATN’s board has given fairly clear direction that they want to look at selling them to a public operator,” Lyster said, “and there’s a reason.”

The buses, purchased with federal grants, come with the condition that they go toward public use or the grants would have to be repaid. The buses’ ballpark value is around $13 million.

The Orange County Transportation Authority is interested in buying the buses, Lyster said, but the tourism district, which would have to get the Anaheim City Council’s approval, is also eyeing the purchase.

The city of Anaheim last year considered taking over the struggling transportation network, in hopes of solving the agency’s financial troubles without asking hoteliers to pay more. But officials said earlier this year the city was no longer interested in the move.

“Let’s say we (the city) and ATID get together and end up owning the buses. They could be leased to a group of hotels,” Lyster said, adding the buses would likely continue to use the Anaheim Boulevard and Claudina Street sites for operations.

“So that’s a hypothetical, but that’s certainly kind of why we’re thinking about this,” he said.

And, Disney officials have said there will be continued shuttle service from the Toy Story parking lot to the Disneyland Resort, though no details have been released.

Shuttles between the lot on Harbor Boulevard just before Orangewood Avenue and the Disneyland Resort represent 60% of ATN’s ridership, or about 4.8 million people each year, transportation officials said.

ATN will no longer exist, but new transit systems are in the works, Lyster said. “So there’s still a few unknowns here, but we have a good idea, come April 1, things will flow in the resort.”

“And then hopefully we can build on that,” Lyster said, “and come up with some near-term and then longer-term solutions.”