BATON ROUGE - A Baton Rouge-to-New Orleans passenger rail proposal may face another delay after the Metro Council deleted an agenda item relating to a preliminary agreement for the project during its Wednesday meeting, The Advocate reported.

City-Parish transportation and drainage director Fred Raiford requested a postponement of the issue to gather more information to the Council.

"I’ve had a lot of communication from the Mayor’s Office about the concerns that we may have in reference to the rail agreement itself," he said. "I also have been able to find out through the last few weeks that the RAISE grant funding that we were looking at to help facilitate building the actual train station itself has been pushed back to give us more time in regards to evaluating issues."

Raiford said he hoped to bring back the item for discussion around May after he takes all options into consideration.