ATHERTON — The town of Atherton has no plans to seek a temporary restraining order to stop Caltrain’s electrification plans, City Attorney William Conners said Monday.

Speaking by phone, Conners said that the town’s concerns still hinge on its lawsuit against Caltrain, a suit to be heard in Superior Court in September or October.

Caltrain on Thursday announced that its board had approved $1.25 billion in contracts for electrical infrastructure and electric trains on the Peninsula line, which runs through Atherton, but Conners said all the board has done is authorize staff to go through the preliminary steps in the work on the contracts.

“They’re not quite there yet,” Conners said, adding that if Caltrain were to move ahead on the electrification project, it would be doing so at its own risk. “They haven’t done anything, particularly, to spend money too soon.”

The risk comes in how the court reacts to Atherton’s suit, which was filed in February 2015, alleging that Caltrain’s environmental impact report was incomplete and did not meet California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) guidelines.

“What we’ve done is ask them to delay issuing contracts costing public money,” said Conners. “If the court agrees with the town of Atherton, you’ll have to stop what you are doing.”

So, there is really nothing new in the conflict, Conners said.

“There’s no secret that Caltrain wants to electrify,” Conners said. “It’s getting money from high-speed rail, because it’s a precursor to high-speed rail.”

Atherton doesn’t care about Caltrain, Conners said, but electrificiation would be a problem in the leafy town.

“You have to put this whole structure around the tracks. There’s a tower on each side of the tracks, and there’s a beam that goes across the track for the overhead electrical. It would widen the whole area.”

That would mean removing lots of Atherton trees.

In July of 2015, Conners told The Daily News, “Atherton looked at Caltrain’s environmental impact report, saw lots of deficiencies. We asked to meet, but Caltrain said it wasn’t going to do that, so the town filed a lawsuit.”

At that time, then mayor Rick DeGolia said in an email, “Everyone wants Caltrain to improve their efficiency and reduce greenhouse-gas generation, but they propose to cut down hundreds (and up to a couple of thousand) heritage trees to deploy century-old catenary electrical line technology (like what SF MUNI has). I am told that there are newer, much more efficient modern technologies that would greatly reduce construction and overall greenhouse gas impacts and don’t require killing all those heritage trees. Caltrain is locked into an old technology and 20th century thinking.”

Email John Orr at jorr@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow him at twitter.com/orr_dailynews.