Deft New Leader Paves the Way for Toll Roads : Transportation: William C. (Wild Bill) Woollett Jr. is riding herd over the first effort to bring major user-fee highways to California.

His friends call him Wild Bill. Some weekends he can be found roaming rustic Bommer Canyon in Irvine, or sailing a 16-foot catamaran off the coast, or river rafting in Colorado.

But at age 61, William C. Woollett Jr. says he has met his biggest challenge: serving as executive director of Orange County’s Transportation Corridor Agencies, which plan to build a 70-mile, $2-billion network of three tollways by mid-decade.

“I like this job because it involves something that’s never been done before,” Woollett said.

Indeed, Woollett presides over the first effort to bring major, publicly owned user-fee highways to California.

Although Woollett may not be well known outside of Irvine, where he served for 17 years as the city’s first city manager, he is one of Orange County’s highest-paid public officials, receiving $118,000 a year.

It’s a pressure-filled job. John Meyer, Woollett’s predecessor, quit last summer, citing job burnout. Developers and politicians clamor to have the roads built “yesterday”; environmentalists threaten to file lawsuits at every turn, and engineers spend the agencies’ money for design work faster than developer fees can pay for it.

Woollett has been at the tollway post less than five months, but agency board members, transportation officials and developers already give him high marks for boosting morale and gaining control of what was an understaffed, unfocused operation.

“I have been tremendously impressed by him,” said San Juan Capistrano Mayor Gary L. Hausdorfer, who chairs the Foothill-Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency board. “He is a very quiet and competent leader. He’s a good organizer. He is a quick learner who very quickly grasps very complicated transportation issues.”

For instance, Hausdorfer said, Woollett hired a financial expert--Wallace D. Kreutzen--as a deputy director to bring board members much better cost- and cash-flow analyses than they had before. Also, Woollett has been giving board members written, weekly updates on financial, environmental and construction issues.

In addition, final design contracts have been signed for portions of the tollways, with construction expected to begin later this year or in early 1991.

But Woollett still faces major hurdles, including:

Foothill-area opposition to federal legislation that would permit Orange County’s tollways to pass through parkland, and an almost-certain environmental lawsuit aimed at blocking the planned San Joaquin Hills tollway bridge across Laguna Canyon.

Continuing criticism from some public officials and developers who complain that the San Joaquin Hills tollway project is already two years behind schedule.

Pending final tollway financing plans, with tollway officials still negotiating developer fees and offsetting credits for donated rights of way and grading.

Even Hausdorfer has acknowledged that tollway financing will be “very tight” and critically dependent, perhaps, on projections that motorists will be willing to pay tolls higher than the $2 to $3 maximums previously anticipated.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Hausdorfer said. “But I’m confident the roads will be built.”

Said Woollett: “I didn’t come here to fail.”

Seeking to head off potential financial problems, Woollett has discussed with some officials the possibility of borrowing money from the state or other local transportation agencies, who would be repaid when tolls are collected.

Tollway employees say Woollett is best at bringing people of opposing views together and then quickly deciding what needs to be done.

But there are some people who remain unconvinced.

When the Tustin Hills Homeowners Assn. recently alleged that tollway officials were white-washing projected tollway noise levels in their community, Woollett promised to respond with the best scientific data available, even if it hurts his cause.

Said Jeffrey Katz, president of the homeowners’ group: “We’ll see. He listens to us, but it’s clear that he knows who he works for. . . . He wants to get the” tollways “done.”

Meanwhile, developers such as the Mission Viejo Co., which had griped last year that the tollways were taking too long to build, have been mostly quiet after a series of private briefings begun by Woollett’s predecessor.

During such sessions, Woollett has developed a reputation for saying exactly what’s on his mind, even to the influential Irvine Co., one of the agency’s staunchest defenders and a major donor of rights of way.

“I was attending a meeting with him and several others recently, when we got into an argument and he turned to me and said simply, ‘Hugh, you’re full of crap,’ ” said Irvine Co. transportation planner Hugh Fitzpatrick.

Still, critics point out that the tollway agency has spent about $54 million since its inception in 1986, without any concrete poured. Much of the money, though, has gone for environmental and route alignment studies, legal advice and legislative lobbying in Sacramento, and costly design contracts.

And while Woollett is under pressure in some quarters to quickly appoint a respected transportation engineering expert to an unfilled, second deputy’s position on his staff, he has bided his time, saying it’s not easy to attract the best people at a salary the agency can afford.

Woollett, the father of a son, 29, and a daughter, 27, reads historical novels and admits to a certain fascination both with futurism and management expertise.

No stranger to issues such as growth control and land-use planning, Woollett once worked privately on the development of Hollister Ranch north of Santa Barbara, which is not unlike the Irvine Ranch.

While he was Irvine’s city manager, his office discovered an error by the city’s Community Development Department that had led to too many development permits being issued for the tightly controlled Irvine Business Complex.

And although urban planners have criticized Irvine’s reliance on mostly pro-automobile, anti-pedestrian development, Woollett has a jaundiced view of the car.

“During World War II, we were forced to look at alternatives,” Woollett said. “But now it just isn’t as high a priority for us--at least not yet.

“Front porches allowed people to see what was going on around them, to communicate face to face with their neighbors and children playing in the neighborhood. Now nobody builds them anymore. We’ve lost that source of communication. Similarly, cars have cut us off from each other. We’re wrapped in steel, chrome and glass.”

But in a county where some government officials drive Cadillacs, Mercedeses and BMWs, Woollett wheels around town in a 1969 El Camino that was so much in need of a face lift that his former Irvine co-workers sprang for a bright red, $2,000 paint job.

“He’s basically a cowboy at heart,” said Paul Brady Jr., who succeeded Woollett as Irvine’s city manager. “The El Camino fits right in.”