Jim McAllister Rides Herd on Widening of ‘His’ Freeway : Roads: The Caltrans engineer in charge of the $75-million project through the San Fernando Valley prides himself on good relations with residents.

With his luxuriously long gray-white beard and greased collar-length hair, Jim McAllister might seem out of place commanding a $75-million project to widen the Ventura Freeway.

But if one imagines commuters as a herd of cows on a four-lane cattle drive--and many weekday commuters won’t have much difficulty conjuring that image--then the colorful McAllister fits right in.

The Caltrans resident engineer in charge of a road-widening project stretching from Calabasas to the Hollywood Freeway, this 52-year-old New Jersey native has spent his working life on concrete and asphalt. Yet he resembles a straw boss on a cattle drive in the Old West.

“I try to dress that way. I’ve often thought about going to a movie studio and saying, ‘I’ll be an extra,’ ” he said.

That may come later. For now, all his energy is being devoted to shepherding a road improvement project for one of the world’s busiest highways, traversed each day by 277,000 vehicles.

The project is designed to relieve congestion by opening a fifth lane both ways from Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Woodland Hills to Universal City. Work begun in 1988 is in its final phase and should be finished by March, according to McAllister, who is ramrodding the work from a small stucco building adjacent to the Haskell Avenue off-ramp.

The offspring of a newspaper photographer who urged his son to try something steadier, McAllister has worked for the state Department of Transportation for 28 years. “They hand me a set of plans and say, ‘Go build this,’ ” he said.

Although his working life has been devoted to engineering, his private interests center on a time when roads were dusty paths through a waterless landscape. Almost larger than life at 6-foot-4 and 250 pounds, McAllister keeps a horse at his Burbank home and is considering joining a mock gunfighters club. He keeps clippings about Gen. George Custer and other Western figures on his desk.

When he was assigned the Ventura Freeway job three years ago, he feared that it might be his own Little Bighorn.

“When I first got this job, I wasn’t keen on it,” said McAllister, seated at a desk in his small office. He had been warned that folks in the San Fernando Valley were so protective of their neighborhoods that they would make his life miserable.

So far, that hasn’t happened, possibly because he has gone out of his way to avoid making their lives miserable. He says he tries to schedule construction work at the least disruptive times and works hard to make sure that work crews are off the freeway by the time promised.

“I feel like I’m building up some rapport with the people in the Valley. They’re not raising hell. I like to think that they think ‘He’s not doing that bad a job.’ ”

By all indications, he’s not flattering himself unduly. His praises have been sung in the newspaper letters column, and he has won other friends by keeping a collection of hubcaps at his office to give away to drivers who have lost theirs.

“I once had a guy call me and say he had lost a hubcap to his Rolls-Royce,” McAllister recalled. Amazingly, McAllister had a Rolls hubcap in his collection. Even though it didn’t fit the man’s car, he took it after McAllister suggested that he might be able to trade it for one that did.

McAllister cleared a major hurdle the night he won over the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

At a meeting in the spring, the crowd grilled him but he didn’t flinch or hedge. When asked why some work was done at night, he responded that it was the lesser of two evils. “You can’t stop people from getting to work in the morning,” he said.

On the other hand, he said he had canceled pile-driving work at night because of the noise. He made that decision after homeowners along Balboa Boulevard fussed.

“We had people coming out there in their underwear and pajamas,” he said.

When he stopped talking, the crowd applauded.

His philosophy is simple.

“If you tell people this is the way it’s going to be, and don’t vacillate,” he said, “they take it better.”

At that meeting, McAllister described himself to homeowners as “rough around the edges.”

While that might be true, it is precisely that quality of simple integrity and Western bluntness that has caused would-be critics to trust him.

A slick, media-savvy public relations expert might encounter suspicion, especially when he said he didn’t have the authority to answer this or that question. But McAllister doesn’t pass the buck, doesn’t mince words and is prepared to take all the blame for what goes on in his territory.

And, in McAllister’s mind at least, the Ventura Freeway has become his territory, off-ramps, sound barrier walls, bumps and all.

“Right now, this is my 15 miles of freeway,” he said proudly. “This is going to be the best job Southern California ever got because people regard this as Jim McAllister’s freeway.”

It is questionable how many people have ever heard of Jim McAllister. But that attitude does propel him to go the extra mile, so to speak.

He hasn’t had a vacation in two years. His workday often begins before dawn and doesn’t end at 5 p.m. If he isn’t on the phone with the project’s contractor, Tutor-Saliba of Sylmar, he is fielding queries from the public and his employees.

On weekends, his day begins even earlier. At 4 a.m., he drives whatever portion of road is under construction, looking for mistakes that need to be corrected. It’s the only time the highway is quiet enough for him to be able to slow down, pull out his flashlight and take a close look at something.

But there are practical limits, even to his obsession for detail.

Sometimes after a freeway is redesigned, the lanes no longer match the arrows on the big overhead freeway signs.

Asked what he did about one such case, McAllister said sheepishly, “To tell you the truth, we didn’t do anything.”

The one thing that gets under his skin is when he hears on the radio that work crews have not opened up blocked lanes at the time they promised. “When they’re giving the radio report, I cringe to hear the Ventura Freeway,” he said.

That very thing happened weeks ago. He was out washing his car at home about 8:30 a.m. when he heard a traffic reporter announce snidely that road workers were still clogging up the freeway. McAllister cringed, then hopped in his car and drove to work to find out what went wrong.

There had been an equipment breakdown and the construction crews didn’t get everything cleared away until 9 a.m.

There wasn’t much that could be done about it. But that didn’t make the drivers caught in traffic that morning any happier to be traveling McAllister’s freeway. He understands the public’s anger.

“I know most of the world is hostile to Caltrans,” McAllister said.

He would like to change that. And if he could get all his critics to sit down and have a cup of coffee with him, around a blazing campfire, he might just be able to do it.