Nearing 2000, O.C. Faces Its Destiny as an Urban Center : Forecast: While tapping its inherent strengths, the county must also address some familiar big-city problems.

As Orange County braces for 1996 and the years beyond, it is only fitting that much of Tomorrowland soon will vanish behind construction walls for its biggest revamping ever.

When Disneyland’s futuristic theme land opened amid orange groves 40 years ago, it was a grand experiment in an era and a county in which opportunity seemed limitless. Here, generations of Orange County children got their first taste of what might lie ahead.

But as the first baby boomers prepare to turn 50 in the new year, Orange County is wrestling with hard-core issues such as bankruptcy, the bruised California economy, traffic congestion and crime.

Today, with 2000 only four years away, we can glean much about what tomorrow really holds.

The future will bring us not People Movers but a glorified Tomorrowland Autopia; by 2000, high-tech toll roads will crisscross the county. By then, too, on rolling hills east of Mission Viejo, a massive development of 8,100 homes will be taking shape. Around the wetlands of Bolsa Chica, another controversial community might be forming around newly restored bird habitat.

The air will be cleaner, and work at two notorious federal Superfund sites might finally be done. Many of our schools will be linked by the Internet. Awash with new computer modems, cellular phones and pagers, the county will get a third area code.

The county’s population demographics will be slightly less white and more Latino and Asian American.

Scars from the 1994 county bankruptcy will linger, but several experts sound upbeat about the county’s economic health in the years ahead. The images are one of a maturing community, still growing but trying to adapt to new physical and fiscal limits. Just as Orange County helped pioneer the new suburbs of the mid-20th century, it now must grapple with fresh challenges.

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Some look to Orange County as a fascinating test case of bedroom community turned city.

In a 1991 book titled “Edge City,” journalist Joel Garreau studied areas including Orange County, northern New Jersey, Arlington County, Va., and the Silicon Valley. These burgeoning areas are spawning what he calls edge cities, each larger than many traditional downtowns. Today, Garreau counts 181 edge cities nationwide, including eight in Orange County alone.

Garreau warns that competition is keen among all these edge cities. In the end, he says, the contest may come down to “the squishy stuff, civilization, soul, identity,” questions such as whether a particular city is a good place to grow old, raise a child, hold a Fourth of July parade.

In the December issue of Wired magazine, Garreau poses three future scenarios for edge cities. Two are upbeat: an old Kmart refurbished by artists, a sprawling shopping mall taken over by a university and then by a mosque. But the third, more unsettling scenario takes place in a fictitious Irvine, where, over time, strict rules about renovation stifle change, prompting people to leave for such spots as Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Santa Fe, N.M.

“You have to be open to change; you have to be flexible,” Garreau said.

At the Irvine Co., spokesman Larry Thomas disagrees with Garreau. It isn’t uncommon for people to come in from the East, take a look at Irvine and criticize it, he said. But people who live there love it.

For Orange County, the quality of life may depend on how it deals with change. But perhaps for the first time, the change won’t have so much to do with landscape and what will be built where. As 2000 approaches, many of the major land-use battles will be settled and land-use patterns determined. Next, observers say, we could find ourselves grappling with social problems such as gangs and substance abuse--in short, the issues of a more mature county.

Said county Planning Director Thomas B. Mathews: “Orange County is growing up.”

So as we move toward 2000, some talk about environment, transportation, education--and some talk about the “squishy stuff.”

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For the county’s environment, the remaining years until 2000--in fact, the next few months--could prove pivotal.

A much-heralded plan to create a 39,000-acre wilderness reserve in central and coastal Orange County could be approved early next year. The effort has received national attention because it tries to find common ground between developers and environmentalists.

The long-running feud over the Bolsa Chica wetlands could be decided in January when the California Coastal Commission reviews a plan to build homes around and on the bird-rich wetlands next to Huntington Beach. The plan calls for restoring two-thirds of the wetlands by 2000.

That is the same year that Orange County’s air is expected to meet federal air-quality standards, 10 years ahead of neighboring Los Angeles County.

More commuters will be taking toll roads, such as the automated road that opened amid fanfare last week along the Riverside Freeway.

Still to come:

* A stretch of pay-as-you-use highway connecting Newport Beach and San Juan Capistrano is scheduled to be partially open by July and finished by March 1997.

* A 25-mile toll road running from the Riverside Freeway in Anaheim Hills to the Santa Ana Freeway in Irvine could be open by 1999.

* In 2000, work will begin on the final segment of a 30-mile toll road from Irvine to San Clemente.

Freeways will be getting wider, with carpool lanes added to several stretches of highway. And by 2000, the regional commuter rail system called Metrolink will add stations at Anaheim, Laguna Niguel/Mission Viejo and Tustin. (Some speculate that Metrolink has been embraced warmly by a generation of county residents conditioned by years of exposure to Disneyland’s Monorail.)

The future of light rail remains murky. In 1996, planners will consider building a light-rail system between Fullerton and Irvine that, if approved, could be up and running by 2004.

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When asked to name their most pressing concern, Orange County residents in two recent polls named crime, breaking from the traditional response of traffic.

Yet crime is down nationwide, and recently released FBI statistics show double-digit percentage drops in Orange County’s largest cities.

Trying to predict whether that trend will continue, local law enforcement officials point to two factors. The “three-strikes” law will keep career criminals behind bars and dissuade the ones who aren’t, some say, but others wonder if the policy will crowd the already busy judicial system. A worse problem is the huge “demographic bubble” of young people, the age group most likely to commit crime.

That bubble also confronts many school districts, particularly in South County, Santa Ana and Anaheim, where student population is growing fastest. The Capistrano Unified School District, for instance, needs 50 additional classrooms a year. It hopes to build several new schools by 2000 but does not yet know if it will receive state funding for them.

Schools will continue to try to stay on the cutting edge of computer technology.

The Garden Grove Unified School District already plans to link six schools and its main administrative offices to the Internet by spring. In time, the district hopes to have all its schools online. Similar plans are underway in Irvine.

Politically, the pace of change could quicken. Term limits will have a significant effect on Orange County’s representatives in the Legislature: All will be out of office by the end of the decade.

In March, voters will decide the fate of a proposed county charter meant to reform government following the bankruptcy. It would establish a strong chief executive officer with the power to hire and fire top county officials. Supervisors would be limited to two four-year terms and would serve primarily as policymakers.

If arts leaders’ dreams come true, the county’s arts scene will have expanded significantly by 2000.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center wants to build a second theater. Although its officials don’t expect that to happen before 2000, they would like to break ground by then.

Elsewhere, a Soho-like Artists Village, with galleries, artists studios and a theater, should be thriving in downtown Santa Ana. Laguna Playhouse will have opened its second theater, and Newport Harbor Art Museum will have doubled its gallery space by expanding into a former library next door or perhaps by merging with the Laguna Art Museum.

And lest we go wanting for more movie screens, James Edwards Sr., who recently christened his 21-theater Big One in Irvine, plans to open at least two 30-theater complexes within the Edwards Cinemas’ territories, which include Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

Look for the completion of San Clemente’s concrete walkway, which will link Doheny State Beach in Dana Point to San Onofre State Beach.

And marine-life enthusiasts are awaiting the possible finish in 2000 of the Orange County Marine Institute’s major expansion, to include an aquarium with a 600,000-gallon tank.

More projects are percolating in cities countywide.

By 2000, Little Saigon may resemble any quintessential business city in Southeast Asia. Last year, the city passed an ordinance requiring any new structure built in the district to have a Southeast Asia motif.

“I can see Little Saigon as a place where people could step in and see a culture that’s different from theirs without going to the Far East,” Westminster Mayor Charles V. Smith said.

And if the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station becomes an international airport, as some hope, Smith says Little Saigon could serve as a major trade center with other Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

In Anaheim, a new sports and entertainment complex around Anaheim Stadium could be completed by 2000. The project probably will include a new baseball stadium for the California Angels. And early plans leave room for a football stadium, should the city succeed in its efforts to lure another National Football League team to town.

The city’s Convention Center is scheduled for a major expansion, beginning this summer, and a major ongoing face lift around Disneyland named the Anaheim Resort project is set to be done by 2000.

Back at Tomorrowland, change has arrived already. The Skyway gondolas have vanished, and the People Mover soon will follow, along with the Circle-Vision Theater, the Magic Eye Theater and the Rocket Jets. Starting in March, the theme land will undergo its first major revamping since 1967, reopening with a new name--still unannounced--in early 1998. Such popular attractions as Space Mountain and Star Tours will remain open during the work.

For Orange County residents who first rode the People Mover as toddlers and now return with their own children, the revamping is symbolic. This is the same land that forecast Rocket to the Moon, Mission to Mars and the popular House of the Future with its microwave oven that seemingly everyone who visited Disneyland in the 1960s remembers well.

But as events and technology have outstripped exhibit after exhibit, some of Tomorrowland may have lost its mystique. One busy day last week, throngs of children waited for Star Tours, while the line for the Rocket Jets was noticeably shorter.

One thing hasn’t changed. Young people still waited patiently for Autopia, ready to clamber into the small-scale cars and wend their way through Tomorrowland. Amid the pending changes, Disney officials report, Autopia will stay.

Times staff writers Lily Dizon, Zan Dubin, David Haldane, Greg Hernandez, David Reyes and Peter Warren, and correspondents Geoff Boucher, Jon Garcia and Shelby Grad contributed to this story.