Serene Site for Reagan Library : Scenic Ventura County Tract Offers Sanctuary from Acrimony at Stanford

During one of the First Family’s periodic trips to California in August, Nancy Reagan took a bumpy ride by dirt road to a hilltop that provides one of the last undisturbed vistas in this part of eastern Ventura County.

The view from the property is the sort she and the President are especially fond of--thousands of acres of rolling hills covered with wild brush. In the valley to the north lie fields of grass where horses graze. To the south and west are views of mountains bordering the Pacific.

At the time of the First Lady’s inspection tour, four years of effort to locate the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library at Stanford University had ended in acrimony and failure. With just 17 months remaining in the Reagan presidency, there was not much time to find a new site and build the library the 77-year-old President hoped to work in after returning home to California.

So library planners greeted with some relief the news that Mrs. Reagan, and, after an aerial flyby, the President, approved of the site. Within weeks, trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation voted to build the $60-million library there.

Library Proposal Welcome

Developers who had donated the 100 acres to the foundation also were pleased. Their previous efforts to develop the property and adjacent land had been rebuffed by local officials, but that quickly changed with the prospect of a presidential library on the site.

Now the developers hope to build a hotel nearby to accommodate the estimated 100,000 to 300,000 visitors each year who are expected to transform the area into a major tourist attraction.

“This is our business, to try and buy properties where others don’t see opportunities,” said Donald E. Swartz, a partner in Blakeley-Swartz, the firm that donated the library site.

But the cost of coming to this isolated hilltop is the absence of any university affiliation or a historic association between the land and Reagan or his family. This sets the Reagan site apart from all eight of the other U.S. presidential libraries.

But university officials and others involved in the search for a site say the lack of an academic connection actually gave the scenic hilltop property a clear advantage in the minds of foundation trustees. It meant there could be no opposition from a university faculty or campus neighbors, two groups that could delay construction of the library.

Now, foundation trustees are hoping the library can be built quickly and with none of the earlier controversy. If so, it will end a search that began in early 1981, Reagan’s first year in office.

Although Reagan was born in Illinois and graduated from Eureka College near Peoria, there was never any consideration of placing the library in that state, said William French Smith, former U.S. attorney general and one of nine longtime Reagan associates and friends who serve as foundation trustees.

Association With State

“His association with California was so long, so deep and so intense; he was governor here for all those years and gained most of his experience here prior to becoming President,” Smith said.

Those serving on the foundation reflect Reagan’s California past. Trustee Lew Wasserman, now MCA’s board chairman, had been Reagan’s agent when he was an actor. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III is another trustee.

As early as 1981, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University wrote a letter to Reagan offering to act as repository for his presidential papers. The Hoover Institution holds the papers of Reagan’s tenure asgovernor and Reagan is an honorary fellow. Also, two Reagan foundation trustees, W. Glenn Campbell andformer Reagan domestic policy adviser Martin Anderson are associated with the institution. Campbell is director.

The library proposal moved along quietly for several years until June, 1985, when Stanford University trustees gave their approval to house the presidential library and a small museum on campus, separate from the Hoover Institution. The decision drew protest from students, faculty and nearby homeowners, who opposed the project for reasons ranging from politics to traffic.

In April, 1987, the university’s Faculty Senate voted 26 to 4 to recommend either reducing the project significantly or moving it off campus.

“We tried to develop a library that would be part of the university environment and of use to the academic program here,” said Charles Palm, archivist for the Hoover Institution. “But the vote by the faculty said they just weren’t interested.”

A week later, Stanford students voted 3,404 to 1,428 in favor of locating the library off campus. Further opposition was expected from residents at the time the proposal would be brought before Santa Clara County governing boards.

Withdrew From Stanford

There was continued support from university trustees, but the presidential foundation had seen enough. It withdrew from Stanford.

“There just wasn’t a meeting of the minds with respect to the center for public affairs,” Smith explained in a recent interview. Foundation trustees “were led to the conclusion that the easiest way to handle those conflicting interests is to go where they didn’t exist.”

To developer Swartz, the problem at Stanford looked like a ripe opportunity. He got the idea of donating the land after learning of the controversy from the Stanford student newspapers his daughter had brought home from college.

Swartz himself had attended Stanford--a former captain and center on the school’s varsity football team before graduating in 1967. The library controversy at his alma mater looked like “a valuable opportunity for ourselves and the community,” he said.

So Swartz wrote a letter to the foundation last April, offering his firm’s services in finding a site.

“Three or four weeks later we got a nice note back saying, thank you for your letter but we can do it on our own,” he said.

By then, the foundation had turned toward Southern California and Swartz was in competition with more than 30 others offering land for the presidential library. “It was a dilemma of riches,” Smith said.

Undaunted, Swartz began contacting local officials to gauge interest in a presidential library in Ventura County. He met with foundation executive director Gary Jones in mid-June and by July foundation architects had toured the site.

At the time, Smith insists, the foundation still sought affiliation with a university, although opinions differ on that point today.

“Library trustees indicated they were reluctant to place the library on a college campus, citing their experience at Stanford,” said Pepperdine University President David Davenport, who spoke with foundation trustees about the possibility of placing the library on the university’s campus in Malibu.

“They never told me that they had taken a formal vote on it, but in light of the experience at Stanford, placement on a college campus was not as interesting to them as it had once been,” Davenport said.

“I think that the prolonged and unfortunate experience at Stanford would make any university think very carefully about such a proposal,” said Michael T. McManus, UCLA assistant vice-chancellor.

In all, seven universities discussed the library with foundation representatives. Four of those institutions--Pepperdine, UCLA, USC, and UC Irvine--received unofficial inquiries from foundation trustees.

Three--Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, UC Riverside and California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks--contacted the foundation expressing interest.

At the same time, more than two dozen unsolicited inquiries came from private landholders, including the Big Sky Movie Ranch in Ventura County and the Blakeley-Swartz property.

For the most part, Southern California universities were lukewarm to the idea of housing a presidential library. UCLA made no formal application, citing a shortage of available land on the Westwood campus. At USC, circumstances were much the same.

No Land to Offer

“We made it very clear that we had no land and that we would have to assemble it at a great cost . . . and that the university could not cover that cost,” USC Provost Cornelius J. Pings said.

At UC Irvine and Claremont McKenna, talks never advanced beyond the preliminary stage.

Two universities, however, did embrace the proposal. Almost immediately after Stanford was crossed out, Pepperdine received several queries from foundation officials, Davenport said. The only property available, however, had access problems, he said.

Pepperdine then helped the foundation in locating potential library sites adjacent to campus, he said. Those proposals were pending at the time the Blakeley-Swartz property was chosen.

UC Riverside took the idea to faculty leaders and Riverside city officials. The response, said university relations director Jack R. Chappell, “was that the potential was so great that any controversy that would surround the library or other facility was apt to be worked out.”

Two Tiers of Sites

University representatives wrote to the foundation. “We were in the mode of asking them to dance,” Chappell said. “We weren’t proposing engagement at that point.”

But Chappell said that in conversations with foundation officials in late summer, “it was clear there were two tiers of sites being considered and we were in the second tier.”

By then, the Blakeley-Swartz proposal had momentum. Foundation officials in September asked the partners to begin drawing the legal papers necessary to transfer the 100-acre property.

Gerald W. Blakeley, formerly the principal owner of the development firm Cabot, Cabot and Forbes and the developer of Laguna Niguel in Orange County, said that he and Swartz had suggested early last year a development plan for the eastern Ventura County area that included a major league sports arena, amphitheater and performing arts center.

County officials, told informally of the plan, quickly rejected it, fearing the reaction of residents opposed to development of the large tracts of open land that distinguishes the area from the densely-populated San Fernando Valley to the east.

Community Interest

The presidential library proposal, however, had more promise. Swartz held a series of informal meetings with local officials and community members during the summer to kindle that interest.

Ventura County officials were convinced early on that a presidential library would bring national attention and prestige to the eastern part of the county, known primarily for its orderly suburban housing tracts and conservative, semi-rural life style.

Two Ventura County officials flew to Washington in late summer to lobby foundation officials on the idea. Ventura County Administrator Richard Wittenberg, one of those making the trip, said the foundation’s main interest was “in finding a place where they would be welcomed because of what had occurred at Stanford.”

Foundation representatives wanted to avoid delays and controversy, said Ventura County Supervisor James Dougherty, a Democrat who represents the area. “They made that a big point to me.” He said he did his best to assure them that the supervisors believed the library was a good idea.

In the end, “there were a number of factors involved in the decision,” Wittenberg said. “But I think they felt we would be fair to them.”

Not Far From Home

In November, foundation officials announced the vote to accept the Blakeley-Swartz property. The reasons, foundation officials said, were its size, beauty and because the property is less than an hour by freeway from the Bel-Air home where the Reagans are expected to live in retirement.

“We had a definite interest in having a connection with a university and a university atmosphere, but the conclusion was that the site we selected, being where it is, could have interaction with all of the universities and colleges in the area,” Smith said.

Besides, he added, “What university could offer 100 acres in such a pristine location?”

Blakeley-Swartz hopes to build a 300-room hotel and conference center on 540 acres adjacent to the library site if the project is approved later this year by the Ventura County Board of Supervisors. So far, the only concern raised about the project has been the failure of the foundation to reveal the size of the proposed library and public affairs center.

Foundation officials have said only that the library will be changed just slightly from the one designed for Stanford. That proposal called for a 115,000-square-foot building, according to a proposal the foundation submitted to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors last year.

Concern of Cities

Last month, officials from the three cities near the site--Moorpark, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks--asked the county for more information. “The lack of detailed information regarding the project has created a great deal of rumor and speculation in the eastern part of the county,” Moorpark Mayor John Galloway said in a letter to the supervisors.

Galloway and others say they fear that the library project will create traffic problems and open to development the large green belt area separating their cities.

If built to the size of the Stanford proposal, the Reagan library would be the largest of the eight presidential libraries, said Jill Brett of the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that operates presidential libraries after they are completed. Currently, the largest is the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library at the University of Texas in Austin, which is about 105,000 square feet, she said.

No decision has been made yet on the size of a proposed center for public affairs, which is to be located next to the presidential library, said Reagan foundation Executive Director Gary Jones. “We have to get the library under construction before we spend a lot of time and effort on the center for public affairs,” he said.

That entails completion of a $70-million private fund-raising effort. “We are well on our way to that goal but we still have a long way to go,” Smith said. The public affairs center would be funded separately.