COLUMN ONE : Towns Vie to Fit Into UC Gown : Dozens of San Joaquin Valley communities hope to become the site of the university’s next campus. Money, jobs and prestige are at stake.

On an immense, dusty pasture about seven miles north of Merced, community activist Bob Carpenter envisions classrooms, dormitories, a library and a gym.

For some walnut groves and cotton fields just outside Visalia, city official Michael Ramsey imagines world-famous laboratories and computer centers.

Along the gently sloping foothills between Fresno and the snow-capped Sierra, a university of great scholars could rise, local banker Leo Lutz predicts.

Big dreams all, and doable with enough money and foresight, contend those dreamers and others throughout eight San Joaquin Valley counties. But the rub is that only one such vision can come true.

The farm-based communities are pitted against each other in a lively competition to be the next host city for a University of California campus and all the jobs, big bucks and prestige UC brings. Governments and volunteer groups are engaged in rival campaigns of boosterism and are dangling amazingly large plots of free or cheap land before the UC Regents, who are to announce Friday a list of eight to 10 semifinalists from about 70 possible land tracts.

San Joaquin Valley interest in the school is so strong that Mark Aydelotte, UC’s area representative in Fresno, said he was tailed after a recent community meeting by other drivers apparently hoping his route home would provide clues to the site decision.

“People have only one question for me: ‘Where is the new campus going to go?’ ” said Aydelotte, who insists he does not know.

That a city would want a UC campus is not surprising. Such a campus can pump millions of dollars into the local economy, spin off high-tech industries from laboratory research and give residents better access to higher education. It also can put a town on the nation’s intellectual map. After all, how many Ivy League scholars ever heard of Santa Cruz or Irvine before the initials “UC” appeared in front of those names?

“There is a competition, but there hasn’t been any kind of nastiness or negativeness associated with it,” former Fresno Mayor Dan Whitehurst said. “But things might change when we get down to 10 specific sites.”

In advance of Friday’s announcement, UC officials would only say the search is focused on eight counties: Tulare, Fresno, Madera, Merced, Mariposa, Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Tuolumne. The list of eight to 10 semifinalist sites, detailed down to crossroads and acreage, will be reduced to three finalists in November. A winner is to be chosen a year later after environmental impact studies are reviewed.

Over the past few months, a dozen committees from places such as Los Banos, Modesto, Madera, Manteca and Hanford have besieged UC officials with reports, brochures, videotapes, T-shirts and telephone calls touting locations. Aydelotte sometimes is concerned that the reality of a campus can never match expectations that a UC “will mean a new renaissance, a new day, a solution to all sorts of problems.”

To be sure, there is opposition from farmers worried about pollution and the loss of agricultural land. UC says it wants between 1,500 and 2,000 acres away from the better soils of California’s food-producing heartland.

Others are concerned about the social and political effects an army of students could have on quiet, conservative farming communities. At a meeting in Sonora, an elderly gentleman angrily asked whether the main education at a UC is in “drugs and kinky sex,” Aydelotte laughingly recalled.

Still, most people in the region were delighted when the regents decided in February that the first of three new campuses to accommodate a projected enrollment boom should be built in the San Joaquin Valley by 1998. The two others might follow in the northern and southern parts of the state. The last major UC expansion was in the mid-1960s with the openings of the San Diego, Santa Cruz and Irvine campuses, and the valley has felt snubbed since.

Partly because none of the nine UC campuses are in the valley, high school graduates from the area attend UC at a rate half the statewide average. And the population of the valley, from Calaveras County south to Kern County, is 2.6 million and is expected to grow faster than that of any region in the state over the next 10 years, fueled by refugees from high housing prices elsewhere in California and from economic and political troubles in Asia, Latin America and Armenia.

The valley is still dominated by agribusiness and family orchards. But the two-story homes and shopping malls blossoming on what were cotton fields a year ago suggest that the bucolic isolation is eroding. Long commutes to jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area are becoming more common, and white-collar employment in the valley itself is increasing faster than jobs in farming. Some people talk fearfully of “Los Angelization.” Others say changes are inevitable and a UC campus with high-tech research as well as agricultural science courses would provide the education to cope with such change.

“Sure we need the school,” farmer Fred Giorgetti said at his produce stand in Centerville, about 20 miles east of Fresno and next to one of the possible sites in the foothills. Twelve ears of corn were selling for $1.50, and French tourists en route to Sequoia National Park were buying up nectarines and walnuts in apparent delight at the low prices.

“Berlin is going to be the capital of Europe, Tokyo is going to be the capital of Asia, and if we don’t get some educated people, we are going to be the capital of dope dealers,” Giorgetti continued, saying he would be willing to sell the farm that has been in his family for 85 years.

The cultural life and prestige of any town that became a UC town presumably would increase. “Whether it’s condoms for cows or tiny robot bugs to eat grape leaf skeletonizers . . ., surely some absent-minded professor will stumble onto a world-class discovery and get us all on ‘Good Morning America,’ ” Fresno Bee newspaper columnist Jim Wasserman joked.

The new UC would start with 1,000 students and possibly grow over 25 years to as many as 25,000. That would require a faculty of about 1,400 and a non-teaching staff of about 9,000. In a region where unemployment runs as high as 15%, it would also mean thousands of new jobs serving hamburgers, selling houses and renting movies to UC students, workers and families. Student spending alone would eventually inject an estimated $5 million a year into the local economy.

“The community needs it as an economic engine,” explained Carpenter, the insurance agent who heads the UC Merced Campus Committee. Merced, in the northern part of the region, has 55,000 people, a lot of dairy farms and increasing amounts of light manufacturing.

In addition, there is little doubt that the value of land near a campus would increase sharply. (That became a sore point after reports that relatives of UC Regent Leo Kolligian had purchased land near a possible campus site in Merced. Kolligian denied that the purchase had anything to do with the campus study, but the university subsequently asked 200 of its officials to reveal any land holdings in region.)

The Merced group is pushing range land next to Lake Yosemite, an artificial lake popular with boaters. The land, with fine views of the Sierra Nevada, is part of 7,000 acres donated to the local board of education. Merced officials think their plan--to give 2,000 acres to UC and sell off the rest to developers--is so sure-fire that they already have scheduled a community picnic Sunday to celebrate being named one of the semifinalists.

Other places are offering free land, too. But since the prices range from $2,000 to $12,000 an acre, land would be a relatively small cost compared to the estimated $300 million needed to build the campus.

So communities are trying to show how much they match other UC requirements: not more than 30 miles from a population center of 50,000; proximity to an airport and major highways; solid infrastructure; job possibilities for spouses of faculty; cultural and recreational opportunities; plentiful and inexpensive housing; visual beauty.

Backers contend that 29 possible sites in Fresno County fit the bill. Fresno County (population 625,000) is presenting a united front in claiming to be the capital of the region. Where else are there so many hospitals, courthouses, museums, shopping centers, television stations, airplane routes, different ethnic groups and varied places of worship?

“It’s obvious that any community that gets the campus would benefit from a selfish viewpoint, but by choosing a Fresno (County) site, UC can fulfill its own mission a lot easier,” said banker Lutz, a Fresno leader in UC wooing.

Rivals carp that Fresno already has a California State University campus. But supporters point out that UC offers doctorates and stresses research, while the Cal State system offers only bachelor’s and master’s degrees and stresses undergraduate education. UC also let it be known that any new campus will not have much of an athletic program compared to the rabidly popular sports teams at Fresno State.

Other possible sites include parts of the nearly 10,100-acre Mapes Ranch west of Modesto; a large tract on the eastern edge of Lake Madera; another near Los Banos between San Luis Dam and California 140; and three perfectly flat tracts of cotton fields very close to California 99 within a few miles of Visalia, a city of 77,000 between Bakersfield and Fresno.

The campaign for a UC Visalia pitches a self-proclaimed pleasant lifestyle, beautiful trees, homes for under $100,000 and an old-fashioned downtown that could accommodate student cafes and bookstores.

Just as important, local officials say, is meeting the UC demand that there be no significant public opposition. UC does not want a valley duplication of town-gown friction in Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara over housing, traffic, water and politics.

“Our expectation is that they will be selecting us not just because Visalia is a good area. But they’ll be selecting us because 30 years from now we will still be enjoying a good relationship with UC,” said Ramsey, Visalia’s director of research and development.

Attempting to prove goodwill, UC boosters in the valley lobbied hard and successfully for a decent margin of approval in last month’s vote on Proposition 111, the state tax and spending changes that make campus construction possible.

On the other hand, a survey by the Tulare County Farm Bureau, which includes Visalia, found that while 60% of its members who responded want a UC campus in the area, 40% oppose it. Laurena Johnson, bureau executive director, said farmers worry about population growth, water shortages and air pollution. “While there is a lot of support for the campus, there is that other faction that says, ‘Hey, if we don’t make a stand now, our county is going to be so overrun with people,’ ” Johnson explained.

Meanwhile, UC representative Aydelotte doesn’t want people to lose sight of the real beneficiaries of a new campus. “Sometimes you get a question from a 10- or an 11-year-old and you realize this kid could be a freshman class member when this campus opens,” he said. “It gives you pause.”