COUNTYWIDE : Cal State Trustees Reject Campus Site

California State University trustees on Tuesday rejected farmland owned by the McGrath family as one of four potential sites for a campus in Ventura County.

The 312-acre parcel west of Harbor Boulevard and north of Gonzales Road is unsuitable for a four-year campus because it sits in the flood plain of the Santa Clara River, a committee of trustees decided Tuesday.

The full board of trustees must still ratify the decision today, but the vote is expected to be a formality.

Charles Conway, a McGrath family member and attorney who also represents the family, said he hopes that the decision will not diminish the chances that a university campus will be built in Ventura County.

“There are only three sites left and the family and I are concerned that the trustees won’t want to use any of them,” Conway said.

But David Leveille, university director of institutional affairs, said the prospect for a Ventura County campus has not changed.

The three remaining sites are 448 acres of farmland south of Foothill Road and east of the city of Ventura owned primarily by the Pinkerton family, 589 acres west of Camarillo and north of the Ventura Freeway near the California Youth Authority owned by the Duntley Trust and the Chaffee family, and the Diedrich/Donlon property on 590 acres west of Rice Avenue and north of Wooley Road in unincorporated Oxnard.

A 450-acre site on the Taylor Ranch on a bluff west of Ventura had been the preferred site but was dropped a year ago after some community opposition and the owners refused to sell.

Both the Taylor Ranch and the McGrath site will still be reviewed in the environmental impact report that is now under way. But the properties are no longer considered preferred sites. The environmental study should be complete late this summer, and trustees are expected to select a site this fall, Leveille said.