Supervisors Back CSU but Do Not Favor a Site : Education: The county board criticizes the Ventura council’s refusal to endorse a location for a state university campus.

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to support the development of a California State University campus without endorsing one of three proposed sites in the county.

And although the board itself stopped short of backing a site, Supervisor John Flynn criticized the Ventura City Council for hampering the creation of a Cal State campus by refusing to choose a favored site.

At a meeting Monday night, the City Council refused to support any of the proposed sites after some members said an environmental report inadequately outlined the effect such a campus would have on traffic, housing, water supplies and greenbelt preservation.

Instead, the council voted to send a letter to the California State University system, criticizing the environmental report.

Flynn said the Ventura council has been one of the biggest obstacles toward construction of a Cal State campus in the county. He suggested that city officials do not recognize the value of such a university.

“It must be the first city in the United States to reject a university,” he said.

Responding to the criticism, City Councilman John Monahan said Tuesday: “That is politics talking.

“We will endorse the appropriate site at the time we have enough information to make a decision that is good for the whole county,” the councilman said.

The supervisors voted Tuesday that a university should be built on one of the sites but did not favor any one.

After the meeting, Supervisors Susan Lacey and Maggie Erickson Kildee said they did not endorse a site because they thought that it was more important to back the concept of a university in the county.

Supervisor Vicky Howard was absent from Tuesday’s meeting, and Supervisor Maria VanderKolk did not enter into the discussion of the campus issue.

Flynn, who represents Oxnard, said he could not publicly support a site because he might be asked to vote on the issue later as a member of the Local Agency Formation Commission.

The commission considers land-development issues that could affect city boundaries. For example, a city would have to apply to LAFCO to annex a campus site in an unincorporated area.

The three sites under consideration are the 350-acre Sudden Ranch south of Foothill Road in east Ventura, the 320-acre Duntley-Chaffee property abutting the California Youth Authority’s juvenile prison in Camarillo, and the 308-acre Donlon property, south of Wooley Road between Rose and Rice avenues, east of Oxnard.

Cal State system officials said they will make the final site selection based on environmental and economic factors.

An endorsement by the Ventura council would make the selection process easier, but “it’s not absolutely necessary,” said Colleen Bentley-Adler, a spokeswoman for the university chancellor’s office.

The Oxnard and Camarillo councils already have endorsed the Duntley-Chaffee site.

An endorsement by the Ventura council would signal to the trustees that the cities directly affected by the decision--Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo--are unanimous on a site, Bentley-Adler said.

John E. Kashiwabara, a member of the Cal State Board of Trustees, agreed that Ventura’s endorsement would make the choice of a site easier. He added that he is worried that the state will decide to use money now set aside for the university for other purposes if the trustees delay too long in selecting a site.

“Time is running out as the availability of state funds runs out,” he said.

During Tuesday’s board meeting, Flynn said the Ventura council opposed a campus at the Taylor Ranch site in west Ventura because it believed that too much traffic would be generated. The site was later dropped from consideration by CSU officials.

“Taylor Ranch was probably the nicest university site, and yet they pushed it out,” he said of council members.

Flynn also read from a letter that City Manager John Baker wrote to Cal State Vice Chancellor John M. Smart.

The supervisor suggested that Baker had threatened in the letter that the city would sue CSU trustees if they chose to build a campus on a 312-acre McGrath site west of Harbor Boulevard and north of Gonzales Road without addressing traffic impacts on nearby streets.

“I believe you could anticipate the city to take every means available, beginning with the EIR process, in order to see these impacts fully mitigated,” Baker wrote in the letter, dated Nov. 21, 1990.

Soon after, CSU officials dropped the McGrath site from consideration, citing its location in the Santa Clara River flood plain as their reason.

Baker said Tuesday that the letter was only intended to notify CSU officials about the city’s concerns over the site. “Nobody was saying lawsuit,” he said.

Ventura Mayor Richard Francis also defended the council for refusing to endorse a site, saying the environmental report failed to provide enough information.