First Building at CSSM Campus May Be Humble but It’s Home

What was lacking in ribbon cutting and helium balloons was made up by pizza and Rolaids Monday as Cal State San Marcos employees moved into the first building to be completed on the new campus.

The structure, housing “facilities services,” is a functional but otherwise unspectacular one-story building standing alone like a family outcast on the northern edge of the 300-acre campus.

It will house the behind-the-scenes staff people who will conduct many of the campus’ daily operations: the mail room, security, truck receiving docks, maintenance personnel, environmental and occupational safety experts and other nuts-and-bolts people who will help guarantee that the state’s 20th and newest university campus will coast smoothly into the 21st Century.

“We’ve crossed the psychological barrier: we’re now ‘on campus,’ ” said Richard Rush, the university’s executive vice president. “And so this is the prelude of great things to come.”

Among its first occupants are accounting and procurement personnel who will have to move again within the year when their ultimate destination, Craven Hall, is completed.

“I’ve moved so far five times this year, and we’re going to have to move a sixth,” sighed Linda Hawkins, assistant director of procurement services, who was among the first to get her personal office put to rights on Monday, complete with family pictures on a shelf.

“This is home, isn’t it? That’s what they tell me,” she laughed.

But she and others conceded that the excitement of being the first to locate “on campus” was bittersweet.

“The only contact we’ll have with the rest of the campus is through computers and couriers,” Hawkins lamented. “We won’t be having any contact with students, and that’s why we’re here, for the students. Now we’re removed from them.”

The university’s students will catch up with them in August and begin classes on the new campus.

Monday’s moving day went smoothly, with secretaries and technicians hauling around their own typewriters and computers, stepping over electrical wiring and pizza boxes that contained their grab-a-bite lunch.

One hurried secretary popped an antacid. The stress of moving, or too much pizza?

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I didn’t have a problem until I had children.”

And so it went, this controlled chaos, with a beach chair inexplicably tucked beneath a receptionist’s counter, indoor plants awaiting placement in nooks and crannies, another secretary pulling a hair-curling iron out of her box of files, and several accountants discussing the various shades of “soothing green” in their work area.

“Teal green window jambs, avocado-green baseboards, green-mist and black speckled institutional carpeting, a mint-green wall and another wall that looks like, well, puke green,” offered one office worker.

In one office, an accountant set up her portable radio and cassette player that will play mostly country western songs, she said. “In the other room, they’ve got the classical music,” she announced.

“It’s exciting, moving in here,” Cynthia Hoctor said. “It makes everything real. It makes the campus real. But it’s sad leaving where we were, even if it was an industrial park, because a lot of our friends are still over there.”

Cal State San Marcos was established in 1989 and welcomed its first 500 students to a business and industrial park along California 78 in the fall of 1990.

The new campus is under construction along Twin Oaks Valley Road, on the south side of California 78. The first three permanent student buildings--one containing lecture halls, another for science labs and a third “commons” building to house various student services, bookstore and cafeteria--are expected to be ready by the time fall classes begin Aug. 23. Fall enrollment is projected to reach 2,500 juniors, seniors and graduate students. Freshmen and sophomores will be accepted in 1995.

The fourth core campus building, the centerpiece Craven Hall administration and faculty building, is expected to be completed later in the year.

So for now, the fledgling university finds itself situated on four different sites: the existing business park location, where most spring semester classes are conducted; an industrial building several blocks away where science labs are maintained; another commercial building near the new campus where the Cal State San Marcos Foundation is headquartered, and the new facilities building that opened Monday.

Wasn’t it exciting, being the first to move “on campus?”

Pamela Ohrazda thought so, brewing chocolate coffee on a coffee maker that was perched atop an upside-down trash can. “We save it for special occasions, and today is one,” she said.

Another employee laughed as a wand, to adjust her window blinds, came off in her hand.

“This is just like moving into a new home,” secretary Jan Lapp said.