Builder’s Offer to Help Pay for School Is OKd

Capping months of negotiations, the board of Camarillo’s Pleasant Valley School District has accepted a developer’s offer to help pay for a new elementary school in the city’s rapidly developing east end.

But the board still has to decide how to obtain at least $4 million--possibly through a loan--for construction costs.

“I don’t want people to think it (construction of the school) is a fait accompli, “ Associate Supt. Howard Hamilton said before the vote. “We don’t have any money for it.”

The board voted unanimously late Thursday to accept Pardee Construction Co.’s offer to provide about $200,000 worth of services--such as installing sewer and water lines--toward the proposed school, to be built on 10 acres on Woodcreek Road.

Also, Pardee will allow the district to defer payment on the $769,000 it still owes the developer for six acres of the school site. The district had already paid for about $300,000 of the $1.1-million site by forgoing Pardee’s developer fees.

The deferment will save Pleasant Valley an estimated $50,000 in interest costs each year and allow the district to resume receiving developer fees from Pardee--estimated at about $500,000 annually--once construction activity picks up again.

“I wish we could have got more” from Pardee, board member Leonard J. Caligiuri said. But “I understand the economic times.”

School officials said they hope to get the 20-classroom, 600-student school built by the fall of 1994.

The district turned to Pardee after Camarillo voters in November, 1991, rejected a $55-million bond measure for school construction and renovation. It was the second school-bond measure voted down in Camarillo in six months.

School and Pardee officials hammered out the agreement approved Thursday in a series of meetings over the past six months. “It’s been a long, tedious process,” Hamilton said.

Pardee is the major developer in eastern Camarillo. It has built about 2,400 housing units and proposes to build an additional 2,000.

The developer has no legal obligation to help pay for building a new school for students living in Pardee-built housing, Hamilton said.

But “it’s in our mutual interest,” he said. “They want a school in the worst way.”

Pardee spokesman Bill Teller said the Woodcreek school would be a selling point for prospective house buyers.

“Their children can stay in the neighborhood without having to be bused,” he said.

Pleasant Valley buses about 80 primary grade and 200 junior high students daily from eastern Camarillo to schools in other neighborhoods, and the district is growing by about 225 new students every year, most of them from the east side.

Consequently, 30% of Pleasant Valley’s 6,800 students live east of Lewis Road, though only two of the district’s 13 schools are in that area, Hamilton said.

One of the two schools is Las Colinas School on Fieldcrest Drive, where district officials have projected that without a new school, enrollment in 17 years will be 1,500 higher than the designed capacity of 1,050 students.

After Camarillo voters rejected a $75-million school-bond issue in June, 1991, and a $55-million issue in November, 1991, the school board began searching for ways to cope with the crowding.

The board moved seventh- and eighth-graders out of Las Colinas School to make room for more primary grade students and is considering changing the district’s two junior highs to middle schools, which would shift all sixth-graders out of elementary schools.

School officials also considered and then decided against adopting a year-round school calendar.

Pardee plans to begin grading and installing utility lines on the Woodcreek school site within two weeks.