Abused Children to Get a Safe Haven : Foster care: Casa Pacifica, with its four cottages and private school, will be dedicated on Saturday.

Ventura doctor Harvey Harris recalls the emotion that swept over him when the volunteer board he sat on launched a $10-million fund-raising drive to build a shelter for abused children: sheer terror. “It scared me,” Harris said. “It scared a lot of people. A $10-million project had never been done in our county.”

Seven years later, sprinklers are watering the week-old grass at Casa Pacifica. Construction workers are hanging the doors on the shelter’s school house. Administrators are filing the paperwork for seven state licenses.

The 22-acre center near Camarillo State Hospital will be dedicated Saturday and take in its first foster-care children in July.

“I go out there frequently and just walk around the campus and say, ‘We did it,’ “said Helen Caldwell, who spearheaded the unparalleled fund-raising drive. “This is really a unique example of the power behind getting the public and the private sectors to work together.”

But reaching this point has taken some work: Casa Pacifica’s volunteer board spent years tapping the depths of the county’s wealthiest families and cajoling the county and Congress into donating half the money needed to build the facility.

Board members took prospective donors on tours of a similar facility in Orange County. They showed videotapes and architectural renderings. They hosted charity balls and bass fishing tournaments. In one case, a county supervisor used the power of her office to solicit a $600,000 contribution.

Then, when the group had millions in the bank and its architectural drawings in hand, the state changed the rules and essentially abandoned its support for foster care.

That meant Casa Pacifica could build the center, but could not afford to run it or even find the foster children to fill the facility. The board quickly shifted direction, scaling back the emergency shelter plans and providing space for troubled and disabled youths who need longer-term care.

“All of the sudden, the change in the law said, ‘Guess what, you’re building something that’s going to be obsolete,’ ” Harris said. “So we adjusted.”

Still, the state’s 1991 funding cuts left the county and the nonprofit board with having to pick up more than $1 million of the $4.5 million yearly operating budget--a sacrifice that county supervisors and Casa Pacifica directors say they are prepared to accept.

“It feels like a seven-year pregnancy that’s about to deliver,” Harris said.

The baby in this case is a unique facility designed to meet any need an abused child might have.

By the time it opens, Casa Pacifica will be licensed as a foster-care provider, emergency shelter, residential home, mental-health clinic, medical clinic, private school and, eventually, a preschool.

Abused children are now taken from their parents and put into emergency foster homes. From there they are transported to hospitals, mental health counselors, and even to police. Often these children are forced to repeat the same story again and again.

But Casa Pacifica will provide a team of counselors and medical officials on the campus. The children can attend school there, and if necessary come back for sessions with counselors.

One frequent critic of the project argues that the displaced children would do better in a home setting.

“It’s the brick and mortar mentality,” said Bob Woodson, who once worked with a local child abuse prevention agency. “For a little 5-year-old girl who has been brutally raped by her mother’s boyfriend, I don’t think the institutional setting is right. She needs a warm, fuzzy, motherly type to hug her.”

Casa Pacifica administrators say they have strived to make the campus as homey as possible. The 74 children there will live and eat their meals in four cottages. Brightly colored furniture, posters of kittens and puppies, bean bag chairs and plastic swing sets should help the children feel comfortable. “I think one of our challenges is to try to make it as family-like as we can,” said Steven Elson, Casa Pacifica’s executive director.

The shelter also provides a better chance for reuniting families, because parents can routinely visit in a safe and supervised setting--something that is often difficult in foster homes, Elson said.

“Casa Pacifica is more than just its building and campus,” Elson said. “It really is a new way of intervening with families and kids.”

The emergency shelter can hold about 50 children who will stay from two to 45 days. Another 24 beds at Casa Pacifica will be reserved for the residential program, designed for older youths who have already exhausted the foster-care system.

These children, who often suffer emotional problems or learning disabilities, are now sent to residential homes in neighboring counties. Ventura County pays fees to the other counties, as well as travel expenses for families and county social workers who must visit them.

Since July, the county has paid $3.9 million to keep 163 children in residential care elsewhere, according to the county Public Social Services Agency. Some of those youths will start arriving at Casa Pacifica on July 18. There they will have a private school, as well as mental health counselors available daily.

After a hiring frenzy this month, Casa Pacifica should have 110 employees, including a nurse practitioner to deal with medical problems, counselors and teachers. Also, the county will provide about 20 workers, most of them mental health counselors and social workers.

To fulfill its commitment, the county must hire an additional 12 workers--an item appearing on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors agenda. State and federal agencies will absorb some of the costs.

But overall, the county will have to contribute $711,500 to running Casa Pacifica in the coming budget year, more than the board anticipated when it agreed to help build the center in 1990.

Part of the increase is due to state cuts, which increased the county’s share of all foster-care funding from 5% to 60%.

On top of that, the sheltered care with its intensive team of counselors is more expensive than foster home care, a Ventura County grand jury warned in 1992. The report estimated that it would cost $3,200 a month to keep a child at Casa Pacifica, contrasted with $702 in a foster-care home.

Elson does not dispute those figures, but said Casa Pacifica was never designed for short-term cost savings. Rather, by dealing with all the child’s needs up front, the county saves money that would be spent later in mental health counseling or juvenile court.

A study by the city and county of San Francisco recently indicated that an emotionally disturbed child left untreated can cost the system $215,447 over a lifetime. “This study gives concrete evidence that, without early and intensive intervention such as that provided at Casa Pacifica, long-term costs for all such children in Ventura County would be staggering,” the county staff wrote in its report to the Board of Supervisors.

That point is not lost on the donors who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to build the shelter.

“We all realize that the better the job we can do with abused and neglected children, the better off we’ll be as a society,” said Dean Rasmussen, whose construction firm donated $172,000 in labor and equipment to build Casa Pacifica.

Harvey Harris, the Ventura pediatrician who sat on the original board, remembers the discussions in 1988. To make the project work, the group would need a big donor.

As president of a local Kiwanis chapter, he turned to the civic group for help. “I begged, harassed, pleaded, cajoled and lobbied and got the division of 13 clubs to take it on as their project.”

The clubs pledged to raise $500,000 for the shelter’s gymnasium. Club members are still raising the money, using pancake breakfasts, auctions, bass fishing tournament and yard sales. Former Supervisor Madge Schaefer saw another opportunity in 1989 when financier David Murdock came to her for a favor.

Murdock was about to unveil his swank Lake Sherwood development and wanted to host a nationally televised golf tournament at the development’s country club. But he needed a county permit for an event of that scope.

Schaefer knew that McDonald’s fast-food restaurants was involved in the tournament and suggested that the chain could donate to the proposed shelter. Ronald McDonald’s Children’s Charities offered $30,000. Schaefer said it was not enough. McDonald’s offered $300,000. Again she told them it was not enough. Finally, Murdock offered to match McDonald’s offer with $300,000 of his money.

For years after, Murdock hosted charity balls for Casa Pacifica at his country club.

The money continued coming in large chuncks: Oxnard rancher Jack Broome donated $350,000. So did Caldwell and her husband, Morrie, owner of Giant Truck Stops. The family of Otis Chandler, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and former chairman of the board of Times Mirror Corp., gave $250,000. The Angels Auxiliary, a group of volunteers, has brought in $500,000.

Caldwell, who has raised funds for charities since college, considers the shelter project her crowning achievement.

“I’m 67,” she said. “I’ve had a bout with cancer. I just feel so good to be leaving this to the children of Ventura County.”