County Lags in Efforts to Build a State University : Education: Latest proposed site is embroiled in litigation. Four other regions have moved ahead on state’s priority list.

The top official for the Cal State University system in Ventura County says she is devastated by continuing delays in planning a state university locally and doubts that it will be built before she retires.

“I’ve been heartbroken over the length of time it’s taken in Ventura County,” said Joyce Kennedy, 60, director of the Cal State Northridge-Ventura campus.

“People still think it’s going to happen in my time, but I’ve given up on that,” she said. “There are times when I’m angry, and there are times when I’m terribly, terribly dejected. How long must we wait?”

In the past two decades, proposals for campus sites have come and gone. The latest, an area of land that includes a lemon grove west of Camarillo, is embroiled in litigation.

Lately, Kennedy has watched in distress as four other sites have crept ahead of Ventura County on the state’s priority list. They have been moved ahead of the planned campus she has championed for 20 years in the largest county still lacking a California state college.

During that time, enrollment at the Ventura satellite campus has increased and state funding has dwindled, prompting boosters to launch all-out fund-raising drives to pay for such basic services as new computers and classes threatened with cancellation.

“We’ve never had higher enrollment,” Kennedy said, noting that the campus had the equivalent of 650 full-time students in the spring, up 9% over the previous year. But “even though our enrollment is the highest ever, the budget is not what it should be.”

Meanwhile, she said, such communities as Monterey, San Marcos, Concord and Palm Desert seem to have leapfrogged ahead of Ventura County in efforts to establish four-year colleges in their areas.

State education officials said the efforts in those four areas are unrelated to their commitment to bring a public university to Ventura County.

Rather, they said, it is the county’s failure to secure a location for the proposed Cal State Ventura that has thwarted its establishment.

To date, three potential sites have been scrapped. A Taylor Ranch location near the junction of the Ventura Freeway and California 33 was rejected by the Ventura City Council in 1990.

“That’s still very painful for me to talk about,” Kennedy said. “It set us back I don’t know how many years.”

Ventura Councilman Gary Tuttle voted against the Taylor Ranch site. But he said the state improperly blamed the city for its own shortcomings.

“It was not a good site,” Tuttle said. “They realized they made a mistake when they looked at all the costs, then they needed a scapegoat to get out of it without admitting they’d made their own mistake.”

Tuttle said he has no regrets about his vote, despite claims by Kennedy and others that it delayed a local university by years.

“It set back the university about 11 months, or 12 months,” he said. “That’s how long it took them to find a better site.”

Cal State officials have since settled on a 260-acre site off Beardsley Road, a two-parcel site sprinkled with lemon groves in the greenbelt between Camarillo and Oxnard.

But one of the two landowners has refused to sell, forcing state officials to file suit to condemn the property. That’s where the project is now stalled.

“We haven’t been able to get the property without going through the legal issues,” said Colleen Bentley-Adler, of the state chancellor’s office in Long Beach. “We certainly thought it was going to be a lot easier to do it.”

So did Kennedy.

While Ventura County has struggled with finding acreage to house a public university, a new college has sprung up in north San Diego County, and another one is scheduled to open at the abandoned Fort Ord near Monterey next year.

Earmarked for off-campus centers are sites in Contra Costa County and Palm Desert, where city officials recently donated 40 acres to the state with a promise to save another 160 acres should a full campus ever be needed.

None of this makes any sense to Patrick Callan, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center in San Jose, an independent nonprofit group that tracks state university trends.

Kennedy’s “concerns are very well-taken,” Callan said, “because the site selection processes for new campuses are in very serious danger of turning into political footballs.

“It may be that the communities with the most political clout rather than those with the most need are the ones who will get new universities.”

As example No. 1, Callan cites Cal State Monterey Bay, where he said there is no justification for spending $140 million or more to transform Fort Ord into a four-year university.

“Simply because it was offered as a gift and the land was free, we are now committed to an incredibly expensive undertaking,” Callan said. “We’re building a campus where there is no demand, and we’re asking students to move there as opposed to building a campus where we need one.”

But Bentley-Adler responded that “you just don’t turn down” offers of free land such as the opportunity at Fort Ord.

She said that the $140 million is coming from the federal government, and that only about $10 million in state university funds has been designated for Monterey Bay.

“Ten million dollars out of a $2-billion budget really isn’t that much money,” Bentley-Adler said. “It would be foolish of us not to build a campus there.”

Similarly, a new university has opened seemingly from scratch in San Marcos, a small north San Diego County city with big growth and even bigger aspirations.

“They went by Ventura like a freight train,” said Peter MacDougall, president of Santa Barbara City College who chairs the CSUN-Ventura community advisory committee.

“They established the land, they acquired the land, and now it’s up and running,” MacDougall said. “The difficulty is in the land acquisition.”

Bentley-Adler said no state university project has been bumped ahead of Ventura County. But a series of factors conspired to delay construction of the long-planned Cal State Ventura, she said.

“Circumstances at the other campuses have just been more favorable,” she said. “Sometimes that happens. It hasn’t been that Ventura’s been pushed back. It’s just that the other campuses have come to fruition sooner.”

Nonetheless, the quick progress of Monterey Bay, San Marcos and the other communities has discouraged those who have worked locally for years to land a public university in Ventura County.

“Everybody that’s been involved is frustrated at this point,” said Stan Whisenhunt, a local publicist who sits on the CSUN-Ventura community advisory committee with MacDougall.

“We’ve been sitting here kind of marking time while these other areas are moving ahead,” he said.

Whisenhunt is not the only committee member full of frustration.

“It’s bothered me all along, when San Marcos and all the others beat us,” said Dorothy Jue Lee, a member of the state Board of Education who also sits on the committee.

“But there’s nothing we can do about it until we get behind a site in Ventura,” said Lee, a former teacher.

State Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria) agrees. He said he has been working with state university officials for years to build a university in Ventura County. But without a place to put it, the project stands idle.

“I know the CSU has been in extensive negotiations with the potential sellers with a desirable site,” said O’Connell, a former Oxnard High School social studies teacher. “CSU wants to avoid litigation and, without a doubt, it’s been very frustrating.”

Even if the land is acquired, through purchase or condemnation, O’Connell concedes that financing construction and operation of the college would require a commitment of funds from residents.

“A lot of it is dependent on the electorate and whether the voters are willing to pass bond measures,” he said. “With any new campus, we’re going to have to supplement revenue sources so it does not become a drain on the existing system.”

The mayor of Palm Desert, which last month donated 40 acres to the CSU for an off-campus center of Cal State San Bernardino, said his community has experienced none of the opposition to a public university that Ventura County has.

Buford Crites, who works as a speech instructor at College of the Desert, said his fast-growing city has seemingly moved ahead of Ventura County because of its commitment to higher education.

“I hope the state of California chooses to have the resources to not make this that the Coachella Valley wins and Ventura County loses,” the mayor said. “No one in this valley has any intention to move something away from other areas in the state.”

But, Crites conceded, “we’re doing our best to tend to our needs well ahead of our time.”

The state chancellor’s office said a campus is warranted in the Palm Desert area because more and more people are moving there. But that off-campus center attracts fewer than half the 1,400 students at CSUN-Ventura.

“They’ve got some real explosive growth out there in the desert,” Bentley-Adler said. “It may not be a new campus right now, but certainly down the line there’s going to be the need for a new campus.”

The deal approved last month also sets aside another 160 acres should the state choose to build a permanent campus in Palm Desert, which spent nearly $11 million to acquire the 40 acres and donate it to the state.

“It’s good common sense,” Crites said. “The end result of this multimillion-dollar investment will be an influx of the kinds of citizens we want, young people we want.

“Any taxpayer should say, ‘Well done,’ not ‘Government giveaway,’ ” he said. People in Ventura County, he added, “need to get on with it.”

For her part, Kennedy declined to chastise Ventura County officials for not displaying the same commitment to higher education that desert community officials have shown.

Instead, she works daily to keep the progress toward a public university in Ventura County humming. A telethon is scheduled in the spring, as is a series of other fund-raisers in coming months.

“Whatever it takes,” she said, “short of selling my soul.”