Area Cal State Plans Assume a Low-Budget Appearance : Education: Planners of the campus near Camarillo drastically revise their views in light of dwindling funds from the state.

With the flow of cash shrinking to a trickle, planners are drastically revising their views on the early stages of a new California State University campus here--a low-budget vision that sees some courses taught in borrowed high school classrooms and via home computer.

Planners of the campus--which could be called Cal State Channel Islands or Cal State Ventura--requested $936,000 for campus drawings and plans this year. But the state budget allotted them just $194,000 to inch ahead with plans.

In the long term, planners and state legislators still say an actual campus with buildings, classrooms, laboratories and student centers is essential for the university, to be built just west of Camarillo.

But the absence of capital funds and shortage of planning dollars from the state are forcing officials to re-evaluate how they envision the campus when the first classes start--possibly as early as 1998.

“The charge has been to rethink how a university functions,” said David Leveille, director of institutional relations and the California State University system’s point man for the Ventura campus. “We are exploring the idea of a virtual college, an undergraduate and graduate level program that could be made available through the use of technology.”

Planners are now talking of a “virtual library” in which books are replaced by compact discs. They are looking to share facilities, holding classes at private and community colleges, high schools and even elementary schools. Classes might become available through home computers as well.

The state university system is also exploring the possibility of working with a private developer to eventually build the buildings for the campus and then lease them back to the state.

“Through technology and public/private partnerships we might be able to start a university before we have a traditional university of facilities,” Leveille said. “This is in addition to, not instead of, facilities.”

Leveille still hopes there will be some core buildings on the campus by the turn of the century. And, he said, even if there were capital funds for building, the planners would be looking for ways to use computers to link some students with professors.

Joyce M. Kennedy, director of the Cal State Northridge campus in Ventura, which holds classes for 1,400 students, said the timing is almost cruel. The state university system has incurred several setbacks, including a rejection by the city of Ventura, in its 10-year effort to buy land in the county.

Earlier this year, the university finally closed the deal to buy a 260-acre lemon orchard west of Camarillo for the campus site.

“It’s rather ironic that we finally get our land in Ventura County and now we’re talking about a virtual university due to a lack of funding,” she said. “We are still paying the price for lack of foresight and missed opportunities and that is what is so profoundly heartbreaking.”

State Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), a former educator who taught at Oxnard High School for five years, said he will support the university’s efforts to build bridges to the community--such as rented classroom space elsewhere--during the interim before a campus is actually built.

“It’s a ticket to a degree,” he said. “I wish those bridges had been there for me growing up in Ventura County.”

O’Connell attended Ventura Community College before moving to California State University, Fullerton for his degree and then to California State University, Long Beach for a teaching credential. “But,” he added, “we should not lose sight of the fact that we want to have a four-year comprehensive California State University campus.”

A bond measure that includes $975 million for higher education, with no money specifically earmarked for Ventura County, could be on the ballot in March if a bill is approved in the Assembly.

But the last two general obligation bond measures with money for higher education have failed in California.

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Other funding possibilities include seeking support for revenue bonds, which, unlike general obligation bonds, do not need voter approval, O’Connell said.

That method was successfully used to secure $18.5 million in the state budget for a community college satellite campus in Lompoc.

Without bond funding of some type for Ventura County, he said, “We’ll see more community college campuses and more high schools being used. But I’m optimistic we’ll have the full campus in Ventura County.”

The quest for a California State University campus in Ventura County dates back two decades when the first land for a university was purchased in Somis during the 1960s. The state later sold that land, and state university officials began again looking in earnest at buying land in the county in 1984.

The university liked the large tract of land bordered by eucalyptus trees across Harbor Boulevard from Ventura Harbor. But nearby homeowners complained of potential traffic and state university officials turned their attention to Taylor Ranch, a bluff overlooking the ocean west of Ventura.

Ojai-area groups complained of both potential air pollution that would travel into the Ojai Valley and traffic on California 33. At the same time, a council dominated by slow-growth proponents was elected in Ventura and later rejected the site. The county Board of Supervisors did not reject the site, but failed to support it either.

The state university system began anew its search for a campus in 1990. In 1991, trustees decided that 260 acres west of Camarillo and adjacent to the California Youth Authority compound would become the system’s 21st campus.

Since then, a new campus on the former Army base grounds of Fort Ord in Monterey has become the system’s 21st campus.

And California State University, San Marcos, which was on the same planning track as the Ventura campus in the mid-1980s, opened for upper division students in 1992 and will open to freshmen this year, marking its development as a full, four-year campus.

“We should have been where San Marcos is,” Kennedy said. “They are admitting freshmen this fall and we’re still struggling to get capital outlay funds. We still don’t know when our doors will open.”

Leveille, who is moving to Ventura County to set up offices to oversee the campus development, said the new university will depend heavily on public-private partnerships.

Among the ideas being considered is one that allows a so-called business incubator--a school aimed at providing training to help start new businesses--to share facilities with the campus.

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The business incubator would educate prospective company owners on how to begin and run a business, teaching them to write business plans and make essential business decisions, said Walter Beck, a Camarillo businessman who is working to start incubators in the county.

The incubator, which could become a department within the college, would begin with federal grant money, then continue operating through pledges of future profits from the successful businesses of its graduates.

“An incubator builds young businesses and it produces jobs,” he said.

Leveille said that kind of job-preparatory education could help make the university more relevant, because the majority of students at the existing Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge are working adults, and many are women re-entering college after taking years off for family or other reasons.

“We’re trying not to be an institution in an ivory tower, distant and removed from society,” he said.