Panel OKs Convent’s Planned Relocation : Oxnard: Land-use board supports the nuns’ bid to move from a site near the Bailard Landfill. The proposal now goes to the City Council.

With fund-raising dollars and a little divine providence, the Catholic nuns who live near the Bailard Landfill say they hope to move into a new convent by the end of 1996.

Oxnard’s land-use advisory board Thursday approved the plan for a new 42,935-square-foot Spanish-Mediterranean convent on North G Street in Oxnard. The convent plan, estimated to cost more than $3.6 million, is set to go before the City Council for a vote within three weeks.

The vote was 4-0, with adviser Sonny Okada abstaining.

“We hope and we pray that in one year, we will have our new convent,” said Mother Superior Josephine Torres. “There are a lot of permissions we need to get from the city. We have to have the money. Our Lord is one that usually will help provide.”

The Sister Servants of Mary convent has sat nearly 500 feet from the landfill for about 30 years. The nuns must move as part of a settlement reached with the Ventura Regional Sanitation District last year.

Convent residents had long complained that the noise, dust and odor from the 180-acre dump might be endangering their health. When the district proposed extending the life of the dump--now set to close in the summer of 1996--the nuns had threatened a lawsuit.

According to Stanley E. Cohen, the nuns’ lawyer, the district agreed to pay the nuns $500,000 to relocate. The nuns, in turn, have agreed to leave the convent by Feb. 1, 1996.

“All things considered, with the sisters still owning the property, I believe it was a fair settlement,” Cohen said.

Torres said the sisters plan to sell the Victoria Avenue property, which was donated to the order 34 years ago. Meanwhile, they are scrambling to find housing for the 23 sisters living in the convent.

Torres said about 12 nuns will stay in Newbury Park, where the order operates a convalescent hospital. Torres said she is uncertain about what the others will do while the new convent is being built.

“We have to rent a house or whatever we can find,” Torres said.

For now, raising the money needed for the new convent appears to be a task of nearly biblical proportions. The sisters have $500,000 in the bank from last year’s settlement, but so far have netted only $40,000 in fund raising, according to Torres.

The order has hired a fund-raising consultant based in New York City to help it reel in donation dollars. Torres also said the order’s other convents in Kansas City, New Orleans and New York plan to join the effort.

“It is a lot of money,” Torres said. “There is a lot we have to go through yet.”

The sisters plan to purchase the 2.8-acre site on North G near 2nd Street from St. John’s Regional Medical Center. The new convent campus will include a chapel, classrooms for the nuns’ religious training and living quarters for about 45 nuns.

According to Mark Pettit, the project’s lead architect, the blueprints for the new convent call for extensive landscaping, including citrus and other fruit orchards. Pettit said the plan also takes into consideration that the sisters range in age from 20 to 96.

“There’s a volleyball court,” said Pettit. “There’s also a more reflective garden, like a rock garden, with lots of shady structures.”

The Sister Servants of Mary convent in Oxnard is one of six such convents in the United States. The order trains nuns to minister to the sick and bedridden, free of charge.

Only two residents turned out to speak on the proposal Thursday, and both were in favor of the project. Jim Leiser said the nuns had cared for his wife, who died of lung cancer in April.

“Thank God for the Sister Servants of Mary,” said Leiser, 48. “Without the sisters, we would have been in dire straits.”