Future of Hospital Prompts Concerns

Your Jan. 26 article reporting the Camarillo City Council’s recent actions regarding Camarillo State Hospital was valuable and comprehensive. However, one area of emphasis at the council’s Jan. 24 meeting was, in my opinion, misunderstood.

The City Council did not agree to pursue converting Camarillo State Hospital into a university. We did agree to work toward finding a hospital use that is both economically viable and acceptable to our community.

The fourth sentence in my motion, which passed unanimously, was: “Although we will be gathering information about the potential use of CSH as a university site, this information gathering process does not suggest we have determined to abandon efforts to find or support an acceptable hospital use for CSH.”

Since we do not know what the governor’s decision regarding the future of the hospital will be, it may be appropriate to formulate questions regarding the feasibility of its use as a university. The answers to some of these questions could reveal fatal flaws in such plans.

Our council will take the time to consider the possibility of continuing the operation of Camarillo State Hospital. We will be concentrating on this decision during the coming months. It is my personal hope that we can resolve this issue before resuming our efforts to build a much-needed California State University campus in Ventura County.

A public forum to discuss the future of Camarillo State Hospital will be held at 7 p.m. March 8 in the Camarillo City Hall council chambers. This forum is sponsored by the Camarillo Chamber of Commerce, State Sen. Cathie Wright and State Assemblyman Nao Takasugi.

DAVID M. SMITH

Camarillo

David Smith is the mayor of Camarillo.

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* The issue of closing Camarillo State Hospital is being made much more complex than necessary or advisable by the competing proposals on the part of some officials and the lack of solidarity, both of these evident in the Ventura County Board of Supervisors.

The unavailability of Supervisors Maggie Kildee and Judy Mikels, and the vacillation of Supervisor Susan Lacey, compound and confuse and only serve to hand the governor his political plum.

Since the Lanterman/Petris/Short Act of the 1960s, the purported aim has been to eliminate the State Mental Hospital System. The theme was to return patients to their home community. I saw where these patients went. I was a consultant to some private facilities. And it was a crime! They were simply distributed over a wide area, being thus less visible, and the county coffers grew, and their mental health departments expanded immensely.

The problem is not “too few patients at Camarillo.” It is that too many patients are in the jails, wandering about the communities or, worse, kept and boarded like hostages.

I was employed at Patton and Camarillo state hospitals for over 27 years, on “the line,” in supervision and in administration. I was the one who originated and pushed the idea to use “the Ranch” part of Camarillo as an ideal facility for the retarded persons of Ventura County, to replace their tiny, storefront cage in Ventura.

We must use Camarillo: Add the patients roaming the streets. Create a residential care facility in part of it. Streamline the budget to make it less costly per patient. Do not just abandon highly skilled, specialized, capable personnel on some political red-pencil, with no sound, adequate justification behind it.

ARMAND F. MAZZUCA

Newbury Park

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* Why must the Camarillo State Hospital be either a treatment facility or a state university? Why can it not be both? The beautiful state-owned site has many acres and many facilities.

In the 1960s, while I was on the Camarillo State Hospital board, our board proposed just that. We had plenty of patients at that time, but believed both the hospital and the university would benefit from a close association. The quantity of existing facilities would have allowed the university to get started immediately, as is the case now.

There was great competition in seeking the campus at that time. State money from offshore drilling was funding the building of state college campuses, and Ventura County was a producer of those funds. Land was purchased in Somis for that campus and was later sold.

Though properties are not selling easily now, the recently purchased property for the university is valuable prime agricultural land that will sell for a good price before long. Those millions of dollars would speed a quick start-up of the university.

I hope the new acting president of our university will pursue this.

JANE TOLMACH

Oxnard