CSU Won’t Pursue Hospital Land for Future Campus

Cal State University officials are not giving serious consideration at this time to proposals to take over Camarillo State Hospital after its scheduled closure in 1997, CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz said Monday in Ventura.

Instead, the university is moving ahead with plans to build the campus on 260 acres of lemon groves west of Camarillo, when or if money becomes available.

Although the picturesque grounds of the hospital south of Camarillo could be suitable in many ways for the university, officials said CSU will not study whether the site is viable until after community hearings March 8 on the future of Camarillo State Hospital.

The comments came at a meeting Monday at the Cal State Northridge Ventura satellite campus to hear community comments and to introduce Ventura County’s acting campus president, J. Handel Evans.

Camarillo City Manager Bill Little urged Munitz and Evans to move quickly to decide whether Cal State is interested in the state hospital property.

“There are 1,500 employees out there on tenterhooks, not to mention the families of patients,” he said. Those people need to know whether they have jobs and where their family members will be housed, he said.

Munitz told Little to go forward on the basis that the university will not take the hospital land.

“It is safe to proceed on the assumption that it isn’t a university site,” he said of the hospital grounds. “We are doing our planning on the assumption that [the proposal to use Camarillo State] never came up.”

But he stopped well short of ruling it out altogether.

“If it turns out that it makes sense, none of us is going to refuse it,” he said. “It’s one of a wide range of possibilities,” he added later.

Evans, an architect as well as being the newly named acting president of Ventura County’s planned campus, said his tour of the state hospital showed him that the buildings are safe and free of asbestos or earthquake problems. But he said it would still be expensive to outfit the grounds for a university.

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Rather than looking to that possibility, he said the community should stay on track with its planning and support for the campus on the property it purchased, and not be sidetracked by the debate over locations.

“As far as we’re concerned, we have a piece of land,” he said. “We don’t want to lose our momentum. And we have to wait to see if Camarillo State is even available.”

Both said they did not want the fate of the university decided based on politics.

“We will work to see that we don’t turn out to be the convenient political solution for someone else’s problems,” Munitz said.

Munitz was one of several speakers Monday who praised Evans as the perfect man to work out problems that might come up and to bring the university to fruition. Others speaking included three state legislators and CSU board members.

“I think we have the best qualified individual in the country,” said Jim Considine, chairman of the board of trustees for the 22-campus Cal State University system. Considine added later that Evans is CSU’s chief negotiator in Washington, and credited him with bringing in enough federal aid to complete earthquake repairs at Cal State Northridge.

“We took him away from some very important duties for this,” he said.

Evans, former vice chancellor appointed to negotiate funds for CSU in Washington and former president of San Jose State, was the man in charge of converting the former U.S. Army base at Fort Ord into Cal State Monterey Bay. He will be charged with developing the Ventura university in all respects.

He will be in charge of formulating curriculum, developing physical grounds and forging cooperative ventures with the community that could include CSU classes at community colleges, businesses and Navy bases at Point Mugu and Port Hueneme. He will also be in charge of coordinating local, state and federal support.

Munitz said that Evans and his wife will be chief fund-raisers, working to garner support in Ventura County for the statewide bond measure coming before voters March 26.

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The $3-billion bond measure contains $936,000 in funding for the Ventura campus, the first substantial funding devoted to the campus since $7 million was set aside by the state Legislature nearly 10 years ago to buy a site.

Munitz cautioned there is a lot riding on the bond.

“Without the bond measure, this goes nowhere,” he said.

Even if the bond measure passes, Munitz said the future holds more tight purse strings for CSU and other public institutions in California. In addition, he said, Cal State must change to accommodate the people it serves and to take advantage of technology now available.

He said the children of the baby boomers are in the pipeline now, creating a bulge of 432,000 additional students heading toward CSU and other public universities. That means that Cal State will have to spend less per student, he said.