2 Agencies in Showdown Over Hospital Site

The battle over the future of Camarillo State Hospital narrows this week to a showdown between rival proposals from two state agencies: Either convert the mental hospital into a public university, or turn it into a prison for young offenders.

Cal State University officially decided last week to aggressively bid for the complex of graceful Spanish-style buildings as the site of its long-promised campus in Ventura County.

At the same time, the California Youth Authority emerged as a rival--busily drawing up plans to change the mental hospital to a 1,500-bed correctional facility for juvenile offenders, including those with special medical or mental-health needs.

While some state and local leaders say Cal State University appears to have an edge in the competition, both agencies are scheduled to unveil their proposals Monday to a gubernatorial task force set up to find a new use for the 60-year-old mental hospital.

“This is an important week,” said Kevin Eckery, deputy secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency, which is leading the task force. “We’ll get a pretty good read on the possibilities and the probabilities at Camarillo State Hospital.”

Two other agencies--California Conservation Corps and the state Veterans Affairs Department--will also outline proposals this week to lease portions of the hospital, scheduled to close next year due to dwindling patients and spiraling overhead costs.

But Cal State University and the Youth Authority are the only agencies interested in taking over the entire complex of 85 buildings spread across more than 600 rolling acres.

It would be Cal State’s 23rd campus, which educators say is needed to meet the upcoming surge in university enrollment as the children of baby boomers reach college age.

But the Youth Authority--already bulging and bracing for increased populations because of the surge in teenage violence--would like to make it the 16th of its facilities.

Neither agency knows exactly how it could afford the new site without a major infusion of cash from the governor and Legislature.

The matchup is more than the traditional competition between schools and law enforcement for the governor’s favor in an era of limited taxpayer dollars. This one pits the state’s need to develop more correctional facilities against a strong local desire for a public university.

Over the past few weeks, administrators from competing agencies have provided the governor’s office with a preview of their plans. At this point, it appears Cal State’s proposal has garnered the support of those who count, according to a high-level source in Sacramento.

“At the end of the day,” the source said, “you are going to have a university there.”

Yet the competition is just beginning, as details of the Youth Authority’s proposal trickled out last week.

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Corrections officials have spent nearly two months plotting a strategy to take control of the rolling hospital grounds and convert it to a prison for juveniles and young offenders up to 25 years old.

Youth Authority officials said they need more space because California’s youth inmate population is nearly 150% of the system’s designed capacity.

“It has been on a general upswing over the past five years,” agency spokeswoman Sarah Andrade said. “With our population projections going forward, we’re looking to add beds.”

One of the Youth Authority’s existing prisons is the Ventura School, situated just east of Camarillo, where nearly 1,000 inmates are housed. If the state hospital is converted to a youth prison, it would be in addition to the existing Ventura School.

Youth Authority officials say they face several key hurdles before annexing the hospital, including the hospital’s annual operating cost, which is $15 million more than a similar-sized lockup elsewhere in the state.

“We’re looking at pros and cons,” Andrade said, “and there’s more cons right now, especially in the financial area.”

Also, the prospect of another prison in Ventura County would very likely run up against local opposition.

“I don’t think Camarillo wants to be known as the youth incarceration center in California,” said Charles Weis, superintendent of Ventura County schools. “I’m not putting down the CYA, I just think we would prefer a university rather than expand our prison population.”

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At a meeting last week, Cal State’s board of trustees instructed staff members to push forward with plans to acquire the hospital complex as an alternative to building a new campus on a nearby 260-acre lemon grove.

The university bought the nearby acreage last year, after a decade-long series of snafus trying to find a suitable site and three decades after the trustees first recommended Ventura County as a campus location.

But after purchasing the Camarillo lemon grove, the university had no money to even pour the foundation for the first building--a predicament that spurred some boosters to wonder whether the campus was still star-crossed.

All that changed with the governor’s decision to close Camarillo State Hospital, which led university officials to begin a reassessment over recent months. Its buildings set around two main quads, its bell tower, its indoor and outdoor pools, ball fields and central dining hall prompted one trustee to call it a “ready-made” college campus.

Cal State officials do not have an immediate need for the entire hospital, given the projected enrollment of 3,250 students by 2005.

But it is an opportunity they would hate to pass up: Moving into the hospital would save millions of dollars in new construction costs and jump-start the stalled plans for a campus recently named Cal State Channel Islands.

“The state is ultimately going to have an academic institution in Ventura County,” Cal State Chancellor Barry Munitz said. “Instead of coming up with $300 million over 20 years, we might have to come up with $40 million to $60 million over two years.”

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Unlike the Youth Authority, the university has lined up many supporters on the 20-member task force, which will make a recommendation to the governor on the hospital’s future next month.

“When I look at the choices, I’d have to lean toward the Cal State University proposal,” said Assemblyman Nao Takasugi (R-Oxnard), a task force member. “We are long overdue in Ventura County for a Cal State University.”

Takasugi said he remains concerned about keeping the existing hospital programs, but does not believe it would be wise to place a juvenile prison next to wards of 800 mentally ill and retarded people now at the hospital. “I don’t think it is a compatible use,” he said.

Cal State officials said they do not believe the university should share the site with a youth prison, or with the current mix of hospital patients. “I just think it’s an awfully complicated relationship,” said Munitz, the Cal State chancellor.

To cover the high overhead costs of the hospital, Cal State’s plans call for leasing unused buildings to education-related enterprises.

Officials have been talking with community college administrators about leasing space for lower-division classes, and with local educators about setting up a laboratory grammar school and high school for special-education students.

Cal State officials have also approached agricultural business leaders about setting up research-related industries for farm chemicals and exports. They hope to set up similar arrangements with entertainment industry and multimedia businesses interested in university-related research and training.

Youth Authority officials, meanwhile, said they are looking at a variety of options to share the expansive facility and its annual operating costs. They declined last week to furnish details.

Hospital workers hope to salvage at least some of the existing Camarillo State Hospital programs--and the 1,500 related jobs--by leasing space from the agency that eventually takes over. Given the university’s reluctance to share space, workers believe their chances are better with the California Youth Authority.

“If we can reach an agreement with the CYA, then that would be much more beneficial to us,” said Brian Bowley, a task force member who represents hundreds of psychiatric technicians at the hospital. “Those two uses are more compatible than a university.”

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Many parents of Camarillo State Hospital patients are frantic about the prospect of relocating sons and daughters to far-off hospitals or group homes and unclear what the rival prison and university plans might mean.

John Chase, president of Green Line Parents Group, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to supporting the developmentally disabled patients at Camarillo State Hospital, said, “We’ve never taken up the issue of choosing between [Cal State and the Youth Authority].” If we had a choice, it would be based on which one would be most cooperative about sharing the facility.

“That’s what we’re interested in.”

Task force member Leo O’Hearn, a retired attorney whose son lives at the state hospital, said he suspects a Cal State University on the hospital grounds would be the worst prospect for mental health advocates.

“I’ll endeavor to arrange for some kind of joint usage by the existing patients, possibly leasing something from the university if they do in fact take it over,” O’Hearn said. “But if the university takes the property, it would seem that the odds wouldn’t be too good” for keeping some mentally ill patients on-site.

State Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), a vocal mental-health advocate on the task force, has opposed a university on the hospital grounds, but has expressed some openness to the idea of a juvenile prison if it would help her preserve the facility as a mental institution.

“I’m sure not going to give up on this,” she said, “until the governor turns his back on us.”