Cal State, Youth Prison Unit Vie for Camarillo Hospital

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.

Although some state and local leaders say the Cal State system appears to have an edge in the competition, both agencies are scheduled to unveil their proposals today to a task force set up to find a new use for the 60-year-old mental hospital, housed in 85 buildings spread over 600 rolling acres.

“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.”

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.

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, bracing for increased populations from the upsurge in teenage violence, would like to make it the 16th of its facilities. 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 that 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.”

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 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 capacity.

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

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

What’s more, the prospect of another prison in Ventura County is likely to run into 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.”

At a meeting last week, Cal State’s board of trustees instructed its staff 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 lemon grove last year after a decade-long series of snafus while trying to find a suitable location and three decades after the trustees first recommended Ventura County as a campus site.

But after purchasing the Camarillo lemon grove, the university did not even have enough money to pour the foundation of the first building. All that changed with the governor’s decision to close Camarillo State Hospital. Its buildings, set around two main quads, its bell tower, 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. But it is an opportunity they hate to pass up: Moving into the hospital would save millions of dollars in construction costs and jump-start 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 to $60 million over two years.”

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 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.”

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

John Chase is the president of the Green Line Parents Group, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to supporting the developmentally disabled patients at Camarillo.

“We’ve never taken up the issue of choosing between [Cal State and the Youth Authority],” Chase said. “If we had a choice, it would be based on which one would be most cooperative about sharing the facility.”

Task force member Leo O’Hearn, a retired attorney whose son lives at the state hospital, said he suspects that 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 at the site.

Kenneth R. Weiss is a Times staff writer and Jeff McDonald is a correspondent.