Some See Rough Road Ahead

The push to convert Camarillo State Hospital into Ventura County’s first public university has stirred the hopes of parents, educators and business people.

But some residents of this expansive hillside community are not so enthralled with the prospects of a 3,500-student college about three miles down twisting Potrero Road from their homes.

They are afraid that the four-year college, combined with other huge developments planned amid the rolling hills north and east of the hospital, will turn their slice of paradise into an urban, smog-choked landscape.

“It would be a nightmare,” said Rene Rodriguez, who has lived in the same Newbury Park house for two decades. “We get a lot of traffic already and this is just going to increase it.”

Three two-lane roads lead into different sections of the 750-acre property that houses Camarillo State Hospital, the meandering collection of 85 buildings scheduled to close as a center for the mentally handicapped and mentally ill on June 30. State advisors favor converting the hospital into the Cal State University system’s 23rd campus.

Two of those streets, Lewis and Hueneme roads, are straight country tracks that traverse the flat Oxnard Plain.

But Potrero Road is a winding, treacherous switchback up a severe grade that Newbury Park residents worry would become clogged with college students looking for a back way into the campus.

“The concern is whether Caltrans is looking at the big picture,” complained Michelle Keotke, a community activist who has lived off Lynn Road for seven years.

“I would hope they’re concerned with the impact on our air quality and the potential for gridlock over here,” she said. “This one neighborhood already is the site of other huge developments.”

Specifically, developers already are planning the sprawling Dos Vientos project, a 2,350-home subdivision that when built will change the face of Newbury Park.

Other massive projects nearby in the Conejo Valley include the proposed Seventh-day Adventist development and the planned expansion of the Amgen plant.

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What’s more, in the hills northeast of Camarillo State Hospital adjacent to the Oxnard Plain, county officials are planning a golf course and an outdoor amphitheater on the scale of the Irvine Meadows complex in Orange County.

Such projects have some Newbury Park residents crying foul.

“This tiny area is going to have a tremendous influx of traffic,” Koetke predicted. “This is a vital wildlife corridor that connects the Santa Monica Mountains with the Santa Susana Mountains.”

Transportation planners in Thousand Oaks are comfortable with the efforts they have made to accommodate the Dos Vientos and other development projects in Newbury Park.

Traffic analyst Jeff Knowles said the city already has diverted much of the traffic along the developed neighborhoods from Potrero Road to Lynn Road. And he said a university at Camarillo State would have little additional impact.

“The city has already taken moves so that arterial streets, with no housing fronting the area, will collect the bulk of the traffic,” Knowles said. “The major traffic won’t be on that roadway.”

Cal State officials, meanwhile, are reluctant to discuss the traffic impacts of their plan to take over the mental hospital because a final decision has not been made.

Nonetheless, university planners and architects have conducted early analyses about what improvements would be needed to allow for the immediate and future students.

“We would have to have some changes made to some of our access roads, but not immediately,” said J. Handel Evans, president of the Cal State Channel Islands campus. “But this is one of those interesting topics we would have to discuss.”

County public works officials have sized up the situation. They know what they would need, wider roads. But they have no money to pay for the improvements.

“The state would have to do environmental reviews and traffic studies and everything else,” said Butch Britt, county public works director. “But they don’t always indicate where the money would come from.”

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Some county projects will proceed, one way or another, including replacing the Hueneme Road bridge spanning Callegas Creek, Britt said.

But the more costly projects, such as widening two-lane Lewis or Potrero roads to make room for thousands of additional cars, remain unfunded. “We’d have to compete for the available road funds,” Britt said.

Caltrans officials have budgeted a $16-million project at the intersection of Lewis Road and the Ventura Freeway, a sweeping new interchange that will move traffic along faster when it is finished.

But construction crews will not begin until 1999 and will take 18 months to finish, said Caltrans spokeswoman Pat Reid.

“The project includes some local streets and widening of Lewis Road about six-tenths of a mile,” she said. “This project should really help.”

But up the Conejo Grade, Newbury Park homeowner Trish Kellogg is not so certain.

She worries that with a new golf course, an amphitheater and a state university all clustered within a few miles of her home, traffic volumes will spiral and potential tragedy will loom.

“People are going to sneak in from Potrero Road to get there quick, then the back way suddenly becomes the way in,” she said. “You can kill yourself on Potrero stone sober.

“When you mix that extra traffic in there, I think you’re looking at a disaster.”