Doing Homework

Cal State University officials have been granted three extra months to submit a plan detailing how much money and what improvements are needed to convert Camarillo State Hospital into the long-sought Cal State Channel Islands campus.

The 90-day extension is important because it allows Cal State planners more time to study the structural improvements required for turning the mental hospital into Ventura County’s first public four-year university.

Along with construction issues, planners will review how the campus would be divided for educational uses and what portions should be leased to other agencies to help provide continuing funding.

Word of the extension came Wednesday as a handful of university trustees toured the hospital grounds for the first time.

J. Handel Evans, president of the still unbuilt Cal State Channel Islands, said Gov. Pete Wilson still wants a draft proposal on the hospital’s conversion by January, but that most of the specific money and construction issues can be spelled out in the later report.

“We have to have the final document in place by April,” Evans said, “so we can be included in the May revise” of the governor’s 1997-98 draft budget.

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A gubernatorial task force last month recommended that Wilson approve the conversion and that Cal State officials submit a detailed plan by Jan. 1.

Cal State trustees have repeatedly said that they need a substantial amount of money from Sacramento--up to $40 million initially and an additional $20 million annually--to pull off the conversion.

“We don’t have enough budget to support what we’ve got,” trustee Jim Considine said. “Therein lies the rub.”

Ideally, Evans said, the 1,500 or so full- and part-time students enrolled at the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge could attend classes at the freshly converted university by the fall 1998 semester.

“We could have 6,000 or 7,000 [students] within five years,” he said.

However, a spokeswoman for the governor said Wednesday that Wilson still has not made a decision about whether he will set aside money for the Cal State Channel Islands project in his draft budget, which is due by Jan. 10.

“The governor’s office is still examining all the issues,” Lisa Kalustian said. “We’re talking about a big project here, and there are a lot of things that have to be looked at.”

The draft budget will be debated by legislators before Wilson makes a series of revisions in May. A final state spending plan must be adopted by July 1.

The three Cal State trustees who toured the Camarillo State grounds Wednesday said they would like to see the facility turned into Cal State’s 23rd campus.

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Trustees Tony Vitti and Martha Fallgatter--both first-time visitors--said they were impressed with what they saw: dozens of red-tiled, mission-style buildings, sweeping lawns and open space and row after row of sturdy homes and dormitories.

“These could all be spiffed up and they would make great faculty housing,” said Vitti, eyeing a series of three-bedroom homes on the north portion of the hospital property.

Moments later, the hospital’s plant operations manager described a new road that could ease traffic for students and teachers living on campus.

“We could cut a road through those mountains there,” said Dutch Grafner, who supervises the maintenance of Camarillo State. “It would drop straight down [to Lewis Road] and they wouldn’t have to go through campus.”

Improvements to the roads leading to and from the 60-year-old state hospital account for just some of the millions of dollars in renovations that would be needed to prepare the property for use as a state university.

Many of the 85 buildings would need significant upgrading before Cal State could put them to use, university officials say. Those are among the details to be included in the report due in Sacramento by April.

Nonetheless, Cal State trustees on Wednesday were enthusiastic about their chances of completing the university conversion.

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“What’s so wonderful is that everything is so uniform,” said Fallgatter, standing in the shadow of the historic bell tower, sizing up the hospital’s original administration building. “It all fits together. It’s so California.”

Vitti was more concerned about how to pay for the proposed university.

“It would be a great thing for Ventura,” he said. “The campus lends itself to becoming a university. But it’s like showing us a $4-million house. We love them. But we don’t have the money.”

Scheduled to close by July 1, the Camarillo State complex housed as many as 7,000 mentally ill and retarded patients in its heyday in the 1950s.

But as costs have swelled to more than $110,000 per patient annually, state officials have begun looking for less expensive, alternative ways to treat the mentally ill and disabled.

The state Department of Developmental Services first proposed closing Camarillo State late last year, saying the patients could receive equal but less expensive treatment at group homes and other state facilities.

The 800 or so remaining hospital patients are scheduled to be moved out before June. Most of the 1,500 employees, meanwhile, already are seeking jobs elsewhere in state government.

Fallgatter expressed some concern over the family members of those longtime hospital patients who are being readied for a move to alternate quarters.

“That would be hard for the families, for those who live close by when the patients are being relocated,” she said.

“It would break your heart.”