Civic Leaders Show Their Support for CSU Campus

Trying to bury any notion that Ventura County is not a college-friendly community, more than 60 university boosters gathered here Monday night to whip up public support for converting Camarillo State Hospital into a four-year college.

Civic leaders called for a strong, unified voice backing the conversion effort, a message they hoped would drown out concerns raised recently by some Cal State officials on the lack of solid local support over the years for a public university.

During a preview last month of the plan to transform the mental hospital into a Cal State campus, a handful of trustees expressed frustration over past battles to find a home in Ventura County for a state university.

University boosters said Monday night they intend to show Cal State trustees that the community is now ready to embrace a college campus.

Moreover, they hope to persuade Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature to loosen the purse strings and include money in next fiscal year’s budget to convert the state hospital into the Cal State system’s 23rd campus.

“Our purpose is to build consensus in the county that we truly want a university and make this visible throughout the state,” Camarillo investment broker Dick Wagner told supporters packed into the Camarillo Boys & Girls Club. “We want to make 1998 the year that a fully operational university opens its doors in Ventura County.”

Wagner and a handful of other community leaders staged the forum--the first in a series of community meetings--to help generate ideas for showing support for the university. Elected officials or their representatives said they would continue to preach the university’s message in Sacramento and Washington.

And residents from throughout the county offered to volunteer for the cause, saying they would write letters, make phone calls and do whatever else was necessary to press the issue locally and across the state.

Handel Evans, president of the proposed Cal State Channel Islands, told university boosters that the campus will not become a reality unless there is plenty of community support.

“It is not a done deal,” he said. “In no way should you imagine that the hospital is going to become a university at this time. I need you as a community to stand behind me and talk to my trustees and tell them you are united behind this idea.”

After Wilson ordered the closure of Camarillo State Hospital early last year, a task force of state and local leaders agreed a university campus would be the best future use for the facility.

Since then, a team of CSU officials has been developing a conversion plan, including analyzing the costs and reviewing the academic programs that would be needed at the proposed campus.

Evans said Monday that community support is key to that effort.

But he added that the proposal hinges on whether enough local business and governmental partners can be rounded up to help shoulder the financial load of turning the hospital’s 85 buildings into the county’s first public university.

Officials estimate that it would cost $29 million to complete the first phase of the conversion, a move that would bring 1,100 students--many from Cal State Northridge’s existing satellite campus in Ventura--to the campus by the end of the decade.

“We can’t eat out of the public trough at the level we have been doing so,” Evans said. “It just isn’t that full anymore.”

A local state university has been planned by Cal State officials for about three decades, when then-Gov. Pat Brown authorized a study of potential sites for the campus.

But a series of setbacks has delayed those plans. The state bought 425 acres in Somis in 1969 to build a university but sold the land seven years later.

In 1986, Cal State officials targeted several hundred acres in Ventura, just west of the Ventura Freeway. But opposition from nearby residents of the Ventura Keys neighborhood thwarted that project and university officials abandoned the site months later.

Cal State planners then looked north to Taylor Ranch, a sweeping hillside parcel near the junction of the Ventura Freeway and California 33. Once again, local opposition prompted Cal State officials to back away from that plan.

“Two or three of the trustees have a rather bad taste in their mouths about Ventura County, and I don’t blame them,” said Carolyn Leavens, a member of the governor’s task force and Ventura rancher who has pursued a public university in the county for years.

“I carry a heavy level of frustration from those times,” she added. “But we need to get beyond that. The critical thing now is to make the university feel welcome.”

That checkered history has left Ventura County the most populous county in the state without its own public, four-year college. And it has led at least some Cal State trustees to question whether there is enough community support in the county for a campus.

To help sway the trustees, Camarillo civic leaders staged the community forum to rally support for the Cal State campus.

Camarillo resident Ruth O’Connell Kent was among those in attendance. She read a letter from her son, state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), saying he would introduce legislation this week transferring ownership of Camarillo State Hospital to California State University after the hospital closes June 30.

“After more than 30 years of controversy and hard work, it is hard to believe that, by the turn of the century, we will finally have a campus to call our own,” O’Connell’s letter stated.

In the meantime, Cal State officials continue to hammer out the conversion plan. Evans said he will provide trustees with an update on those efforts next month, while aiming for preliminary approval of the plan in May.

“As a community, this is a wonderful thing you’re going to get,” Evans said. “And I’m going to try and bring it to you. In fact, I am going to bring it to you.”