Residents’ Support for Local Cal State Campus Growing

The long campaign to bring a public university to Ventura County now has such backing that local residents strongly endorse a private commercial hub and a senior citizen community at the campus if that is needed to help the college pay its way.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents to a new Los Angeles Times Poll say urban-style projects on the bucolic campus are justified if they are needed to convert the shuttered Camarillo State Hospital into a four-year Cal State University.

County residents voice a rising tide of support for the planned university--up from 78% in 1990 to 86% today. And three of every five residents say they like the location at the old Spanish-style mental hospital, hard against the hills at the eastern edge of the fertile Oxnard Plain.

“Eighty-six percent support is huge,” said Susan Pinkus, director of The Times Poll. “Residents think there is a major need for this campus.”

Residents also say they want the campus to have a practical bent when classes begin, as early as January 1999: They favor a curriculum of technical and mechanical “polytechnic” training, medical skills, agriculture, liberal arts, environmental sciences and teacher preparation.

“I’d like to see computer technology programs out there,” said Lori Colvin, 36, of Oxnard, a marriage and family counselor. “Right now with the Internet taking over, we’re looking at a really fast-moving era, and it is very important that this county be part of that.”

In conducting its survey, The Times Poll interviewed 1,286 adults in the county between Sept. 20 and 23. The margin of sample error is plus or minus three percentage points.

The poll--the most extensive so far on political attitudes here--demonstrates even in a county that favors slow growth and preservation of farms and open space that there are some projects so desirable they may override such concern. And the new university is one of them.

After all, Ventura County is the largest county in the state without a public four-year university.

The 690-acre university site abuts the Oxnard-Camarillo Greenbelt, a vast farmland preserve, and includes about 150 acres of developable land that state planners hope will become a money-making, 1,200-unit community for the elderly and a center for high-tech businesses.

In concept, the businesses would not only generate funds to renovate old state hospital buildings and erect new structures, but also fit neatly into the curriculum of the new university. Students would train with the campus companies, and the companies would use the university as an incubator for talented technicians, managers and engineers.

Likewise, the retirement village and nursing facility would fit with the goals of a geriatric nursing specialty that the university hopes to create.

“It’s called managed growth, not urban sprawl,” said Carolyn Leavens, a Ventura farmer and business leader who has worked for years to bring a Cal State campus to the county. “Agriculture and development can be compatible.”

While embracing the countywide Guidelines for Orderly Development, which generally restrict urban growth to cities, Leavens said some projects are so important that exceptions should be made.

“If we want good clean development in this county, such as Amgen,” she added, referring to the giant biomedical firm in Newbury Park, “then we must have a ready supply of people trained to work in those places. And that absolutely demands the university.”

Cal State officials, who hope to generate about $6 million a year by 2005 through private developments at the campus, say the conversion of Camarillo State Hospital to a 15,000-student university should not prompt a corridor of construction through farmland along Lewis Road.

“We will be self-contained on the site,” said Handel Evans, president of the planned Cal State University Channel Islands. “We are surrounded by county land, and the prerogative to develop that land falls with the county, not the university.”

Simple support businesses such as hamburger stands will be available on campus, and basic sundries for senior citizens will be offered to some limited degree, Evans said. But the elder village will still be dependent on off-site businesses to provide basic goods and services, he said.

That worries environmentalists.

They believe the university projects will pull city-style sprawl toward the campus as surely as students consume Big Macs and Blockbuster videos. And they insist the presence of 1,500 to 2,000 senior citizens will fire demand for doctors’ offices, flower shops, gas stations and supermarkets from the Camarillo city limits to the campus.

“It’s not only growth-inducing, it’s growth in the wrong place,” said Carla Bard, analyst for the Environmental Defense Center in Ventura. “And I just don’t think it’s fair to Ventura County to hold a gun to the county’s head and say, ‘If you don’t let us build a money machine on this property, we’re not going to build a university here.’

“I think the university would be a wonderful thing,” she added. “But I don’t think that after planning and working for it all these years, Ventura County should have to accept a poison pill to get it.”

Ventura-based planner Bill Fulton, author of “The Reluctant Metropolis,” which describes the 100-year sprawl of Southern California, said growth often does spin off itself as roads are widened and sewers and water lines expanded to meet the needs of development.

So far, more than $20 million has been set aside by the county for a new, full interchange to be built at Lewis Road and the Ventura Freeway in 2001, and about $4 million was allocated last spring to begin a $12-million, road-widening project to the university.

“If they do widen Lewis Road to four lanes, it’s going to take a lot of political will over a long period of time for the county and Camarillo to resist development, “ Fulton said.

Several institutional projects already dot the cropland along rural Lewis Road, including the Las Posadas halfway house for the mentally ill and the Casa Pacifica home for abused children. Ventura County is also developing a 16,000-seat amphitheater and golf course immediately north of the university site.

But Times Poll respondents expressed little concern about the potential growth-inducing effects of university-sponsored development. Of the 24% of respondents who opposed private businesses and elder housing at the university, just one in 10 was concerned about the loss of open space to housing.

“I think it’s good for senior citizens to be close to a campus,” said Lennart Liljeros, a 64-year-old Newbury Park resident who makes guitar parts. “I think a lot of old people would like to go back and take classes they didn’t get a chance to take in their early days.”

Some early critics of Cal State’s money-making plans also say their concerns have abated because university planners--amid a flurry of criticism--dropped a long-range goal to build single-family homes off university property along Lewis Road.

County Supervisor John Flynn said Evans “looked more like a developer than a college president for a while,” but Flynn has no problem with the current course to pay for campus conversion and growth.

“The university has got to have some money from some place,” Flynn said. “And things have been reduced to a manageable size.”

Nor does Flynn expect strip growth on farmland along Lewis Road. County and city officials are drafting strict new rules to further protect agricultural greenbelt lands, he said.

The city of Camarillo also balked at early plans that would have infringed on the greenbelt. And city Planning Director Tony Boden said he still questions the need for an elder-housing subdivision at the university.

“The idea is that you don’t put uses out there that generate demand for other types of services and uses,” Boden said. “And when you put retirement out there, you’re generating that type of need. But we still feel it can be serviced by the businesses in Camarillo. It’s not that far away.”

So, at this point, Camarillo’s position is that the university should become a full-fledged Cal State campus as soon as possible, City Manager Bill Little said.

High-tech, biomedical and communication companies are looking to the university to graduate workers with skills specific to local industry, Little said. “What we need is a curriculum that meets the needs of these high-tech companies that are moving into the community.”

Poll respondents agreed the new university’s curriculum should shore up the county’s move into a technological age. Technical training was cited in 40% of responses to a question about what courses of study the college should emphasize.

In a nutshell, that is the mission of the university--to meet the county’s future educational needs, campus officials said.

Although efforts are still embryonic, hopes are the new campus will build its curriculum from Ventura County’s obvious assets--its agricultural industry, its biomedical powerhouses, its burgeoning computer industry, its Navy bases and its proximity to the ocean and a deep-water port in an era of exploding commerce in the Pacific Rim.

Similarly, officials said courses at the new university will probably be designed to respond to a proven need: The campus will build on the successes of the current 1,400-student Cal State Northridge extension in Ventura--the largest off-site campus in the Cal State system.

There, the emphasis is teacher preparation, and training in business, child development, sociology, liberal arts and general education--along with specialties such as counseling and nursing.

The Ventura campus is scheduled to move to the Camarillo site in 14 months, in January 1999. If all goes well, the new university would become a full-fledged campus two or three years later, when part- and full-time enrollment reaches 5,000 to 6,000 students. Evans said he believes enrollment could climb to 15,000 students within the first decade of the 21st century.

“I think we’re inventing a university for the next millennium,” Evans said. “We’re sort of putting aside a number of traditions of the founding of universities and looking toward the needs of the people of the area, toward the economic growth of the area, toward a global marketplace. And toward access for a whole new population of Californians, many of whom have no tradition at all of higher education--immigrants and former immigrants.”

Robert Peyton, 61, is the man whose job it is to make that invention work.

A veteran of 19 years as a manager and curriculum planner in the University of California and Cal State systems, Peyton comes to Ventura County with long experience in creating college programs in agriculture, marine biology, environmental sciences and land management.

As senior academic planner at the new school, Peyton has spent his five months in Ventura County listening to local leaders, and dreaming creatively.

“I’m dealing in the wild possibilities at this point,” he said.

His basic strategy: Find a Ventura County need, troll the Cal State and UC systems for programs to meet that need, then bring those programs here. Sometimes, at least in the early years, that will mean delivery of bachelor’s and master’s degrees for courses taught by professors from other colleges via electronic hookups.

He is already taking his ideas to department heads throughout the state, Peyton said.

“They’ve got the accreditation, prestige, experience and faculty,” he said. “So I say, ‘OK, you’ve got the marbles, why don’t you shoot them up here. It’s good for our students, you get paid for it and we all live happily ever after.’ ”

This would work for programs such as agriculture, social work and environmental sciences, Peyton said.

For instance, Peyton plans to pull experts from one or more of the four Cal State University campuses that offer degrees in agriculture--Fresno, Chico, Pomona and San Luis Obispo. Just last week he walked a local 60-acre lemon orchard with the dean of the Pomona program.

“They own that orchard, but they’re trying to improve its management,” Peyton said. “So I say, ‘Let’s see what program we can develop to accomplish that.’ Maybe his faculty comes out here. And maybe the local growers can teach them something.”

Already moving toward a curriculum in agriculture, Peyton applied recently to a UC farm trust based in Ventura for money to survey many of the 2,200 local growers on their higher education needs.

Peyton is also certain that Cal State Channel Islands will offer a program in environmental sciences, with an emphasis on marine biology. “We have a marine sanctuary out at the [Channel Islands] national park,” he said. “So I don’t want anyone telling me we can’t do marine sciences.”

The Ventura campus would become part of a coastal archipelago of colleges and research centers--stretching the length of California from San Diego to Humboldt County, he said. “We’d work with the Cal State education facility on Monterey Bay, and Long Beach has a research vessel we could use,” he said.

A more concrete example of responding to community need is the budding relationship between Ventura County’s social services agency and the new university. Steve Kaplan, county director of human services, has proposed a masters of social work program to Peyton, with a bilingual and bicultural emphasis.

“I rummaged through the Cal State system for the best social work program, and I landed at Cal State Long Beach, which already provides social work degrees for the Humboldt and Chico campuses,” Peyton said. Last week, Peyton petitioned the Long Beach faculty to develop a curriculum for the Ventura County campus.

Also high on the new university’s to-do list are programs that take advantage of existing assets. For instance, Peyton is talking with fast-growing Amgen, the world’s largest biomedical firm, about placing students in internships at the Conejo Valley company.

Partnerships with other high-tech organizations--GTE and the Navy--are also in the planning stages. At the Point Mugu weapons testing facility, for instance, experts who run war games might also teach courses in computer animation at the college, Peyton said.

In its early planning, Channel Islands also hopes to set up a high-tech magnet school on campus with the Pleasant Valley School District, and is also working with county Supt. of Schools Charles Weis to draft a curriculum that puts budding teachers into classrooms as early as their freshman year of college, not the usual fifth year.

“We’re trying to build a world-class teacher-training facility out there,” Weis said. “So many of the teacher preparation programs don’t get at the stuff teachers really need.”

But is it all achievable?

“It all depends on how much clout Robert Peyton and Handel Evans have with the CSU system,” Weis said. “It they really have the authority to design new programs, they will attract the students. And I can say that in my business, among the 19,000 educators in Ventura County, we’re tremendously excited about possibilities of all this.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Ventura County: Inventing a University

A Los Angeles Times Poll of 1,286 residents found a rising tide of support for the planned new Cal State University Channel Islands. Residents back the university’s location at the old Camarillo State Hospital and endorse a private commercial hub on campus if that is needed to pay for it. Many favor a curriculum with a practical bent.

Favor new Cal State University campus in Ventura County: 86%

Believe Camarillo State Hospital is a good site for a new university: 60%

Favor commercial development of the site to help pay for new campus: 64%

What areas of study should the new university emphasize? (Up to 3 replies accepted; top 6 responses shown)

Polytechnic training: 40%

Medical training: 32%

Agriculture: 28%

Liberal arts: 26%

Environmental sciences: 20%

Teacher training: 16%

HOW THE POLL WAS CONDUCTED

The Times Poll contacted 1,286 adults in Ventura County by telephone Sept. 20-Sept. 23. Telephone numbers were chosen from a list of all exchanges in the county. Random-digit dialing techniques were used so that listed and unlisted numbers could be contacted. The sample was weighted slightly to conform to census figures for sex, race, age and education. The margin of sampling error for all adults is plus or minus 3 percentage points; for certain subgroups the error margin may be somewhat higher. Poll results can also be affected by other factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented. Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.

Source: L.A. Times Poll

Campus Blueprint

Cal State plan to convert Camarillo State Hospital into Ventura County’s first public university. The key to the project would be creation of income-generating ventures to help pay the $23 million to $27 million needed to complete the first phase of development. Plans call for the proposed Cal State University Channel Islands to start accepting students by January 1999.

About This Series

“Life in a Changing County” ponders Ventura County’s politics and growth, and residents’ views on key issues of the day. The stories are based on a poll of 1,286 residents conducted in September. Today’s installment, the third in a series appearing over four Sundays, describes how most local residents support a new four-year university despite the growth it might bring.