Planners Envision an Environmentally Friendly Campus

Trying to become the first “green campus” in the Cal State community, university planners have launched an ambitious proposal to create nature preserves, swaths of open space and a network of advanced transportation systems at Ventura County’s budding four-year college.

Under the environmentally friendly plan, a fleet of electric buses or even light-rail trains would shuttle students to and from the university proposed for the shuttered Camarillo State Hospital complex.

Once there, students would be able to hop electric bicycles or fuel-efficient trams to make their way across a sprawling 630-acre campus crisscrossed by wildlife corridors and conservation zones.

While the proposal is in its infancy, it received a significant boost Friday when the Los Angeles-based Environment Now foundation announced it would funnel between $50,000 and $100,000 to the CALSTART consortium to study ways of meeting the university’s transportation goals.

“I am unaware of this kind of thing happening anywhere else on the globe,” said CALSTART President Mike Gage, whose transportation technology consortium has joined CSU planners and the Ventura County Transportation Commission in spearheading the effort.

“To the best of my knowledge, while some areas have experimented with an electric vehicle or two, no campus has made the commitment to literally becoming a green campus, to becoming a living laboratory to how to do things differently and, I might say, better,” Gage said.

University planners hope to have demonstration vehicles cruising the fledgling Camarillo campus in coming weeks and expect to pitch the idea to the Cal State governing board at a meeting next month.

It is perhaps the first time in the state, and perhaps the nation, that a university has attempted to go so far to address concerns about wildlife preservation, air quality and traffic congestion, officials say.

But Cal State boosters say the Channel Islands campus provides the perfect opportunity to apply such innovative approaches.

The planned university, after all, is being created like none other before: forced to generate its own source of money to transform the aging Camarillo mental hospital into a modern-day college campus, the 23rd in the Cal State University system.

In that way, university boosters say, the “green campus” proposal is merely an extension of some of the new ideas that could be put into play as the university evolves over the next decade.

“I think it’s a noble idea,” said Maureen Hooper Lopez, director of transit programs for the Ventura County Transportation Commission. “It’s a beautiful campus, and I think it lends itself to having that kind of [environmentally friendly] theme.”

The CSU’s effort is not completely altruistic.

In fact, planners acknowledge that air pollution, traffic congestion and land-use matters are among the chief concerns highlighted in an environmental impact report prepared for the transformation effort.

Moreover, local environmentalists have alerted Cal State officials that they intend to keep close watch on those issues as the university develops.

By the fall of 1999, the old mental hospital is expected to be transformed into the new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge.

Planners View Campus as Biological Preserve

Under that plan, the satellite center will remain an extension of the Northridge college until it attracts enough money and students to stand as its own full-fledged university.

“I don’t believe it entirely, but I want to believe it,” said Camarillo resident Mike Stubblefield, who reviews air quality issues for a local Sierra Club chapter.

“I’m not aware that any of this stuff has been tried anywhere else, and the Cal State University system doesn’t exactly have a track record of having introduced any of these ideas,” he said. “But I think these are ideas whose time have come, and I would suggest there is going to be pressure from the environmental community to make sure they happen.”

Cal State officials said the green campus proposal grew out of the recognition that the developing university is in an isolated area surrounded by agriculture and thousands of acres of native scrubland, home to deer and other wildlife.

Prodded by environmental groups, university planners began exploring the idea of making the entire campus a biological preserve, creating conservation zones and wildlife corridors that would remain in pristine condition and be off-limits to the public.

Those areas could also serve to boost the university’s evolving curriculum, officials said, providing students of biology or wildlife management a living laboratory from which to learn.

“Every effort will be made to preserve or minimize the impact to flora and fauna,” said Noel Grogan, project manager for the developing Channel Islands campus. Grogan has asked a Humboldt State professor to review the wildlife issues. “It comes down to a discussion of how you’re able to create a university in a way that creates the least impact on the surrounding area.”

John Buse, a lawyer for the Ventura office of the Environmental Defense Center, said he is heartened that Cal State officials are reviewing environmental issues that he and others have raised in recent months.

“I think we’ll certainly look at what the university is proposing to see if it’s truly breaking new ground,” Buse said. “In so many respects, this campus is already breaking new ground. I would applaud them if they were to pull this off.”

Park and Ride Sites Linked to Shuttles

On the other side of the green campus equation is the effort to employ a range of advanced transportation programs to help the university deal with anticipated traffic problems.

The first phase of that effort involves establishment of park and ride sites across the county linked with a fuel-efficient shuttle bus service to deliver students to and from campus, officials said.

That program, expected to be in place by the time the campus opens for business next year, is intended to get at least half of the students using alternative transportation to reach the school. At other Cal State campuses, up to 80% of the students commute to school.

A second phase includes replacement over the next three years of the university’s fleet of older, gas-burning vehicles with electric or fuel-efficient vehicles. That effort involves installing charging stations for electric cars, or even electric bicycles, across the campus.

The final phase includes creation of a light-rail system over the next 20 years that could bring students from as far away as Santa Barbara to the Channel Islands campus without them ever having to get into a car.

Transportation planners said the technology already exists to make many of these proposals a reality in coming years. All it requires now is the money and the will to make it happen, they say.

“It will require some doing, but it’s not rocket science,” said Gage of CALSTART, which on Friday signed a lease to become the first long-term tenant at the Camarillo campus.

“It’s a little easier because this is a new campus. It’s not coming in and displacing the way things always have been done,” he said. “It’s not quite a blank slate we’re writing on, but there’s a lot of white space.”

Indeed, when it comes to addressing transportation issues on Cal State campuses, officials say nothing like this has ever been tried.

A spokesman at CSU headquarters in Long Beach said while individual campuses have tried a variety of programs to ease congestion and air pollution, most are commuter schools where cars and traffic are part of the landscape.

And there is no overall mandate by the governing board to reduce the number of trips to and from campuses.

In that way, planners said the Channel Islands campus finds itself on the cutting edge of these issues, in a position to set a new standard for how a university does business.

“It’s an experiment and we can’t guarantee it will work,” said Mary D. Nichols, executive director of the Environment Now foundation. “But we see it as a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the use of alternative transportation and how to make it work.”

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About This Series

With Cal State University officials moving closer to establishing a four-year university in Ventura County, transportation planners are trying to turn the campus into the CSU system’s first “green campus.” “Birth of a University: Countdown to a Cal State campus” is an occasional series chronicling the development of the campus at the former Camarillo State Hospital complex. This installment focuses on efforts to establish conservation zones and a network of advanced transportation systems for an environmentally friendly campus.