‘Green Campus’ Proposed for Camarillo

Trying to create the first “green campus” in the Cal State community, university planners have launched an ambitious proposal for 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, to be called Cal State Channel Islands.

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

Although the proposal is in its infancy, it received a significant boost Friday when the Los Angeles-based Environment Now foundation pledged to 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 Burbank-based transportation technology consortium has joined Cal State 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,” he said, “to becoming a living laboratory to how to do things differently and, I might say, better.”

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

Environmentalists Monitoring Progress

Cal State boosters say the Channel Islands campus provides the perfect opportunity to apply innovative approaches to wildlife preservation, air quality and traffic congestion.

The new university is, after all, being created like none other before it: 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 system.

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

“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 Cal State effort is not completely altruistic.

Planners acknowledge that air pollution, traffic congestion and land use matters are 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 next year, the old mental hospital is expected to be transformed into the new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge.

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 scrub land, 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 Channel Islands’ project manager Noel Grogan, who 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.”

Traffic Congestion a Key Concern

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

The first phase involves establishing park and ride locations across the county and linking them with a fuel-efficient shuttle bus service for students, officials said.

That program, expected to be in place by the time the campus opens, aims to have at least half of the students using alternative transportation. At other Cal State campuses, about 80% of the students commute.

A second phase includes replacing over the next three years the university’s fleet of older, gas-burning vehicles with electric or fuel-efficient vehicles. Charging stations for electric cars, or even electric bicycles, are to be installed across the campus.

The final phase includes establishing a light-rail system over the next couple of decades that would be able to bring students from as far as Santa Barbara.

Transportation planners said the technology already exists to make many of these proposals a reality.

“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.”

A spokesman at Cal State headquarters in Long Beach said that although 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.”