Pivotal Period Ahead for CSU Planners

In a lot of ways, no one has a better feel for Ventura County’s budding Cal State campus than 64-year-old Dutch Grafner.

Forget about the architects with their fancy blueprints or consultants with their long-winded studies. Grafner was chief of operations at Camarillo State Hospital, mothballed last summer with an eye toward creation of the college campus.

He knows every inch of the place by heart. And he can see exactly how, one day, a university will take root here and blossom.

Where there are now empty buildings, he sees a library and a bookstore, directly

down the hall from the student lounge. He sees the old hospital chapel becoming a giant lecture hall, while an abandoned psychiatric unit will be where the technology center plugs in.

In all, four of the Spanish-style buildings on the 620-acre former hospital grounds are in line for face-lifts designed to yield the dozens of classrooms, laboratories and offices necessary to launch the inaugural phase of the university next January.

“It’s just like a place waiting to be reborn,” said Grafner, who put off retirement so he could be part of the team scrambling now to piece together the long-awaited campus.

“It’s not hard to look out here and visualize what’s going into these buildings, to imagine students walking around with books or sitting under one of these pepper trees before going to their next class,” he said. “Oh, yes, I can see it. I have no doubt that it’s going to happen.”

After a protracted labor spanning more than 30 years, the countdown is on for the birth of a public university in Ventura County.

In less than a year, Cal State officials plan to convert the old hospital into a new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge, the first step toward establishing a four-year college at the site within the next decade.

Under that plan, the satellite campus will remain an extension of the Northridge university until it attracts enough students and funding to support itself and become the university system’s 23rd campus.

The next several months promise to be a pivotal period, one punctuated by key budget hearings and critical planning deadlines. Each step is crucial to pushing the campus closer to reality, a reality that in some ways strays into uncharted territory.

Not only must planners transform the aging institution into a modern-day campus, they also must find ways to generate the cash needed to eventually expand it into a full-fledged university, to be called Cal State Channel Islands.

Toward that end, they are working out plans to create a commercial hub and establish a range of other money-making ventures to help the college pay its own way.

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It is the first time ever that a developing Cal State campus, and perhaps a new campus anywhere, has been forced to contend with such a pay-as-you-go reality.

“In terms of creating an entire campus this way, it’s a new idea,” said project manager Noel Grogan, a 20-year Cal State employee who is set to retire after throwing open the doors for the new university.

“You can’t complain about it, really; it’s a smart thing to do,” he said. “The job of this group is to build Cal State Channel Islands under this strange new format.”

It is against this backdrop that a team of Cal State planners has set up shop in the hospital’s administration wing, taking over a row of offices deserted when the facility shut down.

If the hospital complex is the birthplace for the new university, this wing is its incubator.

In one room, oversized blueprints and drawings line the walls, a quick reference guide for anyone interested in learning how the campus is shaping up. Groups of people wash in and out of the place all day: architects and developers, educators and engineers.

It is the kind of place where homemade baked goods make the rounds during weekly staff meetings. But don’t be fooled. These folks have rolled up their sleeves and have been hard at work preparing for the birth of the university, laying the kind of behind-the-scenes groundwork that goes largely unnoticed.

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Hand-picked by Cal State Channel Islands President Handel Evans, staff members are well connected in the Cal State University system and well versed at squeezing that system in all the right places.

Leading the charge is Evans himself, a 30-year veteran of the university system who once served as president of San Jose State University and who most recently headed the effort to convert an old Army base in Monterey into the Cal State system’s newest campus.

So far, the work he and the others have done has yielded historic results.

Last year, Cal State trustees agreed to take control of the shuttered mental hospital and convert it into a college campus, ending the county’s decades-long wait. And earlier this year, Gov. Pete Wilson earmarked $16.7 million in his proposed budget to push forward with the conversion effort.

If that money survives a series of upcoming budget hearings, and no fatal flaws turn up in an ongoing environmental review, the initial phase of the project should barrel toward completion by New Year’s Day.

But Evans is quick to point out that that is only half the battle. His aim is not simply to shift the Ventura satellite campus with its 2,000 full- and part-time students to Camarillo.

No, he’s a big-game hunter and he’s got a meatier target in his sights.

“My assignment is create an institution, a university for the next millennium, and to try to set the foundation stone on which that university will grow,” Evans said.

“I will not see the end results of this process,” he added. “But what I’ve been sent here to do is to begin that process, to create that institution and see it forward. We’ve not done it yet. We sit here looking out our windows imagining students walking up and down the campus, but they’re not here yet. Really, we’re just getting started.”

Retail, Food Service Opportunities at Site

It seems like everyone wants a piece of this project. Preservationists want to ensure that the hospital’s historic buildings are not harmed by the renovation. Chumash representatives will visit to ensure that culturally sensitive areas on the property are left undisturbed.

The state fire marshal is requiring that at least some portion of the renovated buildings be protected by sprinklers. Other officials are requiring that some restrooms meet new federal standards for handicapped accessibility.

Last week, two Cal State Northridge representatives, Dean Calvo and Debra Hammond, toured the complex to size up retail and food service opportunities at the site.

Calvo and Hammond each oversee similar operations on the Northridge campus, and they will be in charge of extending those services to the new campus.

A bookstore and cafeteria already have been built into the first phase of renovation. But they are considering the long term, looking ahead to a time when the university is bustling with upward of 10,000 students.

“I just see possibilities everywhere,” said Hammond, executive director of the student union at Cal State Northridge, who toured the facility for the first time. “On our campus the student union is really the community center. We want to expand those kinds of opportunities for students out here. They can’t be in the classroom all day long.”

To help keep track of all the competing interests, and to continue to meet key deadlines between now and the end of the year, Cal State planners meet early and often.

They meet with community members to provide status reports on the project. They meet with architects to review the working drawings being prepared to send the renovation work out to bid.

Last week they brought together a wide collection of planners and political representatives for a preliminary peek at a master plan being drawn up to develop the income-generating portion of the campus.

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At the heart of that effort is the creation of a senior citizen community, a high-tech business park and housing for students, staff and faculty members.

Evans said that while none of the ideas is set in stone, the deadline is fast approaching for deciding which opportunities to pursue to generate the money needed to support the university well into the next century.

“We’ve really got to get realistic with where we’re going with all this,” he said. “It’s one thing for consultants to talk about how to make money and it’s another thing to actually go out and do it.”

Just to make sure he doesn’t stray too far afield, Evans regularly bounces ideas off a steering committee made up of business leaders and other community representatives. He knows that for the university to have any success it will continue to need solid community support. And so far, that support appears to be holding strong.

“I’m ecstatic about everything that’s going on,” said Carolyn Leavens, a Ventura farmer and business leader who has worked for years to bring a Cal State campus to Ventura.

“Things are just boiling,” she said. “It’s like a snowball rolling downhill, and it’s becoming increasingly harder to stop. Really, I think the groundwork has been laid well enough so that it won’t stop and that we will have our university real soon.”

Past Proposals to Build a Local Campus Killed

Indeed, when you consider the history of a Cal State campus in Ventura County, things are breaking fast.

For 30 years there have been proposals to build the local campus, but each time those plans were thwarted by community opposition.

But over the past year local residents have voiced a rising tide of support for the new campus, demonstrated in September when university boosters packed a meeting of the Cal State governing board to urge that the hospital be turned into the university system’s newest campus.

The campus will build its curriculum from the community’s obvious assets--its agricultural industry, biomedical powerhouses, burgeoning computer industry, Navy bases and proximity to the ocean and a deep-water port.

In fact, some courses could be up and running even before the Northridge satellite campus moves to the old hospital complex next year.

For instance, the Channel Islands campus could begin offering a master’s degree in social work this fall through a distance-learning program offered by Cal State Long Beach. The Long Beach faculty is supportive of that effort and is waiting to win accreditation for the program in Camarillo.

In coming weeks, academic planner Robert Peyton said he plans to launch an academic council to help refine some of these issues and help decide how best to develop curriculum to meet the community’s needs.

Ultimately, planners agree that the academic program will be the thing that defines the new university. And they are looking to build on the academic successes of the Cal State Northridge extension in Ventura, the largest off-site campus in the Cal State system.

On the job less than a month, extension director Stephen Lefevre has to contend with a sharp learning curve. He has less than a year to expand his own curriculum and course offerings, build enrollment and prepare to shift his entire operation to Camarillo.

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Last week, he walked through the shuttered hospital again, using Grafner as a guide to bridge the institution’s historic past and its ambitious future. He stopped now and then to study a blueprint of the place, wrapping his mind around the idea that these dark, empty spaces would soon be replaced by classrooms and offices.

Sure there are big challenges ahead, Lefevre said. But he said the promise and the possibilities of what will take place over the next year are exciting.

“Ventura County has been waiting for this a long time, and we want to make sure we do it right,” he said. “We are committed to creating an institution that the county will be enormously proud of.”

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Cal State Campus

In less than a year, Cal State officials plan to convert an old mental hospital in Camarillo into a college campus, complete with a bookstore, library and technology center. During the first phase of renovation, four buildings at the shuttered hospital complex will receive face-lifts, yielding dozens of classrooms and administrative offices. The campus is scheduled to open next January.

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About This Series

Over the coming months, crews will begin transforming Camarillo State Hospital into a college campus, the first crucial step to launching a full-fledged university at the site, “Birth of a University: Countdown to a Cal State Campus” is an occasional series chronicling the development of the campus, which ends a decades-long wait in Ventura County for a public four-year college. This first installment focuses on the team of planners responsible for getting the project off the ground.