Delay of Campus Funding Urged

State budget analysts are recommending that funding for the conversion of Camarillo State Hospital into a university be delayed pending further study, including a look at whether it would be more cost-effective to build the campus from scratch.

The recommendation, made Wednesday by the legislative analyst’s office, comes after a review of Gov. Pete Wilson’s upcoming budget, which earmarked $16.5 million to transform the hospital into Ventura County’s first four-year public university.

The Legislature’s fiscal analysts want to put the funding on hold for a year to review long-term costs and benefits of the conversion.

However, legislators and university officials said Wednesday that they are confident that they will be able to safeguard the money and that the project will move forward without delay.

“Their recommendation is short-sighted, misguided, irrational and wrong,” said state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), who has long fought to establish a public university in Ventura County.

O’Connell is chairman of the Senate’s education subcommittee, where the analysts will make their pitch to slash the money from the budget.

“I’ve already told them that they were wrong and I told them that they would not be listened to,” O’Connell said. “I think this will fall, with all due respect, on deaf ears.”

But state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), who also sits on the subcommittee, said analysts have raised good questions, expressing some of the same concerns that she has had about the project.

“I don’t think the project will fall through, but these questions need to be answered,” she said. “It’s a hard-hitting recommendation, but this is a project that has to be sold and you have to have facts to sell it.”

Ending a 30-year wait, the 24-member Cal State governing board agreed in September to take control of the shuttered mental hospital and convert it into the new home of the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge.

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, to be called Cal State Channel Islands.

The proposal received its biggest boost last month when Wilson unveiled his spending package for fiscal year 1998-99 that included $16.5 million to operate the university and turn a number of the hospital’s Spanish-style buildings into classrooms and administrative offices.

In its annual review of the governor’s spending plan, the legislative analyst zeroed in on the conversion money.

Specifically, analysts want to cut $11.3 million set aside for renovation and capital construction, and $5.2 million for technology, maintenance and other support services.

Analysts were most concerned about the increased costs of operating the off-campus center at the old hospital site, noting that the Cal State system would have to pick up the tab for maintaining the entire facility while only needing to use a portion of it.

Moreover, the analysts said they wanted to revisit an earlier proposal to build the university from the ground up on a 60-acre lemon orchard near Camarillo that is owned by the Cal State University system.

While university officials expected budget analysts to scrutinize the conversion project, they said they were surprised by that part of the recommendation.

After all, the decision to convert the hospital into a college campus came after months of study, headed by a communitywide task force. In fact, a fiscal analysis revealed that renovation would come at a fraction of the cost of building the campus from scratch.

“I don’t think it would be good public policy to board up that facility and start building a new university down the street,” said Richard West, senior vice chancellor for the Cal State system. “We will make our case for supporting the conversion, and I would be very surprised if this project is in jeopardy for this reason.”

Indeed, Cal State officials are scrambling to make that case. They will meet with state analysts in coming weeks to review the concerns and prepare a response in time for budget hearings, scheduled to begin later this month.

“I think this is an easy project to question because it’s new and it’s pushing the envelope,” said Handel Evans, president of the budding campus. “It’s being questioned and I think there will be a lot more questions, but I don’t believe they will be enough to sink this project.”