Ventura County Nearing CSU Approval

Come Wednesday morning, Ventura business leader Carolyn Leavens will hop a tour bus headed to Long Beach in hopes of ending a 30-year campaign to bring a Cal State University campus to Ventura County.

Nearly a year to the day after she and other civic leaders successfully lobbied university trustees to take control of the former Camarillo State Hospital and convert it into a college campus, Leavens will return to ask for their final stamp of approval.

She won’t waste time telling them things they already know--that Ventura County is the largest county in the state without a four-year public institution or that generations of area students have plowed into an educational dead-end for lack of a local university.

Rather, she will simply thank them for their support over the years and for standing ready now to adopt Ventura County into the CSU family.

“This is going to make a difference in how lives are lived, and that’s what we’re all about,” said Leavens, who will join two busloads of civic leaders in Long Beach on Wednesday for what is likely to be a historic decision.

“After all this time, we’re at the last hurdle,” Leavens added. “Once we get past this, we are assured of being part of the team, the 23rd campus in the CSU system. We’re not just a blip on the screen. We are solid substance, and that makes a big difference.”

After a protracted labor spanning more than three decades, CSU trustees are poised for the final push to the birth of a public university in Ventura County.

Two items will be up for consideration Wednesday.

A CSU committee will review an environmental study evaluating the conversion of the shuttered hospital complex into the new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge, the first crucial step toward possibly establishing a free-standing university to be called Cal State Channel Islands.

A second committee will consider formally accepting the hospital property into the CSU family, sealing the relationship between Ventura County and the university system.

The committees will make recommendations to the full 24-member governing board, which will vote on each item. The whole thing, the product of 30 years of struggle and hard work, is expected to be over by noon.

“I think this is a watershed date in the history of this institution in Ventura County,” said Handel Evans, president of the proposed Channel Islands campus. “We’ve done everything we can to make this happen. And if it does, I think it will be the time when we move into a new gear and we begin to think of the actual creation of a university.”

A local state university has been on the drawing board since Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown authorized a study of potential Ventura County sites for the campus.

The state bought 425 acres in Somis for a campus in 1969 but sold the land after seven years. Nearly two decades later, Cal State officials targeted several hundred acres near the beach in Ventura, but opposition from nearby residents thwarted that idea.

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More recently, Cal State planners proposed a campus on a sweeping hillside parcel at Taylor Ranch, but again local opposition forced officials to back away from the plan.

Given that history, university boosters set out this time to whip up community support for the proposal to transform the shuttered psychiatric hospital near Camarillo into a college campus. And Cal State officials say that has made all the difference in the governing board’s support so far.

CSU trustees were so impressed last September by the show of local support for the project--a busload of university boosters were on hand, wearing red-and-white “Yes! CSUCI YES!” buttons--that they delivered a rare standing ovation to the crowd.

“You just don’t see that, at least not in my eight-year history on the board,” said Cal State Trustee Jim Considine, an Ojai rancher and longtime university supporter. “It seemed like everyone really wanted this university to happen this time.”

Last year’s board action stopped short of immediately converting the former hospital into a full-fledged, four-year school.

Instead, Cal State officials agreed that the hospital would first become the new home for the satellite campus of Cal State Northridge, which now holds mostly evening and weekend classes for about 1,600 full- and part-time students.

Under that plan, it will remain an extension of the Northridge campus until it attracts enough enrollment--about 6,000 full- and part-time students--and funding to support itself.

Cal State University trustees put a range of conditions on their approval, chief among them being the governor’s support for state funding of the conversion project.

But over the past year, CSU planners have been able to meet each condition. Gov. Pete Wilson joined state lawmakers in earmarking $16.5 million in this year’s budget to convert the old hospital into a college campus.

Lawmakers also have approved a bill aimed at generating the cash to create a full-fledged university.

The legislation, written by state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), will create a special authority dedicated to managing all financial aspects of the proposed campus. The state Senate and the Assembly have signed off on the bill. It awaits the governor’s signature.

Finally, Cal State officials have completed an environmental study on the conversion project, a document detailing dozens of key issues surrounding the proposed campus. Those issues range from the preservation of historic buildings at the hospital complex to the protection of sensitive wildlife habitat and Native American resources.

In response to environmental concerns, planners have launched an ambitious proposal to make Channel Islands the first “green campus” in the Cal State community, creating nature preserves, swaths of open space and a network of advanced transportation systems to serve the campus.

“We haven’t found anything [in the study] that has really surprised us,” Evans said. “But we have to put this document and our findings up in the sunshine and let everybody see. This is one of those tests for the community and this university. We are obviously going to make some changes; the question is, are they prices the community can pay?”

It’s a question that could be answered Wednesday. Unlike last year’s governing board meeting, it is possible some criticism could be leveled against the project this time.

Specifically, lawyers for the Environmental Defense Center say they may show up to tell trustees about some of the concerns they have about the fledgling campus. Although not opposed to the project as a whole, environmentalists have raised serious questions about the pollution and traffic it will generate.

“I think some of those concerns are going to survive and linger past the trustees’ action,” said John Busse, a lawyer with the environmental advocacy group. “No one really doubts the public benefit of this project. But nobody should be under the illusion that this is not a serious step toward changing the area that the university campus will be located in.”

On the other side, as many as 100 civic leaders plan to board buses Wednesday morning in Oxnard and Camarillo and once again show their support.

Several will speak to the governing board, including Camarillo Mayor Charlotte Craven. She said her goal will be to let trustees know that residents and city leaders want this project, a message especially important in light of early run-ins with CSU planners over the effect it will have on Camarillo.

“I think it’s important they recognize that the people of Camarillo support this university,” she said. “I will tell them it’s going to be good for us and good economically, educationally and culturally.”

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Should the governing board give the project its blessing, there will still be plenty to do.

Workers will immediately start converting four of the Spanish-style buildings on the 630-acre hospital grounds into the dozens of classrooms, laboratories and offices necessary to launch the inaugural phase of the university next September.

At the same time, Cal State officials will push forward with creation of a special authority, the one made possible by O’Connell’s legislation, to serve as landlord for the fledgling campus.

A cross between a redevelopment agency and the type of entity used to revive mothballed military bases, the seven-member authority would be responsible for raising revenues from property and sales taxes, selling bonds and providing tax incentives to lure private and public ventures to the property.