Tune Up Financial Engine

It is truly a sad era when parks and public universities need to think in terms of paying their own way. But that is the challenge facing the founders of Cal State Channel Islands, and the reason for the extensive commercial development proposed for the area surrounding the Camarillo campus.

We regret that government thinks it has better things to do with our money than underwrite this institution of higher learning on which future generations of Ventura County residents will depend. It is important that the necessary income property remain focused on the central mission of the university: education.

Cal State officials are proposing to build a self-contained community around the campus. This strategy is designed to sustain both the university and the people who will live, work and go to school there.

The plan includes a sprawling community of 900 houses punctuated by bicycle paths, parks and pools. It would have a child-care center, a kindergarten through eighth-grade school and a bed-and-breakfast retreat for academic-related uses. There would be space for corporate research and development labs and a “town square” with restaurants, shops and perhaps a theater.

CSUCI President Handel Evans describes all that development as “the financial engine for the capital program needed to build the university,” expected to generate the $307 million cost of launching the university over 25 years.

Next, county planners will take these concepts and refine them into a detailed development plan for review by the county’s Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors and at a series of public hearings.

Ventura County has been clamoring for a four-year public university for more than three decades, but a series of setbacks delayed those plans. Cal State trustees finally agreed last year to start one at the old Camarillo State Hospital complex--but only if university planners generated most of the money. By finding ways to finance campus construction, Ventura County will get its public university years earlier than if trustees had decided to take the more traditional route.

There is a danger of the university being used as a Trojan horse to open the way for residential development in a largely agricultural corner of a county where voters have clearly dictated slow growth. Indeed, the initial proposal included a golf course, a conference center and a sprawling retirement complex on the outskirts of the campus.

We support efforts to refine the plan to bring the income-producing components more in tune with the educational mission of the university. If housing is geared toward students and faculty and other facilities are focused on academic pursuits, these commercial ventures will be easier to accept.