Interactive Science Center Envisioned

In a small office in the center of town, a grand experiment is underway.

The working hypothesis: that family-friendly Ventura County will support a $70-million, cutting-edge science and technology center for its youth.

“There’s no question; this is doable,” said Kathleen M. Wiltsey, who heads the board for the Ventura County Discovery Center, a 110,000-square-foot facility planned next to the Civic Arts Plaza on Thousand Oaks Boulevard. “And it is going to happen.”

Over the last few months, a high-powered group--including Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, current and former Amgen executives and developer Daniel Selleck--has solidified its vision for the project, designed to help create a “downtown” for the county’s second-largest city and a regional attraction for the area.

The group envisions a spectacular building of breathtaking architectural design, punctuated with water, light and energy.

Also planned is an Imax theater, where project proponents say vivid images several stories high will take the viewer from the blustery top of Mt. Everest to the colorful depths of the Pacific.

And, they add, there will be continuous learning, as perplexing science and math concepts are easily explained via innovative games, art projects and interactive presentations.

But to prove their theory, project supporters need money--lots of it. The supporters say the cash will come not only from individual donors, but from the burgeoning high-tech and biomedical industries along the Ventura Freeway technology corridor that would benefit from a larger public understanding of science.

“Interesting kids in science gives local biotech companies a source of new employees,” said Gary Elliott, an associate scientist at Amgen.

The youth science center would be a valuable educational resource that, supporters maintain, could become the largest cultural draw between the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

“I think it will encourage a love of learning, a love of science, and create a place where children could go to stay out of trouble,” said Bradbury, who added that his philanthropic and community service work always focuses on Ventura County youth. “For all of those reasons, it’s something I wanted to help with in any way I could.”

Invitations have gone out to dozens of political and community leaders from Santa Barbara to Calabasas to preview the group’s ideas at a reception next week being hosted by Bradbury and the board at The Oaks mall. At the same time, the group’s well-established outreach programs will be showcased in the mall’s courtyard.

Both events are intended to build momentum that supporters hope will continue even after the first bricks are laid.

The Discovery Center has been a dream of local leaders for nearly seven years. Although the basic vision for a hands-on science learning center has always been in place, the concept has evolved.

The museum is now part of an ambitious redevelopment project that includes a $40-million retail, office and entertainment complex by shopping center developer Rick J. Caruso.

The Discovery Center would be the component dedicated to the community’s young people.

The project would be built in phases, the first with a 10,000-square-foot Imax theater, a lobby, gift shop, 4,000-square-foot exhibition gallery and an outdoor science park. The price tag: $25 million.

The giant-screen theater is expected to be crucial to the science museum’s annual revenue stream, the reason it’s being built first. The special projection equipment already has been leased and is in a warehouse in Long Beach to maintain the city’s exclusive rights for this area, Wiltsey said.

But the Imax has its critics--among them Thousand Oaks Councilwoman Linda Parks--who say the theater company’s recent financial woes make it a bad choice for the Civic Arts Plaza site.

“I have some concerns, but I’m wishing them the best and hoping the plan, as they see it, will come to fruition,” Parks said.

Mayor Dan Del Campo, however, said only stand-alone Imax theaters are struggling, not those that complement science and technology museums.

The project’s second phase would feature more than 40,000 square feet of exhibit space, a cafe, offices, workshop space, learning labs and a teacher-training center. Some of the exhibition space would be used for nationally touring exhibits, which often are tied to Imax film subjects, such as ancient Egypt and planet biodiversity.

The Discovery Center board already has partnered with California NanoSystems Institute, a fledgling research and development project coordinated by UC Santa Barbara and UCLA, which in December received a $100-million start-up grant from the state.

The institute plans to establish permanent exhibits at the Discovery Center to educate the public about its work, which focuses on science at the atomic level, said Evelyn Hu, co-director of the institute and a UC Santa Barbara professor.

Wiltsey said the institute’s decision to choose Ventura County is a major boost for the project.

“You can have a beautiful building to which no one comes,” Wiltsey said. “We must have the right programming.”

And the center’s “museum without walls”--traveling programs run by more than 300 volunteers at the Civic Arts Plaza and in local schools--is proof the group knows what it’s doing, supporters say.

Jeanne Bauer, director of volunteer resources, said the programs on Feb. 8-11 will help kick off a corporate outreach initiative that will bring the traveling hands-on activities inside companies for employees and their children.

Fund-Raising Offers the Biggest Hurdle

As with any nonprofit endeavor, the big hurdle is money. No single benefactor or government agency has stepped in to underwrite costs, therefore the money will have to come from a variety of public and private sources.

The project’s price tag has climbed to a daunting $70 million, while cash contributions to date total less than $2 million.

But such has been the fund-raising experience of many similar-sized centers nationwide, said Ellen Griffee, spokeswoman for the Assn. of Science-Technology Centers in Washington.

“The majority of them take a good 10 years to get going,” she said. “In a sense, you have to sell it to the community leadership without having something to show them. It is very tough.”

Last year, the Discovery Center organization hired its first paid director, Mary Anne Porter, who came from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History Foundation in Albuquerque.

Porter has brought on an administrative assistant and consultants, including architects, planners and fund-raising guru Rebecca Rutledge of Santa Barbara. The group has a business plan and a financial oversight committee.

More than $9 million in assets have been secured, including commitments from the city, nonmonetary contributions, private pledges and corporate sponsorships, Rutledge said.

Companies that have supported the effort in the past--Amgen, Conexant, NetZero, Boeing and AT & T Wireless--are expected to continue, Rutledge said.

Last week, the Thousand Oaks City Council agreed to speed payments of a previously promised $1 million in matching funds. The museum will get $250,000 now rather than in June and additional payments in $50,000 increments as matching funds are raised.

“We want to take the momentum we’ve built and take it to a higher level,” Porter said.

In the world of nonprofit fund-raising, there are specific stages and milestones in achieving a large goal, Rutledge said. The Discovery Center is in the “leadership stage,” she said, which will culminate when a major gift is announced. That may be in coming months. A $5-million contribution, for instance, would allow a donor to name the Imax theater, Rutledge said.

“I have every confidence that the funding will come very soon,” she said. “The project is such a natural for the area and the people who live here.”

Kansas Center a Role Model

A science center to which the Thousand Oaks project is looking for inspiration, particularly in terms of architecture, is Exploration Place in Wichita, Kan. The 98,000-square-foot, $62-million facility opened in April and has already exceeded expectations in attendance and revenue, said Al DeSena, the center’s president.

“These institutions can be, when done well, extremely important to the life of the community,” he said.

There are 341 interactive science centers in the U.S., and the Ventura County Discovery Center would rank near the middle in terms of size and scope, Griffee of the national association said.

One of the largest such facilities is about an hour away from Thousand Oaks at the California Science Center in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park. Another hour south of that, in Santa Ana, is a center that even has a similar name--the Discovery Science Center. But Wiltsey said there’s no doubt Ventura County can support its own youth science museum.

City officials agree.

“We are going to draw people from miles around the city,” Mayor Del Campo said.

Building science centers outside major cities is a growing nationwide trend, Griffee said.

“What we’re finding today is much smaller communities are acknowledging that they need these places too,” she said.

Going a step further, the Ventura County center seeks to make its museum a monthly--even weekly--attraction for local students, board member Kenneth Bauer of Newbury Park said. The idea is to create fee-based youth clubs and camps to help sustain the center financially while enhancing science curriculum taught in schools.

“The way kids learn is by doing and interacting,” said Wiltsey, a retired chemical engineer, whose father was a science teacher.

Consequently, the center is strongly supported by the education community.

Longtime supporter Craig Fox, an eighth-grade science teacher at Redwood Middle School in Thousand Oaks, knows how difficult it is to teach concepts such as the Bernoulli Effect--a theory of aeronautics--by simply writing it on the chalkboard.

Exhibits that Fox is helping to develop could, for instance, demonstrate how air pressure can lift something as heavy as a bowling ball, helping students understand how airplanes work.

“I think everybody’s going to get a better understanding of how the world around us works,” county schools Supt. Chuck Weis said. “I really see it as an opportunity to make everyone in Ventura County smarter about science.”