Budget Cuts Not Expected to Slow Plans for CSUCI

Budget cuts ordered last week for Cal State University campuses are likely to have little effect on the developing university near Camarillo, with school President Richard Rush vowing to open Cal State Channel Islands on schedule next fall.

Rush said he will dip into budgeted reserves to make the 1% reduction that CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed called for because of the state’s troubled economy.

The budget cuts will cost Cal State Channel Islands about $200,000 of its $20-million budget for this fiscal year.

But Rush said the chancellor made a point of telling him to hire the faculty necessary to open the campus for the fall semester of 2002.

The university already has hired 13 faculty members and plans to recruit 25 more in time for the opening.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a huge blow, but it’s a blow, sure,” Rush said. “Obviously we’d rather be receiving that money than giving it back. But we’ll have enough resources to do what we need to do this year.”

Addressing trustees and university presidents during a meeting at Cal State headquarters in Long Beach, Reed warned that the system’s 23 campuses could be in for hard times as the state’s economic crisis deepens.

Gov. Gray Davis recently asked all state agencies to prepare for cuts of up to 15% in next year’s budgets.

Rush said it’s too soon to tell how that might play out at the Channel Islands campus, which is under development at the former Camarillo State Hospital site.

Nor is there any way of telling what the struggling economy might mean to the university’s efforts to attract commercial ventures as a way of helping the campus expand.

The CSU governing board has made it clear that the Ventura County campus will expand only if it can generate the cash needed to make that happen. Toward that end, planners have been devising ways to create a commercial hub and other money-making ventures to help the college pay its way.

However, the university recently lost two tenants, including CALSTART, the Burbank-based transportation technology consortium which became the campus’ first tenant in 1998.

CALSTART officials said their hopes of being a magnet for other transportation technology companies never materialized. The consortium’s lease expires at the end of the month.

“We had not been able to attract enough companies to help cover our costs prior to the economic slowdown,” CALSTART President John Boesel said. “Once the economy started to slow down, we just thought our job would be even tougher.”

Cal State officials say that as they have geared up to launch the campus they have not been able to pay as much attention as they would have liked to the commercial campaign.

But they say other parts of that effort are on target, including construction of the first 200 units of faculty and staff housing on the east end of the campus. The first units are expected to be ready this spring. And the entire project is scheduled for completion next fall.

“Of course the economy is a concern, because it might impact people’s ability to help us to the degree they had intended,” Rush said. “But I’m also convinced that the people in this region have waited for a university for 30 years. They are wonderfully supportive, and I know they’ll do whatever they can to help us.”