Flawed Assumptions Doomed Taylor Ranch Project

It was to be a college campus destined to rival the most picturesque, a pastoral oceanside bluff from which a student could ponder the majestic islands and shoreline below.

But three months after Taylor Ranch had been selected for what many believed would someday be Ventura County’s first four-year public university, the celebration was cut short.

In a June 3 letter to California State University, the ranch owners stunned local and college officials with the announcement that they were no longer interested in selling a portion of their sprawling, oil-rich property just west of Ventura.

What has emerged in the wake of that disappointment and shock is a story of misguided guesswork and flawed assumptions, a drama in which virtually all the characters have been unwilling or unable to confirm the intentions of their fellow players.

Cynthia Wood, for instance, the Santa Barbara heiress who owns the 30,000-acre ranch, has proven so elusive that no official involved in negotiations has ever met or spoken with her.

Plans Unknown to Mother

Her plans to consider selling a piece of the property remained unknown even to her ailing mother, Ailene B. Claeyssens, who holds the ranch’s mineral rights and immediately objected to the idea when she was told last month.

Although both women later pointed to Shell Oil Co.’s lease as the principal obstacle to the project, Shell officials say they have never viewed a university campus as incompatible with continued oil production on the property.

And Cal State officials, who voted in March to begin negotiations to purchase a 550-acre parcel of the ranch, proceeded full-steam ahead, even though they now concede that messages from Wood’s attorney explaining her intentions were “hard to interpret.”

In fact, the letter from Wood and Claeyssens withdrawing Taylor Ranch from consideration earlier this month was the first direct word that university officials had received from the family since Cal State opened its latest search for a Ventura County campus last fall.

“Lack of communication has crippled this thing,” Ventura City Councilman Richard Francis said.

Last week, in an effort to revive hope for a Taylor Ranch campus, Ventura Mayor Jim Monahan wrote to Wood’s attorney, J. Robert Andrews of Santa Barbara, seeking a face-to-face meeting with members of the family.

Andrews, however, responded that the 51-year-old Wood, who also rejected several requests from The Times to be interviewed, saw “no useful purpose” in such a meeting.

Meanwhile, City Manager John Baker said his own communication via telephone with Andrews June 7 had been more encouraging, but he declined to comment, terming the situation “very, very sensitive.”

In an interview this week, however, Andrews said he had offered little hope to Baker during that conversation. “If he took encouragement, it wasn’t intended,” Andrews said.

All of which is in keeping with the enigmatic shroud that has obscured the ranch’s status during almost every step of Cal State’s site selection process, which is in its third year and threatens to exceed a state-mandated 1990 deadline for acquiring a campus site.

Even the emergence of the ranch as a contender for the campus site was a misunderstanding.

When Cal State first announced plans in 1985 to build a classroom complex for about 2,500 third- and fourth-year students, it was assumed that the scenic hillside property was not for sale, said Everett Millais, community development director for Ventura.

In the fall of 1986, however, after Cal State had begun negotiations to purchase a site near the Ventura Harbor, a deluge of letters and petitions favoring Taylor Ranch prompted city officials to take a second look.

While it was widely “understood” that the ranch was unavailable, “to my knowledge, unfortunately, this ‘understanding’ was never confirmed in writing,” Millais explained in a letter to Wood’s attorney in early 1987.

Andrews responded by saying that Wood had never been contacted about the availability of her ranch and had “not rejected consideration of the proposal as she is reported to have done.”

But, as a review of correspondence on file at City Hall suggests, if the ranch was no longer off-limits, Wood’s interest in selling a parcel was far more tenuous than perhaps most observers realized.

In a carefully worded but noncommittal statement that has been Wood’s position throughout the ordeal, Andrews on Feb. 20, 1987, wrote:

“She is merely indicating her willingness to listen to any interest that may exist and to explore possible ways in which some mutually agreeable arrangement might be made.”

That lukewarm, make-me-an-offer stance remained Wood’s position when Cal State reached an impasse in its negotiations for the Harbor Boulevard property last fall and reopened its search for a site. It was her position in October when the city commissioned a $25,000 engineering study to determine the feasibility of development on the ranch.

And it remained her position in December, when Cal State indicated that the property was the top contender among three possible sites.

One Ventura official said such posturing is not uncommon in big land deals, so the city and Cal State had no reason to believe that Wood was anything less than a willing seller.

Still, on March 7, just two days before the Cal State Board of Trustees voted to begin negotiations with Wood, her attorney wrote a letter to the university warning that Wood’s position “remains the same as expressed over a year ago.”

In addition, Andrews emphasized that “it should be understood that, as of this time, Miss Wood has not made a decision to sell her property, and it would be incorrect and inaccurate to assume that she has.”

Asked what Cal State officials made of that letter, Deputy Provost Jack Smart conceded that “it was hard to interpret exactly what it meant, even today in retrospect.

“I guess we were guided primarily by the original offer, which was an indication of a willingness to consider a sale,” Smart said. The March 7 letter “obviously was a cautionary note . . . but the cautionary note was not a withdrawing of the property.”

Three months later, that is exactly what occurred. Why Wood and Claeyssens finally told Smart to “direct your efforts elsewhere” may never be known, since all parties involved have contradictory accounts of the decision.

According to Wood’s attorney, the key obstacle to development of a campus was Shell Oil, which has leased mineral rights from the family since 1911.

The petroleum conglomerate expressed fears that having a campus so close to the site of current or future oil production could pose technical difficulties, liability problems and the threat of vandalism, Andrews said.

“They have been very clear in their message to these ladies that there is real cause for concern,” he said.

But Shell officials, who say they do not know what mineral deposits lie near or under the proposed campus site, denied that the company had ever ruled out the possibility of peaceful coexistence.

“It can be an accommodating relationship,” said Jimmy Fox, a Shell spokesman at the firm’s regional headquarters in Bakersfield. “We’ve never seen ourselves as having a role in saying whether or not the negotiations could or could not proceed.”

Meanwhile, Pierre Claeyssens, Wood’s stepfather, attributed the turnabout to his 82-year-old wife, who had not learned of the university plans until her daughter told her last month.

Claeyssens, a licensed architect who himself wrote a letter to Cal State objecting to the site because of engineering constraints, said his wife was opposed to any development on the ranch.

“Mrs. Claeyssens wants to keep the ranch as it has been since the turn of the century,” he said. “She was angry to learn of this. . . . We were in the dark.”

Whatever the explanation, both Cal State and Ventura officials were shocked by the turnabout.

While they declined to speculate whether more direct communication would have spared them the disappointment, Monahan at least remains hopeful that personal contact is the key to resurrecting negotiations.

“We’d really like the opportunity to talk to these people face-to-face,” the mayor said. “We want to make sure we’re getting the message across the way it’s intended to be.”

But Andrews, when asked whether Wood and Claeyssens might reconsider their position, said too many concerns had been brought to their attention to merit a change of heart.

“Anything’s possible,” he said. “But I doubt it.”