Blending Hospital’s Historic Past With Ambitious Academic Future

CAMARILLO —  From the moment she drove onto the property, Carol Roland liked the look of Camarillo State Hospital.

The giant bell tower, the curve of the arches that grace the Spanish-style buildings anchoring the historic core delighted Roland, program coordinator for the state Office of Historic Preservation.

She was especially wild about the intimate details of design, lingering over a level of workmanship still breathtaking more than 60 years after the hospital opened and nearly a year after it was shut down with an eye toward conversion to a Cal State campus.

This place could easily become a university, she thought. But it is also an architectural treasure, the kind of place worthy of preservation and serious state protection.

“It’s a wonderful, wonderful facility,” said Roland, who as part of an ongoing environmental review of the conversion project is helping bridge the hospital’s historic past with its ambitious future.

“It really has tremendous potential, and I think it can be a real landmark,” she said. “Fortunately, they seem to be behaving themselves. They seem to be quite sensitive to the values that are there, and they really have made an effort to understand the process and comply with it.”

As the push to deliver a four-year college to Ventura County shifts into high gear, Cal State planners have entered a crucial phase of the effort to convert the shuttered mental hospital into a 15,000-student university.

With less than 10 months to go before the new campus is scheduled to open, planners have launched an environmental review designed to guide the hospital’s transformation and unearth any fatal flaws that might be lurking in the process.

The first public meeting on the environmental study will be held Monday at the old hospital site.

In coming weeks, armies of consultants and others will scour the proposal and visit the budding campus, delving into issues that range from preserving historic buildings to ensuring that sensitive Native American sites go undisturbed.

Other key issues will drift into focus, including a hard look at the levels of pollution and traffic the proposed campus will generate, as well as related development that could gobble up surrounding farmland.

Ultimately, the environmental review will serve to bolster the campus master plan, a blueprint for development aimed at guiding creation of a range of money-making ventures being proposed for the site.

Those ventures are needed so the campus--to begin as the new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge--can afford to expand into a full-fledged university, to be called Cal State Channel Islands.

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The birth of a university is no easy thing. And while the campus enjoys plenty of public support, Cal State planners caution it is by no means a done deal.

Each step in the environmental review process is important, they say. And each has the potential to stop the project in its tracks.

“We’re in a position where the trustees will not accept a property that has a significant amount of environmental issues connected to it,” said Noel Grogan, project manager for the developing campus.

“Every time someone raises an objection that looks likes it’s meaningful at all, we have really tried hard to address that issue and eliminate it up front,” he said. “There are always things that can turn up down the road, but we’re trying to be as responsive as possible.”

And with good reason. Ventura County has waited more than 30 years for a university of its own. And in the past, environmental battles have helped sink proposals to establish a local Cal State campus.

Even today, some environmentalists worry that the county’s zeal to plant the flag for a Cal State campus may overshadow many of the small yet important details of the environmental review process.

“Even among those of us who might have pretty serious concerns about this, you really have to ponder a second before you throw yourself out in front of this,” said Al Sanders, conservation chairman of the Los Padres chapter of the Sierra Club.

“It’s to the point where even moderating opinions will be taken out of context,” he said. “People will claim you’re against education, mom, country and apple pie.”

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Added Mike Stubblefield, an El Rio resident who reviews air quality issues for a local Sierra Club chapter: “The environmental community has been strangely quiet on this matter. This is going to be a compromise. On one hand, we’re going to get culture, job training and higher learning. But no one really seems to be looking at the dark underside of what we’re going to get.”

If there is a dark underside, it will most likely be dragged into the light during this review process.

Chief among the concerns raised so far is how to expand and improve local roadways to handle traffic going to and from the university. There is also concern that university projects might prompt a corridor of construction--fast-food outlets and strip malls--stretching from the campus to the Camarillo city limits.

Several institutional projects already dot the cropland along rural Lewis Road, including the Los Posada halfway house for the mentally ill and the Casa Pacifica home for abused children. Ventura County also plans to develop a 16,000-seat amphitheater and golf course north of the university site.

Environmentalists and others fear growth will spin off itself as roads are widened and water lines expanded to meet the needs of development.

“We want the college, we just don’t want all the bad things that go with that,” said 80-year-old Camarillo resident Bill Torrence, president of the Ventura County League of Homeowners and a leader of the effort to adopt a countywide initiative to stop development on farmland.

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“As far as I can see, the university itself won’t create any big problems,” he said. “But I’d like to see some good planning go into this. If they start using up agricultural land, we will fight them right down to the last dog.”

Well aware of such concerns, university planners say they have been hard at work addressing those issues.

While it is still unknown how much traffic will be generated by the university, planners say some money already has been earmarked for roadway improvements leading up the campus.

So far, more than $20 million has been set aside by the county for a new interchange to be built at Lewis Road and the Ventura Freeway in 2001. Another $4 million has been allocated to begin a $12-million road-widening project to the university.

To help ease traffic congestion, planners say they intend to build about 900 dormitory units, reducing the number of commuters to the campus. They also plan to improve bus service to the facility, perhaps operating their own shuttle line.

Along that same vein, Cal State officials say they are trying to attract as many commercial services as possible to tend to senior citizens expected to flock to a proposed elder-care facility on the outskirts of the campus. Those services--which could include a restaurant and convenience store--also would serve faculty and staff members expected to occupy 700 to 900 units of housing proposed for the campus.

“The whole goal is to reduce to an absolute minimum automobile traffic on the site,” project manager Grogan said. “We’ve tried to look at the campus in every way possible as a self-contained entity that does not drive people off the property for services.”

As the planning process barrels forward, other environmental concerns will be addressed.

To help protect and preserve sensitive Native American resources on the 630-acre hospital property, Camarillo State Hospital employee Raudel Banuelos has been hired to help archeologists document those sites, including a Chumash village, rock art and a shrine.

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A member of the Chumash nation, Banuelos said university planners have been bending over backward to ensure that sensitive areas are left undisturbed in the conversion project.

“I’m the type of person who wants to make sure everything is done in the right way,” said Banuelos, who has done similar work on Santa Cruz Island. “They support that, and I’m confident these areas will be protected.”

Farmland preservationist Peter Brand holds that same degree of confidence. A project manager with the California Coastal Conservancy and a leader in efforts to save the Calleguas Creek watershed from man and nature, Brand has found the university diligent in its planning efforts.

“We think they are going to be a really good neighbor down there,” Brand said. “They’re trying to look ahead to the future to all the facility’s needs. They’re trying to anticipate those and study them in their EIR.”

Perhaps that is what is most heartening to environmental activists, who have clashed with the Cal State system in the past over the local campus.

Russ Baggerly, president of Citizens to Preserve the Ojai and a board member of the Environmental Coalition, remembers the battles to place a Cal State campus at Taylor Ranch in Ventura.

Baggerly said it appears Cal State planners are doing what they can to address issues as they arise. And he believes that in the long run past battles have served to provide Ventura County with a better site for a university.

“They’ve got their site, they’ve got their buildings, all they’ve got to do is put together their plan and address the environmental issues as best they can,” he said. “This is going to happen, it’s just a question of what form it takes and what follows in its wake.”

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FYI

Cal State University officials Monday will hold an open house and public meeting on plans to convert Camarillo State Hospital into a college campus. The open house starts at 4:30 p.m. at the state hospital complex, 1878 S. Lewis Road. The public meeting is set for 6:30 p.m.

About This Series

As the push to deliver a four-year college to Ventura County shifts into high gear, Cal State University planners have launched an environmental study to convert Camarillo State Hospital into a college campus. “Birth of a University: Countdown to a Cal State Campus,” is an occasional series chronicling the development of the campus. This installment focuses on some of the environmental issues under review as the university moves toward completion.