Public’s Input Sought on Plans for CSUCI Campus

CAMARILLO —  During an inspection of Ventura County’s budding Cal State campus, Rita Mills was the first to admit that she had no planning expertise. Nor did she know the first thing about traffic studies or archeological exploration.

To Mills, a Ventura County newcomer who on Monday joined about 400 other residents eager to learn more about efforts to turn the former Camarillo State Hospital into a college campus, those are back-burner issues compared to the drive to deliver a public university to the area.

“I’m sure that other people will look out for me and the rest of us in making sure nothing is done to put us in jeopardy,” said Mills, stepping up to the microphone before an enthusiastic crowd gathered to learn about an ongoing environmental review of the conversion project.

“I don’t want us to get so involved in this process,” she said, “that we overlook what the university brings to us, how it will enrich our lives.”

With less than 10 months to go before the new campus is scheduled to open, university planners are in the midst of an environmental study designed to guide the hospital’s transformation and unearth any fatal flaws in the planning process.

To that end, planners are seeking as much public input as they can get and threw open the doors Monday afternoon for self-guided tours of the developing campus, to be called Cal State Channel Islands.

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That was followed by a public meeting in an old hospital chapel destined to become a massive lecture hall.

“This represents a very important meeting,” Channel Islands President Handel Evans told the crowd. “For 30 years you have been waiting for a public university in this area. We are now at a point where we have the best chance we have ever had to have a campus in Ventura County.”

Ending the county’s decades-long wait, Cal State trustees agreed last year to take control of the shuttered mental hospital and convert it into a college campus. That was followed by Gov. Pete Wilson’s commitment earlier this year to spend $16.7 million on the conversion effort.

If that money survives budget hearings, Cal State officials this summer will start transforming the old 630-acre hospital site into the new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge, the first crucial step toward establishing a four-year college at the site within the next decade.

Under that plan, the satellite campus will remain an extension of the Northridge university until it attracts enough students and funding to support itself and become the university system’s 23rd campus.

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Not only must planners transform the aging institution into a modern-day campus, but they must also find ways to help generate the cash needed to eventually expand it into a full-fledged university.

They are working out plans to create a commercial hub on the campus and establish a range of other money-making ventures to help the college pay its own way.

University planners said Monday it is the first time ever that a developing Cal State campus has been forced to contend with such a pay-as-you-go reality.

“What you are taking part in tonight is really a very, very innovative way of constructing a university,” Evans said. “This has never been done before.”

In laying out the environmental review process, planners talked Monday about all the areas of study, including issues such as traffic, air quality and historic preservation.

Planners will dig into those and related issues in coming months, hoping to have the final environmental review document ready for the consideration of Cal State trustees in July.

For now, plans call for four of the Spanish-style buildings at the shuttered hospital complex to undergo renovation to yield the dozens of classrooms, laboratories and offices necessary to launch the inaugural phase of the university in January.

Thirty-year Camarillo resident Robert Cole told planners he was worried that the university would prompt a corridor of construction nearby, perhaps even gobbling up valuable farmland.

“It would just be helpful for us to know to what extent can we expect the university to induce growth,” he said, “especially along the corridors leading to the university.”

Some residents didn’t stay around long enough for the evening meeting, showing up Monday afternoon simply to take a good look at the place on its way to becoming a college campus.

“It looks like a campus already; all they need to do is get the students here,” said Harold Wilson of Camarillo. “I think the only comment most of the local people will have is, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ ”

Taking the self-guided tour before going to the public meeting, Rita Mills said she saw great potential for a university.

“I feel very strongly there’s a need to have this university in the county,” she said. “It has been so long in coming. It’s definitely long overdue.”