CSU CAMPUS PLAN FOR CAMARILLO SPURS DEBATE.

Byline: Christopher Noxon Daily News Staff Writer

Plans for a housing and commercial complex on the grounds of a long-awaited Ventura County campus of California State University were met Wednesday with excitement, bewilderment and some outright opposition.

University regents introduced a preliminary plan Tuesday that calls for Camarillo State Hospital to be converted for mixed uses that would include an 80-acre retirement community, a business park and a magnet school in addition to the four-year university.

Regents said an aggressive leasing program to generate cash is the only way the state can afford to renovate the 60-year-old hospital to house California State University, Channel Islands.

``We just can't let that land sit fallow, because we need that revenue stream,'' Mary Stephens, executive project manager for the developing CSU Channel Islands campus, told the trustees.

But some local officials said they believe the plan includes too much mixed use and not enough of a university campus. Ventura County Supervisor John Flynn, who had proposed that a portion of the hospital remain open for patients whose families live nearby, said the county ``deserves a proper university, not another housing development.''

``It looks like the university will be lost beneath all the other development,'' Flynn said.

State Sen. Cathie Wright, who served on the governor's task force assigned to recommend the future use for the hospital, said Wednesday that she believes the university would come at too high a cost.

``I feel they have lied to the people of Ventura County,'' Wright said. ``They talked about a virtual university that would take us into the 21st century. What we've got is a big housing project.''

With the campus planned to take up less than one-third of the hospital's 1.2 million square feet, leasing and development would be key sources of revenue, said CSUCI President J. Handel Evans.

Capital costs alone would run about $45 million to convert the hospital into a CSU campus. Preliminary figures show leases could generate $6.2 million by 2005 to help offset those costs, said Richard West, senior vice chancellor for business and finance.

The remaining funding would come from a combination of sources, namely the state, the university system and three $10 million bonds.

Regents voted to allocate $1 million toward project planning. Evans was given until September to convince the board that his plan is economically viable.

The master plan envisions the hospital's south quad area as the heart of the university and calls for surrounding buildings to be leased to high-tech firms and other businesses interested in sharing university space. Some of the leases would be short-term.

Evans said he expects to move the Ventura Center of California State University, Northridge, and its 1,500 students into the renovated south quad by January 1999. By 2005, CSUCI would be up and running with 3,250 full-time equivalent students, he said.