Three years ago, officials with the Ventura County Community College District were in talks to buy property at the east end of Santa Paula for a new college campus.
That property, owned by the agricultural company Limoneira, is now fallow farmland, no closer to being a college campus than it was in 2023. But it’s still for sale, and the district is now taking the first steps down a road that could lead it to a satellite campus there or elsewhere.
The college district’s board of trustees met Aug. 21 at the Museum of Ventura County Agricultural Museum in Santa Paula. The only item on the agenda was a discussion of the district’s plans for Santa Paula, Fillmore and the rest of the Santa Clara River Valley.
This property at the east end of Santa Paula is owned by Limoneira. The agricultural company wants to sell it to the Ventura County Community College District for a new satellite campus, but college leaders say they’re not ready to take that step yet.
The board didn’t take a formal vote, but at the end of the meeting, the trustees agreed that the district will conduct or commission a study on the feasibility of buying property in Santa Paula for a new campus.
That might mean the Limoneira property or could be another piece of land. Limoneira’s property is about 20 acres, located just south of Highway 126 and east of Hallock Drive, near the new Harvest at Limoneira residential development. The company has offered to sell 8 to 10 acres of it to the college district, for about $1 million per acre.
“We know there’s a property available to us for $8 million or $10 million, but we need to look at building a building, and if you know anything about building schools, that’s a $100 million proposition,” said Trustee Lou Lichtl. “When the time is right, I want to cut that ribbon on that land and that property and that building … but we have a lot of work to do.”
Not enough students for a Santa Paula satellite campus yet
In the meantime, the district is expanding its current operations in Santa Paula, where it rents space just off the freeway on the west end of town. The 2,800-square-foot expansion underway now will add a classroom and two science labs to the Ventura College East Campus, bringing the facility to seven classrooms and two labs, along with offices, a student lounge and other spaces for students to study and get college services.
The East Campus budget has more than tripled over the past four years, from $1.5 million in the 2021-22 school year to $4.7 million this year.
Enrollment is growing, too. The equivalent of 419 full-time students now attend in-person, online or hybrid classes that are based out of the East Campus in Santa Paula, up from 72 four years ago.
It’s still not enough for a true satellite campus, though. To be certified as a “learning center” by the California Community College Chancellor’s Office, a site needs to reach 500 full-time equivalent students and sustain that for a year, and it must also show a “demonstrated ability” to serve at least 1,000 students, said Rick MacLennan, the Ventura County Community College District’s chancellor.
“We’re on our way, but we’re not there yet,” MacLennan said. “We will be evaluated very carefully by the state chancellor’s office, and we have to have all our ducks in a row.”
If the Ventura College satellite campus in Santa Paula does get that “learning center” status, it would come with state funding of about $2.3 million a year, MacLennan said.
How did the college district get here?
The Santa Clara River Valley has been waiting for a community college campus since 2002, and the Limoneira property has been discussed as its possible home for that long, too.
That year, Ventura County voters approved a $356 million bond measure for the college district, and a satellite campus in Santa Paula was on the list of projects it was supposed to pay for. But the promises a government agency makes when it asks voters to approve a bond measure aren’t binding, and within a few years the district had abandoned its plan for a Santa Paula campus, citing rising construction costs and dwindling bond funds.
Residents of Santa Paula, Fillmore and the surrounding areas see this as a betrayal.
“I’ve watched generations of young people in my city grow up full of potential, but without access to the opportunity they deserve,” said Jose Garcia, a Santa Paula native and a union organizer. “It’s not because they didn’t try. It’s because the opportunities just aren’t there.”
Santa Paula Mayor Pedro Chavez said the city’s residents are “strong, we are patient, but we’re also angry and frustrated.”
“We need leadership, and we need vision,” he said. “That land might not be available in the future. … We need to make these decisions now for future generations.”
College district leaders say improving services in the Santa Clara River Valley is now among their top priorities.
“We can’t rectify a problem that was created by the board 20 years ago overnight,” said Trustee Joe Piechowski. “As much as that board should have spent that money the way they promised to spend that money, they didn’t do that. None of us were on the board of trustees at that time, and while we have inherited that board’s problems, none of us here are responsible for that problem.”
The Limoneira property at the east end of Santa Paula is also the planned site of a new county hospital, though that project has stalled, too. The new Santa Paula Hospital would go on the northern portion of the property, closer to Highway 126, with the college campus on the southern end.
In 2021, the county said it planned to build a new hospital on that site, with a developer lined up to buy the land from Limoneira. But that hasn’t happened yet, and last year county leaders said the plan was still being analyzed.
“I really want that area to work,” Limoneira CEO Harold Edwards said two days before the college district’s board meeting in Santa Paula. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you had a medical office building and eventually a hospital and a college campus, so the whole thing felt like it was a campus? There would be all kinds of opportunities to collaborate between the community college and the health care industry.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: College district will study plan for new Santa Paula campus