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Cal Poly in Kern County?
Board of trade hopes to present three area sites to Cal State trustees for future polytechnic university
| Friday, Jan 19 2007 10:20 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Jan 19 2007 10:25 PM
Kern County could be home to a California Polytechnic State University in 10 to 20 years if a local group gets its way.
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The Antelope Valley Board of Trade hopes to eventually present California State University trustees with three possible sites for a university. All three sites are in Kern County.
One is on Edwards Air Force Base, another is about three miles northeast of Mojave Airport and the third would consist of patches of land from the Bureau of Land Management scattered between Ridgecrest and California City.
All the sites must be donated to the CSU. So far, Bob Johnstone, chairman of the board of trade's education committee, said the board has received verbal and written commitments that the land will be donated. Ultimately it will be up to the CSU trustees and/or chancellor whether to build another school in Kern County, said CSU spokesman Paul Browning.
Browning said CSU has no plans as of now to build new schools though it's open to looking at proposals for land.
The state already has 23 CSU campuses, including Cal State Bakersfield. But board of trade members believe a polytechnic school is greatly needed to help fill local jobs in engineering and technical fields. Polytechnic schools specialize in engineering.
"If you take your local students that are born and raised in the desert and give them an education locally they will stay in the valley and provide a work force," Johnstone said. "People who come in from outside areas don't like the desert and won't stay."
Board of trade members are tentatively referring to the possible school as Cal Poly High Desert.
Antelope Valley already has a Cal State Bakersfield satellite campus with about 900 full- and part-time students. But many say that campus does not offer enough engineering instruction to meet the needs of area industries looking for employees. The campus offers some engineering classes through a partnership with Fresno State but has limited lab space, said John Hultsman, associate vice president for CSUB and director of the Antelope Valley Center.
"There's really a need for engineering programs," Hultsman said.
Hultsman said he'd be surprised if the Antelope Valley campus stayed open with a polytechnic university in town. But he said he wouldn't likely see it as competition for CSUB. Instead, he'd see a polytechnic school as a complement to CSUB, which doesn't offer all the engineering programs a polytechnic university would.
Johnstone said the board of trade hopes to have a master plan for its proposal finished by March. He said local elected officials will then form a joint powers authority to take the plan to CSU trustees.
Johnstone said the group is especially happy to have the site near the Mojave Airport as a possible location. The East Kern Airport District board of directors recently voted to throw their support behind the endeavor.
That 640-acre site, which is donated by a San Diego developer, might have more access to roads and infrastructure than the other two, he said.
Browning said CSU leaders choose new campus locations based on many factors, including proximity to transportation, airports, environmental concerns and whether an area's population is growing, among other things.
He said CSU will likely wait to see if the Antelope Valley campus grows before considering whether to open a new school there. He said many of CSU's newer campuses started as satellites such as the one now in Antelope Valley. For example, he said CSU Northridge and CSU Channel Islands were both originally satellite campuses of CSU Los Angeles.
The process of creating a new CSU campus, however, is a long, arduous one. Johnstone said board of trade members know that, but they're in it for the long haul.
"It's not something that's happening tomorrow," Johnstone said.