By Katie Priest and Ava Uhlack, May 6, 2025
Cal Poly Pomona has used more than $10 million in state funds to pay the salaries and benefits for employees, contractors and consultants to work on the Lanterman property between 2015 and 2023, out of which 85% went to pay university police and maintenance employees.
Campus South, previously known as the Lanterman Developmental Center, has been under the care of CPP since 2015. CPP faculty, staff and students don’t use the property. Instead, the university leases out portions of the site for Hollywood film projects, but The Poly Post investigative team uncovered the university moves some stateside safety and maintenance employees off CPP’s main campus to monitor and maintain the 300-acre property.
When the property was originally transferred to the campus, the governor’s office laid out contingencies, including “that state funds will not be specifically appropriated for the operation, maintenance or development of this property,” according to the 2015 governor’s budget summary.
UPD and maintenance employees at Lanterman
According to documents obtained by The Poly Post, CPP has employed 30 campus public safety specialists for this project since 2015. Three public safety specialists cover the day shift, and two cover the graveyard shift.
Jared Ceja, the CEO of Foundation, said the public safety specialists are all University Police Department employees. He added that sometimes film productions will bring in their own security depending on the size of the production, but the day-to-day security is handled by UPD.
In addition to public safety officers, CPP also employs campus maintenance personnel. Maintenance operations at Lanterman can either be handled by campus facilities employees or other vendors depending on the degree of specialization needed, according to Ceja. Since 2015, 68 employees across various areas have received benefits and salaries from stateside for work involving the site, according to public records.
According to KTLA, a UPD public safety specialist who was working at Lanterman was fatally stabbed in his car on Lanterman property in summer 2018 by another CPP employee, who was a part of the maintenance crew at Lanterman. He was later fatally shot by police.
External contractors at the site
Through a public record request, The Poly Post found CPP used more than 100 contractors to upkeep the site. It also found CPP used both Foundation Enterprises accounts and stateside funds, which refers to any financial support provided by the state to support the university, to pay these contractors.
Of these contractors, at least 11 consultants were contracted for work related to the site, including real estate and housing demand, environmental consulting, appraisal and legal services. The university contracted 10 of the consultants with stateside funds, which accounted for more than $2 million in expenses.
Also, one of these consultants paid with stateside money and listed as a stateside employee is Benjamin Quillian, who previously served as the California State University system’s executive vice chancellor and chief financial officer before he quietly retired after an audit led to an investigation of “questionable travel expenses,” according to the Long Beach Post, The documents The Poly Post acquired revealed CPP hired Quillian as a retired annuitant on the state-side, serving as part of the Project Management Team for Lanterman.
“Cal Poly Pomona has maintained consistent project management oversight of the Lanterman Development project through the efforts of Dr. Ben Quillian, Ms. Roberta Achtenberg, as well as Mr. Jeff Marcowitz and Ms. Sonnet Hui, Project Management Advisors,” the official CPP page for the Lanterman site reported. “As various initiatives were undertaken, dedicated working groups were established to ensure the successful completion of essential tasks.”
Of the remaining contractors listed in the report, 83 provided construction, maintenance, repairs and utilities on the Lanterman site between 2015 and 2023. CPP used more than $5.7 million in stateside funds to pay for these services, which included plumbing, electrical, fencing and equipment repairs, concrete work, pest control and landscaping. Furthermore, the utilities covered by these costs are electricity, gas, water, trash, sewage and phones.
Film revenue insufficient for Lanterman’s expenses
According to Michelle Cardona, CPP’s associate vice president for financial services, the stateside fund that covers the cost of these contractors “operates on a deficit all year” but then is reimbursed by film revenue at the end of the year.
“This fund will always run in a deficit throughout the year,” Cardona said. “It’s really once you get to year-end where you see the true up of what the true deficit is for the operating fiscal year.”
However, as The Poly Post previously reported, the Lanternman property is not “self-sustaining,” as CPP President Soraya Coley described. Despite more than $10 million in profits between 2015 and 2023, CPP and CPP Foundation Inc. had to contribute almost $7 million to cover the cost of these contractors because the expenses exceeded profits.
In records obtained by The Poly Post, film crews have been on the property for an average of 98 days a year from 2017 to 2024. According to Ceja, filming revenue took a dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were getting back on that trend until we had those COVID (years) and the strike, which were really painful and did cause for some challenging years,” Ceja said.
There were an average of 170 shoot days on the property between 2017 and 2014, not including prep and strike days. Without 2020 included, where only the months of March and April had no shoot, prep or strike days, the average of shoot days goes up to 183 days. Compared to 2019, the amount of shoot days went down 44% but recovered in 2021 by 182% — a 56% increase from 2019.
Despite the dip in 2020 and a small loss in 2023, the filming efforts across Lanterman have increased on average 26%. The Fox TV series “911,” Netflix’s “Grotesquerie,” “Ford versus Ferrari” and Justin Bieber’s “Holy” music video are all among the titles that have been filmed at Campus South, according to Bianca Nguyen, property manager for CPP Enterprises.
Feature image courtesy of Bryan Doan