Park the Expansion Elsewhere

A noisy and increasingly nasty war of words is echoing through the usually quiet canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains this spring. The dispute pits the expansion plans of Soka University, which owns a chunk of parkland between Calabasas and Malibu, against recreational use by the public. The public’s greater interest should win out here, but that doesn’t mean Soka has to lose.

Starting in 1986, Tokyo-based Soka University bought 580 spectacular acres in the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area for $43 million. Soka wants to build a 4,400-student college, including classrooms, dormitories, a library and roads. About 80 students now take English classes in an old Catholic monastery on the site.

The state and federal park services, who jointly manage the park, have long coveted the Soka property for a park headquarters. The same natural beauty and amenities that attracted Soka--the vast, mountain-ringed meadow and flat terrain--also make the site ideal for a visitors’ center and trail heads.

The ability of Soka, like any other private landowner near the coast, to develop the land as it wishes is contingent on gaining county and state coastal commission permits. Moreover, the park services had designated the site a “high-priority acquisition” before Soka purchased the property.

Since Congress created the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area in 1978, state and federal agencies have slowly pieced together 70,000 acres of wilderness area. They watched the Soka land, along with many other choice parcels, pass from owner to owner--each time for a higher price--while they struggled vainly to find the money to buy it.

The two park agencies offered to swap land with Soka. But last week, Soka rejected two alternative sites--a Northrop Corporation plant in Newbury Park and a Christian conference center near Lake Arrowhead--saying that they were too small. Soka’s counterproposal for shared use of part of the land is still incompatible with the property’s park-like nature.

County and state planners will ultimately decide who wins here, or as one park official put it, which “thousands” will get to use this land: the future thousands of Soka University students who may attend classes in Calabasas or the “public” thousands who may someday get to amble slowly across the meadow, watch a red-tail hawk circle overhead or smell the wild roses in bloom. State condemnation of the land is a last resort. But it shouldn’t have to come to that. If Soka wants to be a good neighbor, it ought to take another look at the two alternative parcels.