Plans to Build Buddhist College Snarled by Open Space Struggle

On the southern slopes of the wide San Dieguito River valley, a marriage of palm trees and cherry blossoms is planned. But the ceremony may never take place in the wake of a citizen-led effort to curb urban sprawl along the City of San Diego’s northern borders.

A Buddhist organization has announced plans to build an American branch of Tokyo’s Soka University on a 149-acre tract along El Camino Real to serve as a campus for students from around the world.

The prospective enrollees will learn a lesson in patience before the campus opens for classes. San Diego city planners and engineers say that the university’s sponsors must first resolve several environmental and zoning concerns and may be caught in the citizens’ initiative effort to slow urbanization of the city’s outer fringes.

Ted Fujioka, an official of Nichiren Shoshu of America (NSA), said the university, first announced in May, 1984, was delayed for nearly a year while San Diego city engineers worked out a new road alignment for El Camino Real, which bisects the Soka property.

The road relocation plans are nearly complete and should go to bid by spring, city engineering development coordinator Jim McLaughlin said. But the university’s plans for its $7.8-million site have yet to get started through the maze of bureaucratic processes and approvals that must precede construction.

Nichiren Shosu of America is part of the Nichiren Shosu Buddhist sect and closely linked to two politically powerful organizations in Japan, the Soka Gakkai, a quasi-religious group with millions of members, and the Komeito, Japan’s third largest political party. Unlike most other Buddhist groups, the Soka Gakkai aggressively seeks religious converts, including non-Japanese.

NSA spokesmen said that the San Dieguito site was purchased more than four years ago after a nationwide search for a tract on which to build a U.S. campus.

Initially, temporary buildings are planned and emphasis will be on language instruction, Fujioka said. After the university receives accreditation, which takes about two years, the permanent campus will be started, he said. The curriculum will be expanded to a two-year junior college and ultimately, around the year 2000, the school will become a four-year liberal arts university with an enrollment of about 1,000 students.

“But first, we must obtain a permit from the City

of San Diego,” Fujioka said. “At the onset, it seemed that matters would move smoothly, but it was not to be.”

City staff reviewed the Soka University application last year and recommended denial of a permit for construction of the campus, mainly because the property lies in the city’s “urban reserve,” nearly 20,000 acres of land designated for development after 1995 in the city General Plan.

Other parts of the Soka site are also problematic. Part of the prop erty lies in the floodway of the San Dieguito River, and development is normally not allowed in floodway areas. Some of the land contains slopes of more than 25%, where construction is restricted, and all of the property is in agricultural zoning, which permits construction of one dwelling unit per 10 acres--far below the university’s proposed density.

Fujioka, who earlier had optimistically predicted the first students would be in residence in 1986, now is more cautious. “We shall take this matter one step at a time until we reach our ultimate long-term goal--an independent university with students from all over the world and from all walks of life,” he said Wednesday. He did not predict an opening date for the campus.

Plans for the campus by San Diego architect John Rule show a cluster of buildings around a small lake. Two four-story dormitories, classrooms, a library and a 3,000-seat gymnasium are planned.

The low-lying parts of the site are to be used for playing fields and extensive landscaping. The campus is designed to be self-contained, with the students and most of the 92 faculty members living and eating their meals at the school.

Doug McHenry, the city planner assigned to the Soka project, said the major problem was the site location within the urban reserve. Although the San Diego City Council has voted, by narrow margins, to withdraw 7,500 acres from the reserve and permit major housing, commercial and industrial projects, an initiative on the November general election ballot, if successful, will take that power away from the council and require approval by a majority of the city’s voters.

“This is a high-level policy matter,” McHenry explained, not one that the planning staff or the city Planning Commission can resolve.

Before the university project can go forward, it needs the approval of the city Planning Commission, the City Council and the state Coastal Commission, which is less concerned with urban sprawl at the city’s northern border than with the negative environmental effects of construction in the river valley and encroachments into the San Dieguito River flood plain.

“There are some aspects of the plan which are very complementary to the natural bluff area,” a Coastal Commission administrator said, “but the main concern is that its approval means opening up a whole new area to development.”