Officials Tell University to Find New Site : Environment: They will meet Monday with the head of the Japanese school, which plans to expand on land coveted for a Santa Monica Mountains park headquarters.

State and federal parks officials have urged top administrators of a Japanese university in the Santa Monica Mountains to come to a meeting Monday prepared to discuss alternative sites for a proposed campus expansion.

That request came in a letter in which the parks officials vow to eventually acquire land now slated for the expansion.

The park authorities say they have been frustrated for months in their attempts to suggest other locations for the proposed 5,000-student campus of Soka University Los Angeles because the college’s administrators have refused to furnish a list of their needs and desires.

Without such a list, park officials say, it will be all too easy for the university to reject any site offered.

“We are very leery about pointing to sites on a map and then having them say, ‘Oh no, that one doesn’t work, that one doesn’t work,’ ” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. “We want to establish an objective criteria and then let the world decide.”

Currently, Soka University is nestled in a valley in Calabasas in an unspoiled grove of oaks that is home to several species of wildlife. The school provides short-term English courses for rotating groups of about 80 students from the main campus in Tokyo.

Last spring campus officials announced plans to expand to 5,000 students by the year 2015 and in August disclosed that they had doubled the school’s land holdings to nearly 600 acres. That alarmed the National Park Service and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which have long viewed the property as the ideal site for a Santa Monica Mountains park headquarters.

University administrators have said they have no interest in a land trade because the Calabasas site meets their needs perfectly and they have no intention of moving. County property records showed the school may have spent up to $56 million purchasing the land around the school. School officials say they spent at least $1 million more renovating dilapidated buildings.

Soka spokesman Jeff Ourvan said Wednesday that the school’s general director, Hiroshi Okayasu, is coming from Tokyo to attend the meeting with parks officials Monday. Okayasu met recently with his board of directors in Japan to discuss a possible land swap and will announce the board’s position on Monday, Ourvan said.

“In the past, his position has been that he’s personally opposed to the idea--he’s skeptical,” Ourvan said. “We definitely want to establish a university here.”

In a letter to Okayasu dated Nov. 16, David E. Gackenbach, superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Areas, said the park agencies “intend to acquire” the Soka land. Gackenbach also said that the agencies will help the university identify alternative surplus government properties.

The parks agencies have spent $15,000 to hire an environmental consulting firm to do preliminary studies of the Soka property, asking it to look at the impact of traffic and additional buildings on wildlife areas and streams. Edmiston, of the conservancy, said that too is an effort to persuade university administrators that they should consider taking the land trade proposal seriously.

“If it proves there are some serious problems, then we could . . . say, ‘Here’s some of the problems you guys are going to face. Doesn’t it make sense for us to join hands and go look for alternative sites together?’ ” he said.