Soka Will Consider Land Trade : Parkland: Government officials who want the Calabasas campus are skeptical that they can meet the university’s stringent criteria.

Expansion-minded officials of a Japanese university’s campus in Calabasas reluctantly agreed during a meeting with state and federal parks officials Monday to consider trading their 580 acres for land elsewhere to free the campus for park use.

However, the criteria that Soka University administrators set for an acceptable alternative parcel exactly described the existing university site, leaving parks officials skeptical that they could find a site that would not bring with it the same conflict.

“I think there are other suitable properties for the university,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, who attended the afternoon meeting. “But if we find something that meets all the criteria that makes Soka’s land so important both for them and for us, then it would be an equally important and beautiful park site.”

In a letter delivered to park agencies Monday morning, Soka University General Director Hiroshi Okayasu said that although he personally is opposed to the idea of a land swap, the university’s board of directors agreed to consider it. Okayasu also agreed to wait until April 15 to file an environmental impact report for the Calabasas land, the first step toward its development.

The conservancy and the National Park Service had demanded last month that Soka administrators specify their requirements for a campus so parks officials could find another location acceptable to the university.

Soka University, which has its main campus in Tokyo, moved onto the grounds of a former Calabasas mansion and monastery in 1986.

Last spring, university administrators announced plans to grow from an 80-student language program to a 5,000-student liberal arts college over the next 25 years. In August, they disclosed that they had doubled their land holdings, bringing their total expenditure to an estimated $56 million.

The National Park Service has long coveted the university’s verdant valley for use as a park headquarters, nature center and trail head for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

At the meeting Monday, Okayasu suggested that a park headquarters and a university could coexist on the land.

“We think that’s the best option, we really do,” said Jeff Ourvan, the campus’s community relations manager. “It serves not only the parks and the university but the public too.”

Edmiston said the park agencies will thoroughly review the proposal before the Jan. 15 deadline set by the university, but he remained skeptical.

“Mr. Okayasu said his personal view was that this land swap would not really work out,” Edmiston said. “Well, my personal view is that a park headquarters and a 5,000-student university would not necessarily be compatible. But to the extent that both of us can look toward compromises, we will.”

The criteria outlined by the university administrators for exchange sites, included in Okayasu’s letter and discussed at the meeting, outlined a detailed description of the Calabasas site.

The letter said any alternatives must be of comparable size, location and aesthetics. It said the land must be suitable for all legal federal, state and local government permits required for building a university. It said it must be in “the greater Los Angeles area and be deliverable to Soka University in a timely manner, free of any and all encumbrances.”

“Although we realize that no two properties are exactly alike, we would like to make it clear that any significant deviation from these parameters may be cause for our rejecting any proposed exchange sites,” Okayasu wrote.