Congressman Seeks $30 Million to Acquire Mountain Parkland : Budget: Rep. Beilenson asks House panel for funds to purchase the Soka University parcel and the Paramount Ranch.

Citing the opportunity to acquire two high-priority parcels, Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles) asked a key House panel to appropriate $30 million in the 1992 federal budget to purchase land in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Beilenson told the House Appropriations subcommittee on interior Thursday that the funds are urgently needed for a centrally located Las Virgenes Valley property owned by Soka University and the scenic Paramount Ranch in Agoura.

“I cannot overstate the importance of these two purchases,” Beilenson said in a prepared statement. “They will give the Santa Monicas the activity sites and facilities needed to serve the growing recreational demands of Southern California’s rapidly expanding population and to make the park a key visitor attraction for Los Angeles.”

Park officials have long coveted Soka’s 580-acre property, along Mulholland Highway between Calabasas and Malibu, for use as the headquarters of the national recreation area. The Japan-based university has rejected proposals from park officials to locate elsewhere. On Thursday, university officials formally submitted an application with Los Angeles County seeking permission to build a 4,400-student campus in the mountain meadow.

Beilenson said that condemnation proceedings to acquire the site are being contemplated because the university is not interested in selling the land.

When informed about the funding request to acquire campus land, Bernetta Reade, Soka University spokeswoman, said it makes little sense to spend federal funds because school officials have offered to compromise and donate 71 acres of the property for the park headquarters.

Soka officials said they have spent at least $43 million on property in the area since 1986. Reade added that the university spent $12 million refurbishing buildings and the grounds.

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state agency, is seeking to obtain the oak-studded Paramount Ranch under a tentative agreement with Union Federal Savings Bank. The agreement stipulates that the conservancy will buy delinquent loans on the 320-acre tract and then foreclose on a development firm that is millions of dollars in arrears. After acquiring the land for $17.75 million, the conservancy hopes to resell the parcel--the former site of the Renaissance Faire--to the National Park Service.

Following his testimony, Beilenson acknowledged in an interview that the Santa Monicas are unlikely to receive the full $30 million that he requested. The recreation area received $12 million in 1991, the highest figure for any park in the nation. This year, President Bush recommended $11.5 million in his proposed budget.

Rep. Chester G. Atkins (D-Mass.), acting as the interior subcommittee chairman in the absence of Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), told Beilenson that “we face a real shortfall” and asked if “there’s some way we can hold our position with those two parcels?”

Beilenson said that would be possible if Congress appropriated $14 million for the Soka property in the 1992 fiscal year and waited until the next year to provide $16 million for the Paramount Ranch property. He noted, however, that this would cost the conservancy and park service an additional $1 million in interest under the agency’s agreement with Union Federal. The conservancy has 18 months to make the purchase.

Previously, Beilenson spoke privately to subcommittee chairman Yates, a personal friend who wields considerable clout in the highly competitive appropriations process. “They have been more generous to us than to any other park in the country,” Beilenson said that Yates pointed out. “But they continue to have fiscal constraints.”

Beilenson also requested $1.5 million for preservation of the endangered African elephant under a conservation act that he got enacted in 1988. The funds pay for research and preservation activities by African wildlife agencies and organizations. With poachers seeking the elephants’ valuable ivory tusks, their ranks have dwindled from 1.5 million a decade ago to fewer than 650,000.

Times staff writer Steve Padilla contributed to this story.