CALABASAS : Soka Wins Approval for O.C. Campus

Soka University won permission Tuesday to build a 2,500-student liberal arts college in the Orange County community of Aliso Viejo.

The Orange County Planning Commission voted unanimously to approve Soka’s plans to develop the 100-acre campus and school. Soka spokesman Jeff Ourvan said construction could begin as early as this summer.

Ourvan said the school plans to build a library focusing on Pacific Rim research, a performing arts center and an art gallery as well as playing fields and classrooms at the site, which is part of the master-planned community near Mission Viejo.

Unlike the hostile response that Soka’s plan to build a campus in the Santa Monica Mountains received, residents and officials in Aliso Viejo greeted the school with enthusiasm, praising the cultural programs it promises to bring to suburban south Orange County.

Soka has tried for four years to expand its 300-student language school in Calabasas into a 3,400-student liberal arts college. Opponents say expanding the campus at the corner of Mulholland Highway and Las Virgenes Road would generate too much traffic and noise and ruin the natural amenities of the surrounding Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

In fact, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy is engaged in a bitter condemnation fight with the school over the property. The conservancy, a state agency that acquires parkland, has already won the right to seize the campus through eminent domain. A jury will decide later this year how much the school should be paid for the land.

Betting that the conservancy will not be able to afford the jury’s price, Soka is pressing ahead with its expansion plans. A hearing on the project’s environmental impact report will be held April 26 before the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission.

Ourvan said the Orange County campus does not change the school’s plans for its Calabasas property. “What happened today does not change anything, except it relieves us of a lot of stress,” Ourvan said, explaining that the new site allows the school to begin expansion as its plans for Calabasas work their way through the county bureaucracy and the courts.