It’s Pass or Fail for Soka School Expansion Plan

After an epic eight-year, multimillion-dollar battle, Soka University today faces the final regulatory hurdle to expanding its campus in one of the last undeveloped valleys in the Santa Monica Mountains.

At a meeting in San Diego, the California Coastal Commission is scheduled to take a final vote on the contentious project, which would increase the number of students per day at the language and Pacific Rim studies school from 350 to 800.

Environmentalists and neighborhood groups see the property at the corner of Mulholland Drive and Las Virgenes Road as the key to preservation efforts in the mountains. They say the university’s expansion would destroy a key wildlife corridor, clog roads and ruin scenery.

But Soka officials counter that they have cut back as far as possible, turning over more than half of the 588-acre site as public lands, agreeing to a 25-year-development cap and drastically scaling back their initial plans, which called for a 4,400-student campus.

The years of battle have taken their toll, resulting in permanent rifts between some environmentalists, charges of racism and millions spent on legal fees and lobbying costs by the university, which receives funding from Soka Gakkai, a Japan-based Buddhist sect.

Though commission staff recommended approval of the project, neither side is predicting victory. The hearing promises to be a pitched battle, with both sides chartering buses for a meeting expected to last late into the night.

“We want to start work as soon as possible,” said university spokesman Jeff Ourvan. “We want to get out of politics and into education.”

The university bought the land, site of the historic King Gillette ranch, in 1986 for $15.5 million. The previous owners were Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant, a cult whose followers received daily enemas and revered Prophet as a “Guru Ma.”

The beginning of the development battle began in 1990, when the university proposed expanding its tiny campus into a full, four-year liberal arts college with 4,400 students and 1.7 million square feet of buildings.

The plan immediately met with protest, some of it based in prejudice against the school’s mostly Japanese student body, say university officials.

“I used to get calls saying, ‘Go back to Japan,’ ” Ourvan said. “I’m from the Bronx.”

But other groups based their objections on environmental concerns. One of the biggest was the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. Charged with protecting open space in the mountains, the conservancy filed suit to seize 245 acres of the university’s property. Soka filed a counter complaint, charging the agency with overstepping its bounds.

The lawsuits were settled in 1994, with Soka agreeing to scale down its project and the conservancy agreeing to support it. But that, in turn, led some environmentalists to accuse the conservancy of selling out to the university. Conservancy officials maintain the deal resulted in more land in public hands than sought in the lawsuit.

“There’s a lot of passion about this valley and this property. Some people still have bad feelings,” said Dave Brown, a Calabasas planning commissioner who has fought the project since its inception.

The university has done its best to soothe those feelings, reaching out to the community through language classes and lecture series.

It has also worked hard to secure the project through political lobbying. As of 1995, the most recent year for which figures are available, the university spent $1.4 million on lobbying fees to various legislative bodies on the project. Millions more were spent on legal costs and public relations.

As it now stands, the university plans to have 650 students during the day on its campus--500 full-time residents and 150 daytime commuter students. Another 150 students will take night classes.

Total development has been reduced from 1.7 million square feet of buildings to 440,000 square feet, including a new gym, library and dormitories. In addition, the university will turn over 383 acres to the conservancy as public land.

Those concessions, say university officials, make the project environmentally friendly.

“We feel we have bent over so far to where we’re more like a pretzel than a university,” Ourvan said.

But environmentalists still aren’t convinced. They say the university, even in its scaled down form, will still be an eyesore along Mulholland, a designated scenic corridor.

Worse still, new buildings will disrupt an area that bobcats and mountain lions use to roam between the Santa Monica Mountains range and Los Padres National Forest.

And the additional students will jam already overcrowded Las Virgenes/Malibu Canyon Road.