Ruling Could Clear Way for Soka University Expansion

Los Angeles County attorneys ruled Wednesday that the Calabasas campus of Soka University is operating legally, clearing the way for the Japan-based school to try to expand to 4,400 students.

County zoning investigators cited the school in March, charging that it was violating its land-use permit by holding English classes for about 100 students from its home campus in Tokyo. Investigators said the permit allowed only religious training because it was originally issued to a seminary located on part of the 580-acre parcel in the 1950s.

The citation complicated the school’s plans to apply for expansion permits because under county zoning law, applications for changes cannot be accepted when the current land use is illegal. The expansion application already was expected to face opposition by neighbors and by state and federal park agencies, which want the same land for a headquarters for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

But Zoning Administrator Rudy Lackner said Wednesday that the county counsel’s office had determined that the English classes were similar to the college courses offered to seminary students.

“The legal opinion is that the uses are similar enough in nature, that this is a form of a college too,” Lackner said.

Federal and state parks officials, who have been trying to acquire the school’s Calabasas meadow for years to use as their headquarters, minimized the significance of the county ruling. They said they were disappointed, but not surprised.

“We were always preparing for the day when they would go ahead with their permits to build this major university,” said Marc Litchman, a political consultant working for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. “At least this appropriately brought a lot more scrutiny of what they were doing.”

Zoning investigators also had initially maintained that the permit was void because no educational use had occurred on the site for more than two years before Soka began purchasing the property in 1986. But Lackner said further research showed that the religious sect that owned the land in the interim--Church Universal and Triumphant--had continued some classes.

“They called it Summit University,” Lackner said. “We don’t know exactly what it was, because they would never let us on the premises . . . but it seems to have been some kind of educational use.”

Soka University administrators had not been notified of the decision in their favor, spokeswoman Bernetta Reade said. But Reade said the ruling seemed to accept the arguments that administrators had made after the March 4 citation.

With this legal hurdle cleared, Reade said Soka plans to file its application for expansion early next week.

The application will request permission to share the property with federal and state parks agencies, Reade said, even though parks officials have all but rejected that idea because they say it will bring too many people to the meadow.

Soka last week offered to give the park agencies 71 acres and build a $2.5-million visitors center, while reducing its proposed future student body to 4,400 from an earlier proposal of 5,000.

Litchman, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy consultant, described the decision to include the parks in the permit application as presumptuous.

“The public opposition to that kind of proposal is just so broad it would be impossible for any agency to agree to something like that,” he said. “We in no way, shape or form have consented to that. That’s clear fantasy on their part.”