Soka Site’s Important Role Cited : Calabasas: The school’s 580 acres support flora and fauna in the region, affecting drainage and wildlife, a report finds.

Although full public review will not take place for several months, glimpses of the environmental impact of expanding Soka University and the compensations proposed by the Calabasas school are beginning to emerge in community meetings and draft documents.

A study of the flora and fauna on the site obtained last week by The Times said the 580 acres owned by Soka in the Las Virgenes Valley play “an important role” in the region’s ecosystem, affecting the drainage of water and the movement of wildlife.

At a meeting last week, Soka officials laid out plans for mitigating the effect of the school’s expansion, including leaving a significant amount of land undeveloped.

Meanwhile, the Tokyo-based school and its supporters are attempting to fend off criticism by turning public debate away from their plans and toward proposals for making the area part of a park.

Soka backers note that the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which wants to put a visitors center and headquarters on part of the school’s property, has not offered any details of its plans. Recreation area planning documents had earlier considered using parts of the site for a recreational vehicle park, stables, youth hostels, museum, food concessions or a park-and-ride facility.

The backers say the amount of traffic and environmental impacts those uses might cause should be analyzed before local officials act on the school’s expansion plans and before the National Park Service allocates enough money to buy the property from Soka.

Parks officials have long wanted to acquire the land and buildings where the main Soka campus now stands. Those plans were thwarted when Soka began buying land in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1986, although state and federal parks officials have since said they would seize the land through condemnation if necessary.

The school’s holdings include an historic mansion and other buildings, where it holds conferences and English classes for about 100 students. Soka has applied to Los Angeles County for a permit to expand to 4,400 high school and college students, nearly twice the size of Pepperdine University in Malibu.

Submitted to county planners a month ago, the flora and fauna report by Soka’s environmental consultant, Envicom Corp., said the diverse assortment of plants on the property, some of them rare, help support sensitive species of reptiles, small mammals and birds. In addition, it found that water running off the property drains into Malibu Creek, one of the few remaining spawning grounds for steelhead trout, and that a variety of wild animals cross the site as they travel through the Santa Monica Mountains.

The report is the first piece of a thorough analysis of the environmental impact of the school’s expansion, which will be the subject of a series of public hearings later this year. The issue must eventually go to the county Regional Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors.

In a slide presentation shown last week during a meeting organized by Soka supporters, architect Steve Davis said the school plans to preserve wildlife corridors, replant wild grasses, and relocate or replace 40 oak trees displaced by buildings. Davis said 90% of the school’s property, including the most environmentally sensitive areas, would be left undeveloped.

Even so, opponents say, Soka proposes to donate only about 71 acres of its land to the park system, which the opponents say leaves the door open for future expansion.

Davis said the campus would sign restricted deeds so that the land could not be developed but that the school would maintain ownership, partly because its officials fear that the land would not be properly maintained under park stewardship.

Opponents also say the additional students at the school would add to congestion on already busy Las Virgenes Road, which has only two lanes. But Soka officials say vehicle traffic would be limited by creating only 1,100 spaces for student parking, Davis said. Class hours would be staggered so faculty and staff members would not be commuting during morning and evening rush hours, he said.

At the end of the slide presentation, an organizer of the support group, Friends of Soka University, asked repeatedly about the park service’s plans for the property and how they would affect the environment.

“What astounds me is that they don’t have a plan and they’re trying to get money from Washington to buy the land,” said Alexis Byfuglian of Agoura Hills. “It seems to me that you ought to have some idea what you want to do with that property before you ask for money.”

She asked, for example, whether only 50 or 60 visitors a day would come there, as federal park officials have estimated at community meetings and in media interviews. Or, she asked, would 10% of the estimated 29 million annual visitors to the national park--2.9 million a year or nearly 8,000 people daily--pass through the headquarters and visitors center?

Digging into park master plans from the early 1980s, the most recent completed, Byfuglian dredged up commercial and other recreational uses that once were considered as possibilities.

“Could this be another Yosemite?” she asked. “What is the cost to the habitat of that volume of visitors?”

Such questions are difficult for park officials to answer definitively, they say, because under federal laws, they must go through a process of meeting with community planning groups and holding public hearings before they can develop a park plan.

That process takes about two years and cannot begin until they actually own the property, said Nancy Arkin, chief planner for the recreation area.

Mostly, Arkin and other park officials have been answering such questions by trying to shift the debate back toward Soka’s plans.

“The primary issue is not what would the parks do with the land, anyway,” Arkin said. “It’s what Soka is proposing.”

But the opponents’ questions have sparked the interest of Tarzana environmentalist Dorian Keyser. He said he plans to counter Soka’s criticism by developing an unofficial update of the park’s plans for the site, enlisting the help of other environmentalists and even park officials, if they are willing.

“I agree that if you’re going to ask for something, you have to give some idea of what you’re going to do with it,” he said.

What Arkin and other park officials can say is that the Soka property would not be “another Yosemite” if they owned it.

For one thing, if the land is acquired by the park, no new structures would be added to the 39 that are on the land. Moreover, they said, earlier proposals for an RV park and a park-and-ride facility have been rejected.

Soka, on the other hand, plans to construct 62 new buildings by 2015 and demolish four existing buildings, leaving a total of 97.

Parks officials also note that even if the recreation area’s headquarters were built on the Calabasas property, it would be a destination for only a fraction of the more than 29 million people thought to visit the park annually. The majority of those visitors go to beaches within the recreation area’s boundaries, park officials say.

The 17,000-acre Santa Monica Mountains recreation area is a patchwork of land, stretching from Griffith Park to Point Mugu and including popular Zuma Beach, Malibu Lagoon and part of Malibu State Beach.

In April, the temporary Santa Monica Mountains park headquarters in Agoura Hills averaged 33 visitors daily, which park spokeswoman Jean Bray said was a high water mark resulting from peak spring wildflowers.

“Of course, who’s to say?” Bray said. “If we find a permanent place for a headquarters, it becomes better known and our highway signage improves, that number is likely to increase.”