Officials Offer Soka Land Swap : Acquisitions: The university has 580 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains that park advocates have sought for a visitors center.

State and federal officials on Sunday proposed a land exchange with Japan-based Soka University, which owns 580 acres of prime Santa Monica Mountains real estate that park advocates have long coveted as a visitors center.

A top university administrator said he would convey the proposal to his board of directors but expressed opposition because the American officials had no specific site to trade, a spokesman said.

The offer was presented at a meeting between Soka University officials and David Gackenbach, superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area; Joseph Edmiston, director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy; and Dan Preece, district superintendent of the state park system.

Scheduled in June to take advantage of a symposium at the school and the presence of top administrators, the meeting was originally planned so park officials could discuss their interest in acquiring the school’s 248 acres off Las Virgenes Road and Mulholland Highway for use as a park headquarters and visitors center.

Instead, the talks centered on Soka’s announcement last week that it had purchased an additional 332 acres, most of it northeast of the current campus--stunning park officials and threatening plans for a visitors center anywhere in the area.

The university plans over the next 25 years to expand from a language-training institute of 80 students to a four-year liberal arts college of 5,000, campus spokesman Jeff Ourvan said.

Ourvan said Hiroshi Okayasu, Soka’s general director and second only to its president, reacted skeptically to the land-swap idea because of the “inability of Mr. Gackenbach to submit any concrete proposal.”

“We didn’t have a clue as to any specific idea or land and in fact we’d be very surprised if Mr. Gackenbach could come up with a piece of property as ideal for our purposes as this one,” Ourvan said.

He said it was unlikely Okayasu would have an official response for another two to three months, when his next trip to the United States is scheduled.

In the meantime, Ourvan said, the university will discuss its long-range plans with neighbors. He said Soka had no immediate plans to submit development proposals.

“If they can find a better spot, we’d be open to that, sure,” Ourvan said of the proposed land exchange. But he also said the university considered its Calabasas location ideal.

“It’s not a question of money to us but a question of value, and we feel this site is very valuable to us for its beauty and our vision of establishing a university that is both academically functional and environmentally sensitive,” Ourvan said.

But the spot is also ideally suited as a focal point for the park system, Edmiston said of the mountain conservancy. It is not only scenic, Edmiston said, but located midway between the Pacific Coast Highway and the Ventura Freeway, and would afford both seasoned hikers and casual picnickers easy access to the mountains.

The national recreation area has no visitors center, which makes it difficult to attract the public into the mountains. Edmiston said most visitors use only the beaches.

Edmiston said parks officials presently had no other piece of land in mind to offer Soka University. But he said if university administrators were amenable to the idea, “we will take their criteria and hire a consultant and do as exhaustive a search as possible” to find the best site for the school.

Edmiston and Ourvan described Sunday’s meeting as cordial. It lasted about 90 minutes, mostly consumed by translators for both sides.

The national park system has been interested in the Soka site for 12 years, Gackenbach has said. The park service tried to buy the land in 1986 but lost to Soka University, which purchased it for $15.5 million from the Church Universal and Triumphant.

Edmiston said one advantage to purchasing land elsewhere and trading it for the Soka site was that the cost could be more affordable to the park service.