The Sierra Club is again challenging the county’s approval of a plan to build hundreds of homes on undeveloped semi-rural land in North County’s Harmony Grove community.
In newly filed court documents, the group argues that the environmental review the county relied on is outdated and ignores new rules regarding assessing how far the new residents would drive on average, including their commutes to work or stores.
A bigger fear for neighbors is fire evacuation concerns.
The battle is over the proposed Harmony Grove Village South, which calls for 453 single- and multi-family residential units on 111 acres in a community just west of Escondido. This is the second go-round for the controversial project, which was defeated a few years ago after a lengthy legal fight. The developer says those concerns have been addressed.
Last month, the county Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the project. In giving it a green light, the county had to agree to amend its General Plan, because the development calls for far more homes than the zoning allowed.
At the end of October, the Sierra Club filed a petition in San Diego Superior Court, arguing the county’s approval violated the California Environmental Quality Act.
“A project of this density is totally inappropriate in Harmony Grove,” Dave Hogan, volunteer chair of the San Diego Sierra Club’s legal committee, said Wednesday.
He called the project “a perfect example of exactly the wrong kind of housing development needed in San Diego.”
“Residents will have long commutes to jobs with no public transit, so greenhouse gas emissions will be enormous and worsen our climate crisis. Most of the houses will be unaffordable. Residents and neighbors will be put at the highest possible risk of wildfire, and sensitive habitats and wildlife will be bulldozed,” he said Wednesday.
A county spokesperson declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
David Kovach, managing partner for the proposed development, said Wednesday in a statement to the Union-Tribune that he is grateful to both the county’s Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors for their support of the development “and their firm commitment to tackling our County’s housing crisis.”
He also said the project had been “thoroughly reviewed and repeatedly affirmed” by courts, fire and law enforcement officials, and land planning authorities.
“We still have a few opposing voices that do not seem to fully understand the depth and magnitude of the housing crisis, but the time for discussion and debate is over,” he said. “We are proudly moving forward to ensure hard-working San Diegans will soon have the opportunity to own a new home in a beautiful community and live the American dream.”
The county first approved the development in 2018, over the objections of residents. The Sierra Club and others sued, and a trial judge sided with residents’ fire concerns.
A state appeals court later ruled that the environmental impact report had adequately addressed fire concerns but not concerns over the climate change impacts from greenhouse gas emissions. The appeals court ordered the county to decertify the whole environmental report in 2022.
The environmental impact report is again at the center of the legal battle. This new legal filing from the Sierra Club is not a new lawsuit; rather, it is a new filing tied to its 2018 challenge to the project.
In its new filing, the Sierra Club argues that the developer revived the old report but inadequately addressed and updated the greenhouse gases and transportation assessments. The group also argues that a 2020 state law laying out a different way to assess a project’s transportation impact on a region heralded such a significant change that the impact of this project must be reassessed through that new lens.
The new filing notes that the site is located within an area that Cal Fire identified as a “very high fire hazard severity zone,” and that it burned in the 2014 Cocos fire. It also states that the San Diego Association of Governments places the area in its highest category measuring the amount of miles that residents drive on average each year, given their distance from more urban areas.
The area in question is in an unincorporated area between Escondido and San Marcos, south of state Route 78. The Harmony Grove Village South development would sit south of Escondido Creek.
Two-lane Country Club Drive crosses a creek and is the only paved road in or out. The plan calls for making the two-lane crossing at the creek into a three-lane bridge. Within the development, fire mitigation measures include using ignition-resistant construction materials and installing additional fire hydrants.
A big concern for residents in Harmony Grove: There is only one paved road in and out of the proposed development.
“That puts not only people who are going to be moving into the new development at enormous risk, it also greatly increases the risk to all of the people that already live in that area who have to evacuate on roads that will now become much more congested with all of the new residents,” Hogan said.
The fire chief of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District told the Board of Supervisors it would take an estimated one to two hours to evacuate the area.