Why this matters
The Sierra Club was previously part of a lawsuit against the county after it approved the project in 2018. Friday’s petition accuses the county of violating newer environmental laws.
The Sierra Club is once again challenging a controversial housing development near Elfin Forest in court.
The environmental advocacy nonprofit asked the court Friday to require the county to redo its environmental analysis of the 450-unit Harmony Grove Village South proposal it approved last month. The Sierra Club said in court filings that the project violates the California Environmental Quality Act and that the county failed to properly analyze its impacts.
The Sierra Club first filed a lawsuit against the county in 2018 after it initially approved the development. After years of litigation and despite significant public backlash against the project, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors last month approved a revised plan for the development.
“We were genuinely shocked at the vote,” Sierra Club San Diego Chapter Chair Lisa Ross told inewsource Tuesday. “We were really not expecting that with the amount of community opposition and also the level of fire danger in this.”
The group’s petition accuses the county of failing to use a methodology called vehicle miles traveled, a way of estimating a roadway’s traffic, to assess the transportation impacts in the area, which was required after a law went into effect in 2020. It also said the project contributes to “excessive and harmful” greenhouse gas emissions and failed to get necessary approval from the fire district.
inewsource reached out to the county for comment, but spokesperson Donna Durckel said the county does not comment on active litigation.
The project’s recent approval came after a yearslong battle, both in government meetings and the courts. The October hearing was four hours long and had close to 100 public speakers, the overwhelming majority of whom opposed the project. Neighbors from Elfin Forest, Harmony Grove and environmentalists argued that placing a large housing development in a high fire-risk area with only one exit would endanger the residents in the new development and living nearby.
On the other side, county staff, union representatives and developers said the project would bring much needed affordable housing and would be safe.
After the Board of Supervisors first approved the development in 2018, the Sierra Club was part of a lawsuit accusing it of violating the California Environmental Quality Act. In 2020, a state trial court blocked the project out of fire safety concerns. An appeals court reversed the fire safety ruling, but kept a block on the project due to its greenhouse gas emissions.
The developers revised the plan to address the court’s concerns over the emissions ruling. The revisions relate only to what the court mandated, and not the fire safety concerns that residents and environmentalists raised.
New concerns in petition
The court already struck down the fire safety concerns in the Sierra Club’s earlier lawsuit. This latest filing makes new claims.
“There was a clear final ruling on the adequacy of the [environmental impact report] of only having one evacuation route, so we are not bringing that claim again,” said Isabella Coye, the attorney representing the Sierra Club.
However, she added, because there was a new environmental impact report for the revised project, it needed to meet laws that had passed in the time since.
In its petition, the Sierra Club also accuses the county of failing to get the revised development proposal approved by the fire marshal before the planning commission weighed whether to approve it. The petition references a September Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council meeting in which Dave McQuead, the fire chief of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District, said that the project would not meet today’s standards. He also wrote a letter to the county that confirmed the fire district had not been consulted for a review since the 2018 approvals process, the petition said.
But later, in the October Board of Supervisors meeting, Rancho Santa Fe Fire Chief Dave McQuead said he agreed with county staff’s recommendation to approve the development and said that, even though the plan doesn’t include a secondary exit route, there are other safety updates that offset the lack of one. Increased parking to keep vehicles off the street, increased water pressure in the fire hydrant systems and adding a third lane to the exit road would make the project safe, he said.
Dave Hogan, the Sierra Club’s legal committee chair, called Harmony Grove Village South a “wildfire death trap.”
In addition to the fire safety concerns, Ross and Hogan said, the project — an enclave in a rural forest — added to the issue of “sprawl” and therefore added to gas emissions.
“The Sierra Club doesn’t take filing a lawsuit lightly, but this project is a perfect example of exactly the wrong kind of housing development needed in San Diego,” Hogan said.
