Opinion: Developing Harmony Grove Village South poses unacceptable fire risk

If you’ve lived in San Diego County for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard of our small unincorporated community of Harmony Grove. Unfortunately, we are infamous for our history of wildland fires overshadowing the serenity, beauty and open space recreational opportunities that are free to thousands of residents and visitors alike.

Our community is currently working to stop a development, called Harmony Grove Village South, that would increase everyone’s risk in the next wildfire to come our way.

I have lived in Harmony Grove since 1995, retiring from the San Diego Police Department after 30 years in law enforcement. My father and brother were career firefighters for the city of San Diego, and all of us have had extensive professional experience with wildland fires, including the Cedar Fire that destroyed hundreds of homes in the Scripps Ranch area. 

We are quite versed in the dangers of Santa Ana-driven fires that can quickly overwhelm even large metropolitan police and fire departments — the most recent examples being the Palisades and Eaton Fires in Los Angeles County in January.

Harmony Grove, Elfin Forest, and Eden Valley are three rural sister communities situated between Escondido, San Marcos, Encinitas and Rancho Santa Fe. The dramatic topography and narrow country roads are a challenge to development, and thus the area has pretty much remained a respite from urban sprawl. Over 3,000 acres of land have been preserved through the efforts of local nonprofits and San Diego County.

With this open space comes the constant threat of wildland fires. Since I moved to Harmony Grove in 1995, we’ve had numerous major fires resulting in the loss of scores of my neighbors’ homes and the death of one resident. 

Our last rodeo was the Cocos Fire in 2014, which resulted in the loss of over 30 homes in Harmony Grove and Eden Valley and  awakened the community to the severe lack of viable evacuation routes. During that fire, it took me and many of my neighbors close to an hour just to get a few miles to safety.

Since then, an additional 750 homes have been built in the center of Harmony Grove, tripling the number of homes in the area while adding little in the way of viable additional evacuation routes out of the valley.

Now an additional development of over 450 homes is in the works. Harmony Grove Village South is sited in the very south end of Harmony Grove, in a box canyon, surrounded by 15,000 acres of open space and old-growth chaparral, with a single two-lane road in and out of the site. The entire valley is rated as a “very high fire severity zone.” With the new developments and the proposed project, renowned evacuation expert Dr. Tom Cova, a PhD from the University of Utah, determined it would take over seven hours to evacuate.

The communities of Harmony Grove, Elfin Forest, and Eden Valley have vehemently opposed the new development based on the extreme danger it poses to existing area residents.

The county Board of Supervisors approved the project in 2018, despite a deficient fire protection plan that waived a state standard requiring a minimum of a secondary emergency evacuation route. The plan claimed to have additional features that would mitigate the need for a secondary evacuation route but did nothing to improve the safety for existing homes that rely on the same primary route. 

The plan suggested a series of private driveways and unimproved utility easements could be used as an evacuation route if the one actual road became impassible in a fire. This so-called route is narrow, overgrown with chaparral, on a steep hillside, and impassible by most passenger vehicles. Any reasonable person would see that this route is incredibly dangerous. But the county clearly didn’t bother to visit the site to see it is impassable.

The Elfin Forest/Harmony Grove Town Council won a lawsuit against the county and the developer in 2018 in San Diego Superior Court. The judge ordered the county to vacate the approval of this project unless the fire protection plan could be brought up to current standards.

Every retired fire chief that has had jurisdiction over this area, be it with the old Elfin Forest/Harmony Grove Volunteer Fire Department, or Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District, has admitted, either publicly or privately, that this plan is deficient, or as one chief put it in two separate public meetings, “absolutely insane.”

Nevertheless, the project’s developer financed a legal appeal in which an appellate judge did not think it was his place to question the fire authorities’ approval of the fire protection plan. This judge overturned the Superior Court’s decision and reopened the project for reconsideration by the Board of Supervisors, although all approvals still needed to be rescinded

Good systems of governance are in place for a reason, in this case to prevent disasters.  Unfortunately, in the case of Harmony Grove Village South, good governance seems to have taken a back seat to profit. The developer, a Colorado billionaire, even tried to donate $850,000 to the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District, in an obvious attempt to secure support for the project.

Last November I ran for the board of directors of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District and defeated a 20-year incumbent, arguing that new blood with public safety experience was needed to supplant a board that is overly focused on revenue and neglecting its commitment to public safety. But since I live near the proposed Harmony Grove Village South site, state law prohibits me from voting on any issue related to the project that comes in front of the fire board.

American academic and entrepreneur Scott Galloway has said that “the wealthiest 1% are protected by the law but are not bound by it. The bottom 99% are bound by the law but are not protected by it.”

Harmony Grove Village South is slated to be heard by the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 1. The pending question is, will Galloway be proved correct in his assessment of the state of affairs in this country, or will the 99% finally be protected from the 1%?

Kevin Barnard is retired from the San Diego Police Department and serves as a director of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District.