County freezes Harmony Grove housing project after Sierra Club legal victory

A 453-home master-planned community south of Escondido was put on ice Wednesday — the latest suburban housing project blocked in the courts by environmental groups based largely on wildfire and climate change concerns.

Harmony Grove Village South was approved by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors in 2018, along with the nearby 326-home Valiano project to the north.

The Sierra Club, Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council, Endangered Habitats League, and Cleveland National Forest Foundation quickly filed lawsuits against both projects, prevailing in San Diego Superior Court in 2020.

The state 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego upheld that decision last year, saying the projects were inconsistent with the county’s general plan and regional efforts to reign in greenhouse gases from cars and trucks.

An appellate court rejected Harmony Grove Village South and Valiano based on greenhouse gas emissions from new car and truck trips.

Under court order, the supervisors voted unanimously on Wednesday to rescind approval of Harmony Grove. The fate of Valiano remains in limbo, with settlement negotiations ongoing.

“This is a culmination of five to seven years of hard work from the community,” said JP Theberge, chair of the Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council. “The era of sprawl development should be over.”

The three-judge panel specifically found fault with a carbon offset program the county had proposed to allow developers to pay their way around restriction on planet-warming vehicle emissions. The funding could have gone to projects anywhere in the world, such as to reduce deforestation or turn methane from manure pits into energy.

An investigation by the Union-Tribune in 2018 found that California’s offset program often paid for greenhouse gas reductions that would’ve happened regardless. In many situations, companies maintained green business practices that long preceded the offset program, but qualified to sell credits by pledging to simply continue those activities.

The county had previously aimed to approve as many as 10,000 new homes in high-fire areas using such offsets purchased through private carbon registries, such as Climate Action Reserve and American Carbon Registry. The court found the program was flawed on several accounts, writing the county’s plan “lack(ed) objective performance criteria to ensure the effective and actual mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Since then, many of those proposed housing projects have been blocked in the courts, including Adara at Otay Ranch and Newland Sierra. Newland Communities recently sold the 2,000-acre plot where it planned to build roughly 2,100 homes to the nearby Golden Door spa.

The Sierra Club remains in settlement negotiations with a number of the projects, including Otay 250 Sunroad.