ENCINITAS — The city of Encinitas is turning to the courts for clarity on the controversial 199-unit Clark Avenue Apartments project, seeking a ruling that the development violates fire safety regulations and to allow the city to withhold additional permits until the developer complies.
The city filed a complaint Nov. 5 in Vista Superior Court against WNG HHF Encinitas Apartments, LP, the development team behind the project wedged on a site between Interstate 5 and a web of narrow Leucadia streets.
“There is a spirited debate in our community as to what the fire code requires for a 199-unit apartment building served by narrow streets, and we think it is best to ask the judge to clarify the law for the benefit of the community we serve, for the developer, and for the city,” Mayor Bruce Ehlers told The Coast News in a statement.
Representing the city, attorney Michael Colantuono of Grass Valley-based Colantuono, Highsmith & Whatley, argued the development, approved by the City Council in 2022, violates fire-access rules because the access roads are too narrow and the site lacks a required turnaround area for fire engines.
Under the city’s fire code, updated in September to better align with neighboring jurisdictions, fire access roads generally must be at least 24 feet wide, with additional requirements for dead-end roads longer than 150 feet, including specific turnaround designs for fire engines.
The complaint alleges that several streets between the project and Fire Station 3 on Orpheus Avenue fail to meet these standards.
The code provides three acceptable turnaround designs: a 120-foot “hammerhead” T-turnaround, a 60-foot “Y” turnaround, or a 96-foot-diameter cul-de-sac.
While project plans acknowledge the need for “alternate materials and methods” to address turnaround requirements on the site, the city argues that the council’s approval of the project did not include the specific findings necessary to justify a deviation from the fire code.
“An actual controversy exists between Plaintiff and Defendant as to whether the Clark Avenue Apartments project complies with the Fire Code,” the city states in the filing.
The lawsuit marks an escalation in a years-long dispute over the Clark Avenue Apartments. The width of nearby streets has long been a sore spot for residents and city officials as they weigh the impact of the 15-building project, which includes 159 market-rate units and 40 affordable units, on a former nursery site between Union Street and Clark Avenue.
“Union is not a suitable road for what’s about to happen to it,” former Planning Commission Chair Kevin Doyle said in explaining his vote to deny permits for the project in 2022. “This is the big flaw of this project. The way in and out just sucks.”
Residents have described the area as a “working-class” Leucadia neighborhood, repeatedly expressing concerns that the narrow streets, limited access to the freeway, and increased construction traffic pose safety risks.
Neighbors have observed that Union and Clark effectively become single-lane roads once cars are parked along the curb, questioning how large fire engines and evacuation traffic would maneuver during an emergency.
“Our street, Union, is 19 feet, six inches wide; Clark Street at its widest point is 21 feet wide,” Leucadia business owner Tom Gonzalez, who operates a dog daycare at the end of Union, told The Coast News last year. “I don’t understand how it’s physically possible to have yield-only traffic moving down these streets.”
Another resident, Sheri Armendariz, who lives on Union Street, recently likened the construction and pending build-out to being trapped in the 2008 Witch Fire, saying she worries about traffic, delayed emergency response and her home’s future value.
“It’s really a mess,” Armendariz said in September. “We didn’t buy this gridlock.”
City officials have publicly wrestled with the same concerns. The Planning Commission unanimously denied permits for the project in 2022, citing traffic and emergency access problems, but the City Council later overturned that decision and approved the apartments as a state-backed, “by-right” housing element site.
Since then, council members have attempted to add safety fixes. In October, the council unanimously approved new stop signs and no-parking zones at Clark Avenue and Puebla Street, an intersection near the project’s northern entrance, after residents complained construction traffic had made the area dangerous.
Councilmember Jim O’Hara — a frequent critic of the project — recently called it a “turd sandwich,” saying added stop signs were “mustard or mayo or pickles” on an otherwise unpalatable project.
O’Hara and Mayor Bruce Ehlers have also questioned whether the project ever met the objective standards required for its “by-right” classification, arguing that if basic road-width rules were not satisfied, the city would have retained more discretion, and the deadlines to challenge the approval may not have expired.
While O’Hara did not wish to comment further on the litigation, he added that the “City Council is dedicated to insisting that public safety be a priority in any development citywide.”
Deputy Mayor Joy Lyndes told The Coast News that she supports addressing neighbors’ requests to widen Clark Avenue, but questioned the city’s strategy, saying repeated legal battles over state housing requirements have drained public funds and failed to produce results.
“Over the past eight years, the City of Encinitas has filed multiple legal actions regarding state mandates for housing,” Lyndes said. “The city has spent nearly $4 million of hard-earned taxpayer money on these lawsuits, and the city has lost all of them. There are many better and less expensive ways to continue fighting housing mandates, other than through more legal action — ways that are more likely to succeed, such as the work SANDAG is doing on RHNA reform.”
Lyndes, who served as chair of the SANDAG Sustainable Communities working group last year, said focusing on RHNA reform through the regional planning agency is a more effective and less costly way to seek changes to state housing mandates than continued litigation.
“The strength of the entire San Diego region, working together to negotiate changes to the state housing mandates, is powerful,” Lyndes said. “I believe taking action as a collaborative region through SANDAG is more powerful and more likely to succeed.”
The developer and its attorney, Marco Gonzalez, of Coast Law Group in Encinitas, have consistently stated that the project complies with state and local housing laws. In a warning to the council last summer, Gonzalez said that attempts to revisit or unwind the council’s previous approval would be “entirely inappropriate and illegal” because the statute of limitations had expired.
In response to a request for a statement about the litigation, Gonzalez told The Coast News that his “client does not have any comment at this time.”
1 comment
Thank goodness we have a Mayor who follows code rather than bends it to favor the developer. As former Chair of the Planning Commission, Mayor Ehlers has a deep knowledge of our Municipal Code and understands and employs its protections. Appreciate this true leadership rather than what certainly has had in the past all the appearances of corruption.