The Harmony Grove Village South saga has a new chapter, and this one is playing out behind closed doors in Sacramento.
A Colorado billionaire is using the state legislature to get what he’s been unable to get in court. Senate Bill 1256, authored by San Diego-based Senate Minority Leader Assemblymember Brian Jones (R-Santee), would kill a pending wildfire safety lawsuit against the Harmony Grove Village South project near Escondido, and the bill’s sole listed supporter is RCS Harmony Partners, the entity owned by Marcel Arsenault, the Colorado-based developer behind the project.
The Harmony Grove Village South project has been in and out of court since 2018, when a coalition of residents and environmental groups first challenged its approval on fire-safety and greenhouse-gas concerns.
After years of litigation that led to the full rescission of approvals, the developer resubmitted its application. The county reapproved the project in 2025 but allowed the developer to bypass the fire-safety review required by its own code.
The Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council and the Endangered Habitats League filed a new lawsuit over that failure, and SB 1256 would bar it, even though the county’s approval relied on fire safety standards more than a decade old.
HGVS sits in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, in a community that was directly in the path of the 2014 Cocos Fire, which destroyed more than 30 homes in the neighborhood. Sited on a dead-end bowl, it still lacks an adequate secondary evacuation route that dozens of experts say will create a serious entrapment risk during the next evacuation.
The county’s own fire chief has said publicly: “Today, you could not pass that project without secondary access.”
The statewide implications go beyond this project. Observers say it could shut the door on legitimate fire-safety lawsuits against other high-risk developments across California, voiding residents’ existing legal rights to protect their communities.
SB 1256 is the result of a gut-and-amend process in Sacramento, the kind of maneuver that leaves local voters scratching their heads while outside special interest money quietly rewrites state law to serve a single developer’s bottom line.
The bill was introduced in February as a railroad crossing measure, then quietly rewritten in March into a Subdivision Map Act provision that exactly matches the Harmony Grove Village South situation. It has so far cleared two committees in the State Senate and is likely to head to the Assembly.
If this concerns you, make your voice heard. Contact your local state Senator and Assemblymember and tell them that California residents deserve the right to challenge development decisions that put lives at risk — and that no out-of-state developer’s bottom line is worth taking that right away.
You can find your representatives at findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov, or you can go to www.dontburnus.org/actnow for more information on submitting letters.
JP Theberge is the vice chair of the Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council.
