A controversial housing development near Escondido is beset by legal challenges yet again, after the Board of Supervisors backed the project last year. But now state Sen. Brian Jones has stepped in with a bill to help the project fight its litigation headaches.
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Legislation from the San Diego Republican could halt one of two ongoing lawsuits against Harmony Grove Village South, a 450-home development from a Denver-based real estate firm owned by billionaire Marcel Arsenault.
San Diego County is facing a lawsuit from residents and an environmental group alleging it violated the state’s Subdivision Map Act when supervisors approved the project in October. The Sierra Club has also sued, saying the county ignored state rules for studying how much future residents of new housing developments would drive.
The chief longtime concern about the project is its location in an area at very high risk of wildfire. The lawsuit by the local groups, the Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council and the Endangered Habitats League, alleges county supervisors improperly relied on outdated fire safety standards when they backed the project.
The town council previously unsuccessfully sued over the project back in 2018.
Jones, California’s highest-ranking Republican as the state Senate minority leader, said he’s grown frustrated with litigation blocking development amid the state’s housing crisis.
“We’ve watched for decades as lawyers and other groups have fine-tuned their tactics to make money from the litigation spin cycle, and Californians have had enough,” Jones said in a statement to The San Diego Union-Tribune. “It needs to end, and this bill is just one small step in that direction.”
Jones’ legislation, Senate Bill 1256, does not mention Harmony Grove by name. But it targets the exact legal situation the development faces.
The bill would prohibit lawsuits under the Subdivision Map Act if past litigation has already dealt with “substantially similar claims.”
That prohibition would only apply to developments with at least 400 homes being proposed in the unincorporated area of a county with a population between 3 million and 4 million, and only two counties meet that threshold — San Diego and Orange counties.
Jones said he originally wanted the bill to apply statewide. But in talks with other lawmakers, Jones narrowed the bill’s scope before introducing it.
He insists the bill “doesn’t give any developer special treatment.”
“It simply says that, at some point — when all the plans are checked, the tests are run, the public gives its input and the local elected officials and government agencies responsible for approvals approve — then it’s time to let the builders build,” he added.
J.P. Theberge, the town council’s vice chair, said this isn’t the first time the developer has used political influence to push the project forward. In 2024 and 2025, the developer steered $80,000 in donations to Republican groups and the local Democratic party amid key supervisor elections, campaign disclosures show.
“Now they’re going to our state senator and getting him to put a bill on the floor that goes against his own community,” Theberge said.
Much of the safety concern around Harmony Grove Village South has centered on the development’s lack of a secondary entrance — a leading issue raised in the town council’s current lawsuit. Residents in neighboring communities have said they fear how thousands of people would evacuate in the event of a fast-moving wildfire.
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Theberge said that if a secondary access were added to the project plans, his group would back down from a court fight.
“They won’t throw us a bone,” he said. “They think it’s cheaper to pay off all these people than fix the problem.”
When county supervisors approved the project in October, they directed staff to study how a secondary entrance could be built.
David Kovach, a managing partner with RCS Harmony Partners, said his company supports Jones’ bill because it tries to address a wider statewide issue of litigation delaying and blocking housing development.
“At its core, we hope this bill will prevent repetitive legal challenges that are purposely intended to delay housing, which results in increased costs and worsens California’s affordability crisis,” Kovach said.
Tori Ballif Gibbons, a San Francisco attorney representing the town council, contends the new lawsuit deals with different legal issues than her client’s previous case.
In that 2018 case, the town council argued that the project had an inadequate fire protection plan. In 2021, an appeals judge sided with the county and the developer on the project’s fire standards but still ordered the county to rescind its approvals over its lack of carbon emissions mitigation.
Today, the town council’s lawsuit alleges the county relied on a dated 2015 environmental review for the project. California has since adopted new fire safety standards that that review didn’t take into account.
David McQuead, the fire chief of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District, which would service the development, told a community meeting last year the project could not be passed today under current standards.
Ballif Gibbons said Jones’ bill, if passed, would likely affect her client’s lawsuit — but she pointed out that it doesn’t explain what would make a new legal action “substantially similar” to a previous one. What’s more, the court system already bars the same plaintiff from bringing claims that are too similar to past claims, she said.
“The bill is an effort to allow projects to go forward that are not evaluated against current fire safety laws,” Ballif Gibbons said.
A hearing is scheduled in July to determine if the case can move forward, after county lawyers asked the court to dismiss it.
The county did not return a request for comment.
Jones’ bill has so far unanimously passed the state Senate’s judiciary and local government committees. It’s now awaiting a vote from the whole Senate.
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