By Severn Williams
The Harmony Grove Village South saga has a new chapter, and this one is playing out in Sacramento, behind closed doors.
A Colorado billionaire is using the California state legislature to get what he’s been unable to get in court.
SB 1256, authored by San Diego-based Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R), would kill a pending wildfire safety lawsuit against the Harmony Grove Village South (HGVS) 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 over fire safety and greenhouse gas concerns. After years of litigation, the county re-approved the project in 2025 but bypassed the fire safety review its own code required. 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 that are over 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 100 homes in the area. 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 the existing legal rights of residents 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 matches the Harmony Grove Village South situation almost exactly. It has so far cleared two committees in the State Senate and is likely to head to the Assembly.
Ironically, in a 2022 op-ed in the Colorado Sun, Marcel Arsenault — the billionaire developer — wrote movingly about losing his family’s home in the Marshall Fire, urging immediate, nonpartisan action on climate change and wildfire prevention. “Proactive environmental cooperation,” he argued, is essential to protecting communities from future disasters. That piece is worth a read alongside SB 1256.
Good luck fighting that. The days of grassroots wins against deep pockets and corruption are long gone.