Encinitas to consider placing a pause on permits for controversial Clark Avenue Apartments project

A proposal to suspend the permitting process for a controversial, 199-unit apartment project just east of Interstate 5 will go before the City Council Wednesday.

A group of people who live near the proposed development are asking city officials to stop it from proceeding, saying it doesn’t meet city fire codes, and thus fails to adhere to the requirements of a state housing law that allowed it to gain permit approval three years ago.

Long controversial, the development plans put forward by Western National Properties call for placing 15 three-story buildings on a 6.22-acre site in a neighborhood of single-family homes with narrow, older roadways. Though the development is known as the Clark Avenue Apartments project, its entrance is proposed to be on Union Street.

Project opponents say the development plans fail to meet city fire codes regarding roadway width. Under city regulations, projects that exceed 30 feet in height need to have an “unobstructed road width” of “not less than 26 feet,” project opponents wrote in an Aug. 11 letter to city officials asking for the permit pause and additional environmental review.

“The project’s 39-foot height triggers this requirement,” states the letter, which was signed by more than a dozen people. “The sole access roads for the project — Union Street and Clark Avenue — are dangerously substandard. Union Street measures only 19-21 feet wide, with failed edge pavement, no curbs and utility pole encroachment. Clark Avenue narrows to 21 feet at the project’s primary entrance, where access is most critical.”

They ask Encinitas officials to withhold the project’s grading permit, cease any other permit processing and place the item on the council’s agenda.

An attorney for the developers informed city officials late last week that they view this proposal to reopen the project’s approval process as “entirely inappropriate and illegal.”

In the Aug. 22 letter, attorney Marco Gonzalez mentioned that the project was approved by the city in 2022 and wrote that the deadline to challenge its exemption from a full-scale, state environmental impact assessment has long since passed. That deadline was Oct. 22, 2022, he wrote.

State courts “have consistently held” that once the deadline has passed, opponents cannot launch new challenges to a project’s approval, Gonzalez added. Also, he wrote, the fire department access issue mentioned in the opponents’ letter was “already addressed during the project’s original review and approval process,” so the opponents’ current claims are “both untimely and without merit.”

In a final note at the bottom of his letter, Gonzalez said that the project’s primary entrance is on Union Street and that Clark Avenue is only used as an exit, not as a “primary entrance,” contrary to what opponents wrote in their letter.

Encinitas City Council member Jim O’Hara, who was elected in November and thus didn’t vote on the project when it came before the council three years ago, agreed to place the residents’ request on Wednesday’s agenda. The meeting begins at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 505 S. Vulcan Ave.

In a report produced for the meeting, O’Hara wrote that the opponents have provided “credible evidence that the Clark Avenue Apartment project cannot lawfully be processed” under Senate Bill 35. That’s a 2017 state law that grants higher-density-housing developers some exemptions from municipal building regulations in exchange for setting aside some of their units for lower-income people.

“Placing this matter before council ensures that Encinitas does not move forward with a project under defective approvals, compromised fire safety, or unlawful ministerial processing,” O’Hara wrote in his report.

O’Hara added that he believes Encinitas should require the project’s developers to do a full-scale, environmental impact report, if they wish to proceed with their construction plans.