St. Helena's Fire Code and the City's Attempt to Avoid It
By Daniel Hale
This letter appeared in the St. Helena Star in August 2026.
For years, St. Helena's municipal code has required two fire-access roads for residential developments with more than 30 units. It's a common-sense rule in a town surrounded by lands prone to wildfires.
Yet in February, the City Council approved the 41-unit Spring Grove project with only a single access road, in violation of the local fire code.
When residents pointed out that the project didn't meet the two-road requirement, the Council didn't fix the project. It repealed the rule.
Residents sued and qualified a referendum. Facing a public vote it was likely to lose, the Council rescinded the repeal, publicly restoring the two-road requirement.
That should have ended the matter. It didn't.
A Technicality Used as a Weapon
The City now claims the restored requirement "has no effect" because the reinstated language references the 2022 edition of the California Fire Code rather than the 2025 edition currently in effect. But that argument confuses a code reference with the law itself.
The 2022 reference was mandatory when the provision was enacted because it identified the state Fire Code then in effect. When California updates its Fire Code every three years, cities adopt the new state code and carry their local amendments forward, updating the date reference to the new edition. St. Helena has done this for years. In fact, when St. Helena adopted the other 2025 state codes this year, it updated the references for its other local fire-code amendments from 2022 to 2025.
But it chose to omit this one.
That omission does not erase the substantive requirement the Council restored and residents fought to preserve. If anything, it creates a straightforward administrative problem: the City should correct its published code to accurately reflect the law the Council adopted. Instead, the City appears to be treating its own failure to update a code citation as a reason to disregard the requirement itself.
What the City Is Doing Is Dishonest Governance
A published municipal code should tell residents what the law is. Homeowners, architects, engineers, contractors, City staff, and first responders all rely on it. No one should have to reconstruct legislative history, untangle the City's drafting errors, or parse staff comments to determine whether a basic fire-safety requirement is still in effect.
And the stakes are not theoretical.
The City is now processing the Spring Vineyard development, another proposal with almost 80 units and only a single emergency access road. How St. Helena applies its fire-access requirement has immediate public-safety and legal consequences.
Two Principles That Matter More Than Any Single Project
First, projects should be judged under the rules in effect when they are approved — not under rules rewritten or eliminated afterward to rescue an approval that did not meet existing standards.
Second, the City's published Code and its decisions should faithfully reflect the laws its Council has adopted. Clerical mistakes should be corrected in public, not sneakily weaponized to defeat a fire-safety requirement residents fought to preserve, just to benefit one development project.
The Council restored the two-road requirement. The requirement remains in the Code.
Fire safety is not a clerical game. Neither is honest government.