Palm trees may be fun to look at, but they can sometimes pose a serious risk to their surroundings when it comes to flammability. A Rancho Bernardo homeowner is raising the alarm over dozens of untrimmed palm trees surrounding an elementary school and nearby homes, warning that their dried fronds create a serious fire risk. Debbie Nolan, whose backyard faces Westwood Elementary School, told ABC 10News that the palms haven’t been trimmed once in the 13 years she has lived in her townhouse. She compared the situation to a matchbook waiting for a spark.
Nolan said a years-long dispute between her homeowners association and the Poway Unified School District over responsibility for the trees has left the problem unresolved, with both sides pointing fingers. She said she asked the district to clean up the palms and was told it was the HOA’s job.
The two parties each place the responsibility on the other. The Westwood Homeowners’ Association says the trees sit on Poway Unified property and that it has tried without success for years to get them trimmed, while the district confirms it owns the land but says it is not responsible for the trimming. Nolan showed the station dozens of palms ringed with dried, dead fronds around the school.
The dispute turns on a decades-old agreement. Poway Unified says a 1974 agreement between the townhouse developer and the association requires the HOA to maintain the trees, and district spokesperson Josué Reyna said in a statement that agreements dating back to the 1970s assigned maintenance responsibility for the area to the current association’s predecessor. In 2023, the district asked the HOA to split the nearly $200,000 cost of tree remediation equally, and the HOA refused. Association manager Candace Baker said the trees are on the school’s property and should be maintained by the district, not the surrounding associations.
Why Untrimmed Palm Trees Are a Fire Hazard
Palm trees become dangerous specifically when their dead fronds are left in place. The dried fronds are highly flammable. Because they burn fast and hot and can be lofted into the air once alight, a burning palm can throw embers well beyond the tree itself. That ember cast is what makes untrimmed palms a neighborhood-scale hazard rather than a single-property one.
The risk lands harder in a region primed to burn. Southern California’s dry summers and Santa Ana winds can carry embers into landscaping, roofs, and vents far from an ignition point, and a row of untrimmed palms next to homes and a school sits directly in that path. Nolan said last week’s Creelman Fire in Ramona deepened her worry, and she warned that a fire reaching the palms around the school could become a major tragedy if the trees are not trimmed before it happens.
Who’s Responsible for Trees on a Property Line?
Disputes like this one are common. It’s not always clear who’s responsible for taking care of certain parts of a yard or property, and that’s part of the issue here with the palm tree maintenance. And ownership doesn’t always settle the question of who’s responsible. A third-party agreement could always change that. Poway Unified argues the 1974 agreement did just that. When the underlying document is decades old, the parties can end up reading it differently, and the trees go unmaintained while the disagreement drags on.
But fires don’t wait for people to figure out who should be trimming trees. Fire officials and local governments can sometimes compel abatement of a documented hazard regardless of the ownership dispute, through weed-abatement or nuisance ordinances that let a jurisdiction order the work done and bill the responsible party.
For a resident caught in the middle, options include pressing the local fire authority to inspect and issue an abatement order, rather than waiting for the HOA and the district to agree. With students returning to Westwood Elementary next month, Nolan said she hopes someone will act, though for now the dispute continues.