RubyLeeSchembari.blog

Written and edited by Ruby Lee Schembari

Often, when people think of San Bruno or any of the other surrounding areas, they think of it as a sleepy suburb of San Francisco that doesn’t offer much to see, let alone explore.

However, this notion is untrue, and if there were one man in the area to set the record straight, it would be none other than Del Schembari, a local environmentalist and former conservation chair of the San Bruno Mountain Watch.

Del has made it his life’s goal to protect the natural landscape on San Bruno Mountain, and it all started in 1974 when he joined a non-profit group called Save San Bruno Mountain. When asked what sparked his passion for protecting the environment, Del reflected on the 1960s when he transferred to SF State:

“They had an ecology course at SF State, and I took the class with about 400 other people, and it was like one of the first ecology classes in the country. So, after reading the material that was provided, I became an environmentalist from then on,” he said.

When asked what his first big project as an environmentalist was, he told me about helping stop the development of San Bruno Mountain in 1974.

“The main issue at the time was developers wanting to put a 20,000-person high-rise development on the saddle of San Bruno. So we banded together with people from Brisbane and around the mountain,” Mr. Schembari remarked.

He explained that he started an anti-development petition, got his family to sign, and collected a few signatures from neighbors before presenting it to the Daly City Council. Shortly after, a local newspaper picked up the story and published it. Del received a phone call from a future colleague, Dave Schooley, after Schooley had read the article about Del and his efforts.

“He asked me to come to a meeting, and that’s how I joined Save San Bruno Mountain. It was two years of a grassroots organization, going door to door and supporting the organization however I could,” he said.

“And in 1976, the board of supervisors voted to put the saddle of San Bruno Mountain in an open space zoning, which really upset the developers and cost one of the supervisors his job because they stopped supporting him after that vote,”

However, even after this joyous victory, Del explained that tensions began to build when they found two endangered butterfly species living on the mountain, the Mission Blue and the Elfin butterfly, both federally listed as endangered since 1976.

Because the species is endangered, developers had to make an accommodation, but if they could implement a scientifically approved plan to maintain the species, they could develop in certain sections.

“It’s called a habitat conservation plan. It was the first one in the country, but this split the group in half,” Del shared.

“My friend, David Schooley, and some other SSBM members were against it, but I went with the rest of the board because there didn’t seem to be an alternative. Schooley eventually quit with some other members, forming the San Bruno Mountain Watch.”

Even though the two of them split, Schooley kept calling Del, trying to get him involved with SBMW, but Del was too busy starting a family with his wife, my grandmother Ann.

Once Del’s life had plateaued, he finally joined Schooley and the SBMW with the first project of protecting the mountain’s southern slope.

He explained that the southern slope contained a verified archaeological site that developers wanted to build high-rises on.

“So we worked on that with a lawyer, and without a lawyer, environmental wins are difficult to obtain,” he said.

“So we began putting lawsuits on the property; however, another developer, Myers Development Company, had recently bought the property, so we started sending lawsuits to them.”

Del described how, eventually, the developer responded to the lawsuits and was willing to negotiate with the SBMW. The deal was that the developer would give 30 acres of San Bruno Mountain that they owned to extend the State and County park, on the condition that he could build two high-rises away from the archaeological site.

“So that was a compromise,” he said.

The Southern Slopes project happened in 1998, and Del had been a board member of the SBMW project for 25 years after that. Even though he retired in 2023, he still has environmental projects in the works. Some of his newest projects are protecting the Daly City Dunes, which is located right above JFK Elementary, working against a proposed million-square-foot development in the Quarry next to San Bruno Mountain, and helping to get a new San Bruno Mountain-related non-profit off the ground.

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