It's Only Natural

Often, when people think of San Bruno, South San Francisco, or any of the other surrounding areas, they see it as a sleepy collective of areas that doesn’t offer much to see, let alone explore the outdoors in this vast stretch of concrete jungle that sits along El Camino Real.

However, this notion is untrue, and if there were one man in those surrounding towns 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 sprouted 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 the class provided, I became an environmentalist from then on,”
he said.

When asked what his first big project as an environmentalist was, he shared the story of stopping 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 how he started an anti-development petition and got his family to sign, as well as a few signatures from neighbors, before standing in front of 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 is 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,”

“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,” he said.

However, even after this joyous victory, tensions began to build when they found two endangered species of butterflies, specifically the Mission Blue and the Elfin butterfly, which are federally listed as endangered. Because they are endangered, developers had to accommodate them, 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 and trying to get him to become involved with SBMW, yet Del was too busy starting a family with his wife, Ann.

Once Del’s life had plateaued and he wasn’t as busy as before, he finally joined Schooley and the SBMW with the first project of protecting the mountain's southern slope.

Del explained the issue with the southern slope was that developers wanted to put high rises on top of a verified archaeological site by Bay Shore Boulevard.

“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, Myer’s 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 thirty acres of San Bruno Mountain they owned to extend the State and County park if 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 to get off the ground.