Tom Adams and That Bunch
Do A—180 Degree Turn
Jim Keegan, South San Francisco Citizens For Our Mountain
One of the things we just sort of fell into was the association with the Legal Aid Society and Tom Adams as our attorney. The Habitat Conservation Plan—The 10a Permit, Tom Adams, The Sierra Club, and that bunch came full circle on the issue. There was that meeting when David was living at Tony Attard’s place and we tried to bring the two factions together. I refereed that meeting and made the statement “We didn’t come here to get into incriminations, to place blame on anybody. How can we get the CSSBM patched up and back on track?” Because it was completely derailed by then, which was not a good thing. David had moved back to Brisbane by that time. And Doug Butler and I were trying to keep Tom and David and the CSSBM together. But we were never included in this new CSSBM that Tom was creating—we were completely left out of that 10a Permit thing.
Tom was speaking for the CSSBM and that’s when this big rift started because they didn’t want David to use the name of the CSSBM. David was just 100 per cent against Tom Adams and that HCP. Well, Tom and that bunch saw the HCP as some sort of a compromise. Actually, I don’t really know what they saw it as. It’s pretty hard to figure out what’s going through their minds at that time. It was Tom Adams, his wife, the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, Ellie Larsen and Sylvia Gregory. These were the people who got together and made the compromise, you know, you take some and we take some.
See, the whole thing was a fraud. The HCP was a conspiracy between the developers and this bunch of people. They put all kinds of political pressure on the people back in Washington DC. It was during the Reagan Administration and Reagan wanted to get rid of the US Fish and Wildlife, and practically cut em off at the purse strings, he emasculated them. And they were scared silly that they were gonna lose everything. The USFW got caught up in that.
Tom Adams pulled a fast one...
Forget that stuff because that’s the kind of remark that Jackie Speier and the county planning people trashed us on. That’s the kind of stuff they picked up on and really whipped us on. They trashed us. You know Jackie Speier’s famous remark on channel 4. Emerald Yee came to my house and she was there all day working on a 5 minute television slot. They use to have a feature on channel 4. Well, it took Emerald Yee all day to film it and interview us. And she also interviewed Jackie Speier. And Jackie referred to us as renegades.
And at that time Leo J. Ryan was on the council and he was the mayor. He use to live down the street from us. Then he went to the state and then he went to congress. Jackie Speier worked for him and she was in Jonestown. And she was wounded. She still has some schrapnel in her hip or something. She has Potomac fever. That was her big thrust. She started out in County politics and went to the State.
Jim Keegan—3
Jackie Speier is aire-apparent to Tom Lantos. If Tom Lantos retired tomorrow she would have his job. Frank Pacelli ran her campaigns and he was also working for Visitacion Associates and he owned The Bay Relations, his family still has that firm. He attended all the meetings. David got a picture of Frank and Liz Dumonte was trying to protect him. Everybody protected him
After the HCP was in effect WW Dean graded Paradise Valley right up to the park boundary. Well, those slopes are geotechnically unstable, so the land began to slide after the next heavy rain. Dean said he needed to take more of the hillside to correct the problem and South San Francisco gave him permission. But to take some more land, they had to amend the HCP.
When they pushed the park boundaries up the hill, they took another 25 acres of parkland. And this was habitat which was supposed to be in conservation for the butterflies. It’s supposed to be a protected area. And that’s when Tom Adams, Ellie Larsen, Sylvia Gregory realized that they had been taken on the HCP, The 10a Permit. They’d been used. So they called a meeting down at Ellie Larsen’s house. David wasn’t invited but they invited Doug Butler and me. And this was the first time they had involved us in the HCP.
So they had this big meeting down there and they said “Hey, look what’s happening here—we’ve been taken. This is totally political and they’re taking away endangered species habitat that’s supposed to be in conservation and they’re getting away with it.”
And they decided to fight the HCP Amendment. That was a big shock to the developer because he thought he had these people sewed up. And that’s when they decided to file the suit against the HCP.
When it came to the HCP Amendment, the whole CSSBM came together again. And all through that whole thing where we filed a referendum against that HCP Amendment, which allowed them to encroach into the protected butterfly habitat—that was all handled by Tom Adams. His wife, Anne Broadwell, handled it. They did all the legal work for us pro bono and took it all the way up to the California Court of Appeals. We got thousands and thousands of dollars worth of legal work for nothing. They completely came around, 180 degrees, and discovered that they were used by all these people that they had joined with to help put together that 10a permit, the HCP.
We decided to file a referendum against it and it would’ve cost 26,000 dollars to do that referendum. And the referendum had to be done in South San Francisco. Because by this time they had annexed the South Slopes into South San Francisco. And David had moved back to South City. He was living on Walnut Street at Marie Cox’s mother’s house. And we had no trouble getting signatures for that referendum. We had a proposition number on it and everything else. We had an election date and then Dean challenged it. He went to court and held it up and finally won. But that court case dragged out. And Tom Adams did that. He went all the way to the Supreme Court but they wouldn’t take it.
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Jim Keegan—4