Matier & Ross:
Prominent Marin attorney in neighborhood feud with nuns.
The attorney who made national news representing the family of Jahi
McMath in the battle to keep their daughter attached to life support even after she was declared dead is now waging a fight closer to home.
His opponent: Dominican nuns who want to shelter two homeless women and their children at their convent next to the lawyer’s megamillion-dollar Marin County mansion.
“I’m just trying to protect the nature of my neighborhood,” said attorney Chris Dolan, whose $6.5 million Victorian sits behind a tall hedge on 2 acres next to the convent on
Locust Avenue near downtown San Rafael.
“They are making it out like this is the big, rich neighborhood against the poor sisters — but if anybody is the underdog, it’s me,” Dolan said.
Nasty battles are nothing new for the personal injury lawyer, who practices in San Francisco. He made his name in Jahi’s case, representing the McMath family in its effort to keep the teenager attached to life-support machines after doctors declared her dead following tonsillitis surgery at Children’s Hospital Oakland in 2013.
Dolan’s latest battle began in January when city officials granted the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael a permit to use their Our Lady of Lourdes Convent to house two needy families referred to them by a local nonprofit.
The families would live in what is now a vacant wing of the convent, which would be spruced up at a cost of $30,000 to $50,000. The rest of the convent houses 17 elderly nuns who need assisted living care.
“This is just one little mission we want to carry out for two years,” said Sister Patricia Simpson, the convent’s director. After two years, the thinking goes, the families would be on their feet and would move on, and the city’s permit would lapse.
Simpson said she was inspired to house the two homeless families after she saw images of children fleeing the Syrian civil war. Taking in refugees proved too big a challenge for the sisters, so they set their sights on sheltering a couple of single mothers and their children.
Dolan, a personal injury lawyer, went on the attack against his nun neighbors in a 17-page appeal to the city’s Planning Commission, saying the order’s plan to house the families violated the area’s zoning ordinance. He argued that a full-blown zoning change — as opposed to a conditional use permit — was needed and that “neighbors have well-founded concerns about the change and its effect on the neighborhood.”
Dolan says his real fear is that allowing a change of use for the nuns will open the door for the neighboring Dominican University — which has no affiliation with the order — to eventually buy out the convent and convert the property into student dorms.
“The university is always looking for more space,” Dolan said.
Gary Ragghianti, an attorney representing the nuns, calls that argument nonsense. Selling the property to the university would be the nuns’ prerogative, he said, “but nobody has indicated that’s their intention.”
For her part, Simpson calls such suspicions unfounded.
“We have been here since 1889, and we started the neighborhood,” she said. “And we haven’t done anything to not have our neighbors trust us.”
Dolan suggested that the whole problem could be avoided if the nuns simply agreed to house the families at the larger Dominican Convent that they run across the street, whose buildings provide more of a buffer to his property.
“That’s nice of him to suggest what we should do and how we should handle our homes,” said Kate Martin, development director for the convent. But she says this effort was something undertaken specifically by the nuns at the assisted living facility — and anyway, the Dominican Convent is fully occupied.
Dolan argues that the deck is stacked against him, that the nuns are in cahoots with the city to approve the deal. He points out that Ragghianti is the former law partner of City Attorney Rob Epstein, whose initial stance that the housing conversion was legal paved the way for the zoning administrator and Planning Commission to OK the plan.
But Epstein insists everything was done by the book, and pointed out that he has known Dolan longer than he has known Ragghianti. “It’s “not unusual for people to know each other in a community the size of San Rafael or Marin, and lawyers knowing each other is not relevant,” he said.
Dolan said he fully expects his appeal will go down to defeat Monday when it goes before the San Rafael City Council.
“Then I can file a lawsuit,” he said.
As for the McMath case, Jahi’s mom and stepdad now care for their daughter — who is still attached to life-support machines — in New Jersey while they pursue a malpractice suit against the doctors who performed her surgery and Children’s Hospital Oakland.
Although he continues to stay in touch with the family, Dolan says, he isn’t involved in the suit.