How the Mount Um tower was saved
There are two reasons why the Mt. Umunhum radar tower was saved for good this past week. One stems from a groundswell of public sentiment that began at least five years ago. The second had to do with a fresh set of eyes from another bureaucracy.
Put another way, you can fight City Hall, particularly if you can persuade a second City Hall to join your cause.
One of the greatest problems in preserving the South Bay landmark was a matter of line of sight. It shaped the political battle from the beginning.
The owner of the former Air Force station atop Mt. Umunhum is the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, which has its headquarters in Los Altos.
The Midpen district is a long banana-shaped area with many of its voters in Palo Alto and San Mateo County. They cannot see the radar tower. They wonder what the fuss is about.
Guided by General Manager Steve Abbors, no friend of the tower, the Midpen board until last week clung to what I call the “Goldilocks” menu.
One option would have been to raze the tower. The second would have been to take down all but the foundation and convert it into a visitor’s center. The third would be to seal the hulking structure and preserve it.
The language used by the Midpen bureaucracy — the first City Hall, in my telling — revealed its preference. Razing the tower was called “Restoration,” meaning restoring the mountain to its original unbuilt status.
Of these three choices, only preservation was acceptable to the people who valued the tower as a bookmark of the valley’s Cold War history.
Online petition
In 2012, the historian of the Air Force station, Basim Jaber, began an online petition to save the tower that ultimately gathered more than 2,100 signatures.
“That showed the board that there were a heckuva lot more people who wanted this to stay,” says Jaber, who also gave a series of well-attended talks on the history of the sta-
tion.
After a series of contentious public hearings, the Midpen board agreed in 2012 to give the preservationists five years to raise the $1.5 million estimated to save the tower.
The Umunhum Conservancy, led by Jaber and its president, a diplomatic software engineer, Sam Drake, raised about a quarter of that amount.
Historical status
More importantly, the preservationists sought help from the second City Hall — Santa Clara County government — to get historical status for the tower, which would make it far harder to demolish.
After some vacillation, county planners made a significant decision when they hired a Sacramento consulting firm that concluded firmly that the tower, which went into operation in 1962, deserved historic status.
When the county Board of Supervisors followed that last month by adding the tower to the county Historic Resource Inventory, the fight was over.
On Wednesday night, following a recommendation by Abbors, the Midpen board voted reluctantly to preserve and seal the radar tower. The Goldilocks options were abandoned.
The beneficiaries of all this will be the public, which will have a far more interesting visit to Mt. Umunhum when the summit is opened in October.
The line of sight mattered. From the headquarters of the second City Hall — county government — you can see the tower clearly.