I'm probably just displaying my ignorance of TT, but I'd look for a percent sign followed by a single quote. The code you included doesn't have it, but that's what the error message says.
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Comment on Re: Template::Toolkit, DBI and mysql % wildcards
I updated the SQL query to be the same as the code producing the error with a 'adm%' in the query rather than '%adm'. However, that is the query I need to run and cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to get the template to allow the valid MySQL wildcard character in the query.