Farmers, Sierra Club Line Up Against California Forever
Battle lines are forming as referendum looms on utopian city backed by billionaires.
In Solano County, battle lines are forming in a campaign over a referendum that would clear the way for California Forever, the utopian village a bunch of Silicon Valley billionaires want to build in the eastern half of the county.
The ballot question in November 2024 will either validate the vision of a former Goldman Sachs trader and several of his really rich friends or it will deliver a rapidly forming backlash to a scheme that involved the stealth acquisition for $800M of more than 50,000 acres of eastern Solano County in the past five years.
California Forever envisions a new city on the outskirts of Travis Air Force Base in a hilly rural area halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento.
The referendum is a lightning rod for anything associated with California Forever, including a recent Solano County Water Authority meeting at which the group proposed to fund a study on the need to upgrade the county’s water supply.
The meeting drew 200 attendees, mainly residents of the farmland in Solano County. California Forever parent Flannery Associates earlier this year accused a group of farmers who had refused to sell their land of colluding to raise prices.
US Representative John Garamendi, whose district includes Solano County, has raised national security concerns regarding California Forever’s proximity to Travis Air Force Base.
The Sierra Club this week joined the opposition to California Forever, calling the project a “hostile takeover” of Solano County to build utopian project that would reverse years of local planning, according to a report in the San Francisco Standard.
Flannery Associates is pitching California Forever as a new urban area that will be as “walkable as Paris” in a series of town halls the group is hosting in several Solano County locations.
Former investment banker Jan Sramek launched Flannery’s land acquisition binge in 2017. During the next five years, the initiative received the backing of Silicon Valley investment titan Marc Andreesen, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, among others.
Environmental groups have suggested that California Forever is violating the county’s Orderly Growth Initiatives, which dates back to 1984.
“With respect to these project opponents, who made up their minds before ever seeing details of the project, they are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own ‘facts,’” Sramek told the Standard.
“By giving voters the final say, this project explicitly adheres to the Orderly Growth Initiative, by asking Solano voters whether they want to turn an area with the least productive and least ecologically valuable soils in all of Solano County into a new economic engine for the county,” the California Forever founder said.