Tech billionaires backing a proposal to build an entirely new city on the rolling prairie northeast of San Francisco Bay have agreed to withdraw their measure from the November ballot and will first fund a full environmental review of the project, officials announced Monday.
The pause — announced in a joint statement by a Solano County supervisor and the executive director of California Forever, the group backing the project — marks a dramatic shift in what had been a tireless effort to build a city from scratch in rural Solano County. Until recently, California Forever, whose roster includes tech giants like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, seemed intent on taking the proposal directly to local voters this fall.
In June, after the group spent millions of dollars on a signature-gathering campaign, the county recorder announced that the measure had been approved for the November ballot, despite opposition from many local elected officials. At the time, Jan Sramek, the former Goldman Sachs trader leading the effort, said the measure was nothing less than “a referendum on what we want the future of California to be.”
Then, on Monday morning, California Forever announced it was withdrawing the measure. Instead, the group will follow the county’s normal process for zoning changes to the nearly 18,000-acre swath of land proposed for development. That includes funding a full environmental impact review and reimbursing the county for staff and consultant time related to the project, according to the joint statement issued by Sramek and Mitch Mashburn, chairman of the Solano County Board of Supervisors.
While “the need for more affordable housing and good-paying jobs has merit, the timing has been unrealistic,” Mashburn said in the statement. California Forever’s rush to the polls without an environmental review and negotiated development agreement “was a mistake,” she added. “This politicized the entire project, made it difficult for us and our staff to work with them, and forced everyone in our community to take sides.”
In his part of the statement, Sramek, the CEO of California Forever, noted that his investment group remains committed to the project and feels the urgency to see it through. “For every year we delay, thousands of Solano parents miss more mornings, recitals and bedtime stories because they commute two hours to work. They can’t get those magical moments back.”
“We want to show that it is possible to move faster in California,” Sramek said. “But we now recognize that it is possible to reorder these steps without affecting our ambitious timeline.”
He said his group would work with the county to complete an environmental review and development agreement over the next two years, then take the package to local voters for approval in 2026.
In an interview with The Times, Sramek said the decision to pull the measure from the ballot came after it became clear that Solano County residents wanted a thorough environmental review process. He said he was confident the decision to “reverse the order of steps” — putting the environmental review and development agreement before bringing the issue to voters — would lead to a better outcome.
“It won’t affect the timeline,” he said. “In fact, it could speed it up.”
The change also gives California Forever time to re-establish itself with local residents after the group's rocky introduction into Solano County politics.
The effort, launched under a cloak of secrecy, was mired in controversy last year amid unfounded speculation that the land buyers were foreign agents intent on spying.
That’s because for years, before the developers revealed their plans, they used a limited liability company called Flannery Associates to buy land from farmers across a wide swath of the county, stretching from Rio Vista west to Travis Air Force Base, without telling anyone why. News of the mysterious land sales, in an area so close to a crucial military installation, led some people to speculate that it might be part of an effort by foreign spies to obtain military secrets.
Last year was revealed instead as a bold plan to build a model city from scratch and reinvent the way housing is built in California.
In January, Sramek unveiled plans for the new community, which envisions tens of thousands of homes surrounded by open space and trails. California Forever highlighted the community’s proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area and promised that the project would turn unused agricultural land into “middle-class neighborhoods with housing we can afford.” The city would be walkable, socioeconomically integrated and powered by clean energy.
But the proposal sparked fierce initial opposition from some local leaders concerned the group was circumventing the planning process, as well as environmental groups concerned about the loss of natural habitat.
Mashburn said his agreement with Sramek came after difficult conversations about how the process had gone so far.
“We talked about Solano County, about the initiative, about the future, about what things would look like, about the processes we would have to go through and whether we wanted to do it amicably and have a county where neighbors weren’t fighting each other,” Mashburn said.
“It is commendable that they and he have agreed. It is not easy for a leader to admit that he may have made a mistake.”
The decision to pull the measure from the ballot came a day before the Board of Supervisors was scheduled to discuss a county-commissioned advisory report on the potential fiscal impacts of the development and vote on whether to put the initiative before voters in November.
The report, prepared by Stantec Consulting Services in Walnut Creek, questioned the financial viability of the proposed new city and predicted construction challenges that could lead to large deficits for the county. It estimated the cost of building schools, roads, sewer systems and other infrastructure to support the new community would run into the tens of billions of dollars.
In announcing the new timeline, Mashburn issued a challenge to California Forever investors, asking them to demonstrate how they would provide water, solve transportation challenges and navigate the “financial engineering that makes it possible to pay for billions of dollars in infrastructure” without raising taxes.
Asked whether he believed Sramek and his supporters would eventually build their dream city in his county, Mashburn said he was skeptical it would turn out exactly as the tech titans envisioned.
“We’re starting from scratch,” he said. “There are some incredible hurdles that need to be overcome.”
