The company “California Forever” is holding a series of town halls to gain community support for its proposal of a new city on agricultural zoned land in Solano County.
Due to the Orderly Growth Initiative, the land is currently protected as working farms, ranches, and watershed areas in Solano County. Urban growth and development has been directed into the cities. The initiative says only the voters of Solano County may amend or repeal those policies.
California Forever has its eyes set on a November 2024 ballot initiative to seek voter approval to rezone the land and build its city on portions of the 60,000 acres the Flannery Associates group has acquired in unincorporated Solano over the last five years.
California Forever is the parent company of Flannery Associates.
The website of California Forever states it is a company founded in 2017 by CEO Jan Sramek.
The investors include Marc Andreessen, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, Chris Dixon, John Doerr, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Google investor Michael Moritz, Laurene Powell Jobs (the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs), and the California investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is a big venture capital fund in Silicon Valley that has funded many of the apps that people have on their phones, Mr. Sramek said.
California Forever stated that approximately 97 percent of the capital comes from U.S. investors while the remaining 3 percent comes from Patrick and John Collison and other U.K. and Irish investors.
Earlier this year, Flannery Associates made headlines due to its land purchase near Solano County’s Travis Air Force Base, which raised security concerns because the group of investors behind Flannery Associates was unknown at the time.
The Epoch Times previously reported that public records of Solano County can trace Flannery Associates LLC back to Feb. 9, 2018.
Allan Fischer, chairman of the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association, told The Epoch Times that he first started to hear of property sales about a year and a half ago. He said the former postmaster of Bird’s Landing in southern Solano County told him they sold their property to Flannery Associates.
He said a lawyer from out of state was doing the purchasing for Flannery Associates in a “close-mouthed” kind of way.
Mr. Fischer said, “The reason they didn’t go public was they wanted to buy as much property as they could before people started to object, so they didn’t tell anybody.”
California Forever’s website states that to build a complete, sustainable community, it needed to assemble a large holding, and the only way to avoid creating a rush of reckless short-term land speculation was to not share its specific plans until it finished acquiring the properties.
Mr. Fischer said that Flannery Associates wanted to trade the land adjacent to Travis Air Force Base for other land away from the Base because Flannery Associates didn’t realize the Department of Defense has conditions on that property.
In a panel discussion about the project, Mr. Sramek said the reason the company bought property all the way to the Travis Air Force Base fence line is because they wanted to protect the land from being developed. He said California Forever will not develop the land near the Air Force Base, and it will act as a buffer between the Base and their proposed project.
Mr. Fischer said the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association’s Western Railway Museum owns 20 miles of railway from Jepson Prairie to Montezuma. It uses about 6 miles of it for museum attendees to take a historical ride on the electric train.
He said that not much has changed in that area of Solano County since 1911 when the railroad was built, and people in the area would like to keep it that way.
He said: “We would like to see it stay the way it is now. We are not against what they’re doing, because we don’t really know what they want to do and how they’re going to do it. They have not approached us, which I guess is saying we’re irrelevant to what they’re doing. They think they can do whatever they want without talking to us.”
He said Flannery Associates owns several parcels adjacent to the railway line.
Mr. Fischer said that Flannery Associates has a lot of money to spend on this project, and when you start throwing money around, sometimes that changes everything.
He said the farmland in eastern Solano County, where the city is being proposed, used to have 50–70 farmers, but now it’s down to about 18.
Mr. Fischer mentioned one farmer he knows who refused to sell his farm to Flannery Associates because he wants to keep farming on the land. The farmer told Mr. Fischer that the other farmers around him all sold their property to Flannery Associates.
The farmer added that he used to lease the land from his neighbors for his animals to graze on. The farmer said Flannery Associates is now playing “hardball” with him when it comes to leasing the land for his animals to graze. That farmer is currently being sued by Flannery Associates, Mr. Fischer said.
California Forever stated on its website that it is suing a group of local farmers for allegedly engaging in an illegal price-fixing conspiracy regarding the sale of their properties.
The website states that Flannery’s lawsuit alleges that within a few days of the Flannery Associates purchase rejection, instead of deciding not to sell the property, the defendant attempted to force Flannery to pay an asking price of $32,000 per acre by contacting other local landowners and telling them that the remaining property owners should be in agreement on what the selling price of the properties should be, so Flannery Associates cannot play owners against owners.
The Times Herald reported that at a recent town hall in Rio Vista, Maryn Johnson, a member of one of the families named in the lawsuit, asked Mr. Sramek in the middle of the meeting to drop the lawsuit as a gesture of goodwill toward the farmers. He declined after alleging that Ms. Johnson asked to settle the lawsuit previously.
Ms. Johnson, who is a teacher, said her brother continues the family tradition of farming and they have no intention of selling the property, which is why they and others set prices so high.
Ms. Johnson told The Times Herald: “Of course we have interacted with each other. The people that are named in this lawsuit are family even though we share different last names.”
The Times Herald reported that Ms. Johnson didn’t expect Mr. Sramek to drop the lawsuit.
She added, “But I think you need to ask these questions and put powerful entities in the position of stating before the public whether they will or will not act with common decency.”
Mr. Sramek said: “There are hundreds of people here who didn’t sell, and they are not getting sued, and there are 600 people who we bought from and we are not suing them. So it’s a small group; we’ve settled with half of them. You heard me say today, ‘Hey, if you want to discuss a settlement, we can talk.’”
California Forever has not revealed any specific plans yet but has put together a team of engineers and planners listed on the California Forever website. Mr. Sramek said plans will start to come out in January 2024.
Supervisor Mitch Mashburn, who represents the 5th District of Solano County, mentioned in a panel discussion that California Forever has a lot of hurdles to overcome when it comes to building the city. He said there’s transportation, water, power, the protection of Travis Air Force Base, and innumerable issues with regulatory agencies like the Department of Fish and Wildlife regarding protecting endangered species and plants.
“Until we actually see a plan … this particular project is all hat and no cattle,” Mr. Mashburn told Mr. Sramek. “You got nowhere to go but up, brother.”
California Forever’s website states that it was created to bring back the California Dream. It states that the company wants to do that by building a new community, solar farms, and a greenbelt of agriculture in eastern Solano County.
It states that the project will bring thousands of good paying jobs and new paths to middle-class home ownership in safe, walkable neighborhoods.
