Solano County Administrator responds to California Forever Purchases
Cows graze on land purchased by the Flannery Associates with California Forever in hopes of building a new city between Suisun City and Rio Vista. | (Chris Riley/Times-Herald)
Vallejo Times-Herald, by Nick McConnell, September 6, 2023
The Solano County Administrator’s Office responded with a Wednesday news release concerning the purchase of over 50,000 acres of Solano County farmland near Travis Air Force Base by California Forever, the parent company of Flannery Associates.
The release identifies the administrator’s office as “the government agency with land use authority over this region.” Solano County has been in communication with state and federal representatives about the extent of Flannery holdings since 2018.
“Communications with Flannery have been limited despite the county’s efforts to understand their intentions for the use of the land they had been acquiring,” according to the release.
The county has informed Flannery since it started making the purchases that the land acquired is limited to agricultural use under the current regulations.
“To be clear,” the release reads, “if the recent reports in the media are true, along with the assertions made on California Forever’s website, the concept of creating a new urban center in Solano County raises some complex issues.”
According to the administrator’s office, urban development in that area would need to be put to a vote on the ballot and be approved by a majority of Solano County voters.
“For decades, Solano County residents have consistently decided at the ballot box that preservation of agricultural land is a priority,” the administrator’s office said.
A cornerstone of land use policy in Solano County has been the protection of Travis Air Force Base from any encroachment that could threaten the base.
The release notes that Solano County has not yet received any project information or proposals from the company at this time.
We will continue to keep the community informed as new information becomes available,” the release said. “It is the County’s hope to have frank discussions with California Forever regarding Solano County’s long-standing land use policies and their expressed vision.”
[There is a massive hazardous spill fully blocking westbound I-780 lanes near the East 2nd Street exit. The closure is at East 2nd Street with traffic diverted off at 5th Street. Scroll down past the NBC post to see Benicia PD’s Facebook post regarding the incident. BPD has also reported that the liquid asphalt is entering a highway culvert, possibly on its way to Benicia storm drains, and we’ll follow up on that s we can. Benicia residents, folks picking up kids from Benicia schools, commuters – be warned, be safe and please find alternate routes home. ]
Overturned tanker truck spills asphalt across westbound I-780, injuries reported
Initial reports from a California Highway Patrol incident information page said “6,000 gallons of hot asphalt oil slurries” spilled onto the freeway.
KRON4, by Alex Baker, August 6, 2023 (as of 12 pm)
An overturned tanker truck collision resulting in injuries occurred on I-780 near 2nd Street in Benicia Wednesday morning. The truck has spilled asphalt across the westbound lanes, according to a Sig Alert.
The truck that overturned was hauling 6,000 gallons of hot asphalt. All lanes are currently blocked. The California Highway Patrol said no one was hurt in the crash, which happened just before 9:30 a.m.
The tanker ended up leaking across all the lanes of the westbound I-780 and on the right embankment of the freeway and into a ditch.
Environmental regulators have been called to assess whether any of the substance has reached local waterways. At least one resident asked authorities if the substance hit her fence.
All traffic is being diverted off the freeway at Fifth Street. The CHP is asking people to avoid the area while the cleanup is ongoing Wednesday afternoon. There is no estimate for when the highway will reopen.
Bay City News contributed to this report.
Keep reading, there’s more.
Here’s another amazing photo, this time from the folks at NBC that shows the spill from the NBC chopper:
Westbound I-780 in Benicia is closed at East 5th Street due to a semi-truck turnover and hazardous materials spill. Please take alternate routes. It is expected to be closed for an extended period of time.
At approximately 9:15 a.m. on Wednesday, September 6th, the Benicia Fire Department responded to a report of a semi-truck turnover. Upon arrival, firefighters found that the semi-truck had been transporting 6,000 gallons of hot asphalt tar in two 3,000 gallon trailers. Both asphalt tar trailers ruptured. The product spilled across the westbound lanes of I-780 along the shoulder and into the culvert. One patient was transported to a local hospital.
Benicia Fire Department, Benicia Police Department, Solano County Environmental Health, California Department of Fish & Wildlife, Caltrans, and California Highway Patrol have responded.
For more information, contact Della Olm, Benicia Fire Public Information Officer at dolm@ci.benicia.ca.us or 707-746-4272.
As the culture wars find a new front in public libraries, Benicia Public Library’s strategic plan presentation this Friday represents more than just a look into our library’s future
By Ashton Lyle, September 5, 2023
Ashton Lyle, BenIndy contributor.
During my first year of college, my friend offered me a tour of her hometown, a small community in the Boston suburbs. While exploring downtown, she pointed out a small, nondescript building that had been the nation’s first public library. Founded by Benjamin Franklin in a town named for him, this library broke with the tradition of previous lending collections, which had subscription rates equivalent to $575 today. Instead, access was free to the community.
The public library model pioneered in Franklin, Massachusetts expanded across the country, and libraries rapidly became essential public spaces, serving as community gathering points that hosted meetings, town events, and literary discussions. The Benicia Public Library, which helped introduce me to a love of learning as an elementary school student through its summer reading program, continues in this tradition and was fundamental to my intellectual development, especially when coupled with the libraries at my elementary, middle, and high schools.
Today, these same institutions are regularly under attack, both in Benicia and nationwide. The state of Georgia just applied its “divisive concepts” law for the first time, firing a longtime teacher for reading “My Shadow is Purple” to her class, a children’s book about “being true to oneself and moving beyond the gender binary.” And in Benicia, proponents of anti-trans bigotry have spoken before the school board with all the faux intellectualism typical of the “do your own research” crowd.
These attacks have converged around school libraries which, despite their importance in educational outcomes, are now at continual risk of restriction and censorship. This is an especially concerning development because of the strong correlation between strong library programs and student success, even after correcting for parent education and income levels. Interestingly,studies find it is staffing levels, rather than the size of a library’s collection, that determine students’ success.
This finding reflects the changing nature of the contemporary library. The library, once focused largely on lending and storing books, has adapted to the internet age, refocusing its mission to become an essential training resource for media literacy, academic research, and critical thinking. In an age where a nearly infinite amount of written material is instantly accessible to students at an increasingly young age, libraries play an essential role in teaching young people how to process and prioritize information.
Today, libraries are the primary means by which we teach students to vet the truth and relevance of something they’ve read. School libraries regularly provide students with formal training on how to responsibly use online resources, providing fundamental approaches to gathering quality information that is missing from many segments of our population. They also lead by example, providing young people with reading material that is accurate and well-contextualized, thereby familiarizing them with factual texts and well-informed opinions. In contrast to the internet, which provides stimuli in the most engaging package possible, a library contains information that is organized, research-backed, and vetted for extreme content. Learning to tell the difference between fact and fiction is increasingly difficult to teach, but libraries do it more successfully than any other resource I’ve seen.
Equally important to consider is that attempting to limit the information in school libraries, where it can be contextualized by librarians and expanded upon by other texts, does not eliminate a young person’s desire for this information. By removing texts and topics from the professionally curated and regulated space of a public library, “activists” such as Mom’s for Liberty force young people to seek insight through more accessible means, like the internet, where information is wholly unregulated, regularly untruthful, and usually decontextualized. Real harm takes place when naive children, desperate for guidance, stumble across content that exposes ignorant, explicit, or hateful beliefs. Algorithmic incentives to prioritize engaging content can lead teens to view self-harm, dangerous, or extremist content at a very impressionable age, potentially trapping them in silos of thought from which it can be difficult to extract oneself.
Attempting to pull books off shelves condemns our young people to explore the world of information alone, without guidance and without guardrails. It leaves them un-inoculated against illiberal thought, prejudice, and other harms. Ultimately the censorship approach harms children’s development, produces adults less interested and able to participate in civil society, and further weakens our democratic institutions. This has been evidenced in civil societies across regions and cultures; there is nothing innate in America that will prevent it from happening here. Only a wholesale rejection of reactionary tendencies amongst our neighbors can stop the slow slide to autocracy.
Libraries are essential to giving young people the tools, information, and desire to maintain and expand America’s civil society. This is why I encourage all residents to participate in the upcoming discussion regarding the future of the library. On Friday, September 8th from 6 – 8 pm, the BPL is holding a meeting that discusses future planned initiatives. Help keep our library relevant and our society free.
California Forever, a group of Silicon Valley investors who want to build a city in Solano County, launched a website for their project, which included illustrations of their proposed development. | Provided by California Forever
OK, this is something new — an elevator pitch for a whole new city.
That’s apparently what a cadre of Silicon Valley investors naming itself California Forever seeks to build on 55,000 acres in southeast Solano County: an Eden of walkable neighborhoods swathed in farmland and natural spaces, an oasis of sustainable energy and water conservation.
But the website launched Thursday by California Forever offers no real details, such as the projected population or precise location. Instead, there are renderings of cuddly townscapes and soothing talk of building “a remarkable place for Solano residents.” Oh, and an earnest promise to “begin the phase of our work that matters most: our conversation with you.”
Let the eye-rolling commence.
It’s impossible to critique the vision of the investors, because what was unfurled is so innocuous as to be an insult. The images are as placid as a video aimed at infants; just this side of cartoonish, depicting clusters of vaguely sized storybook homes hugging a terrain that looks more like Italy’s Cinque Terre than the wind-battered ranges of Solano County.
Cows rest in the shade of a wind turbine in the farmland southeast of Travis Air Force Base near Fairfield. The windswept locale is far different from the scene shared in renderings for a planned new city by a group dubbed California Forever. | Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle
The website also refers to how this will be a center of “economic opportunity” and “new employers.” Great! But only two of the 12 renderings show people at work, including one where three men install solar panels while the sun sets in the west. Let’s hope they’re being paid overtime.
A spokesperson for California Forever said Friday there’s no secret plan behind those remedies: “We’ll hear what the county wants and what the people are interested in,” explained Brian Brokaw. “The specifics will emerge.”
Besides the utter lack of specificity in terms of what the conversation will actually be about, here’s the most insulting aspect of California Forever 1.0: It claims to be the natural outgrowth of Bay Area planning tradition.
Or maybe not: Among other things, the 1960 plan calls for a new bridge from San Francisco to Sausalito by way of Angel Island. Plus new suburbs in West Marin and filling in up to 325 miles of the existing bay for development purposes.
“It’s so sad and disappointing,” is how the California Forever mindset was described Friday by Amanda Brown-Stevens, executive director of Greenbelt Alliance. The nonprofit has worked for decades to protect farmland and natural landscapes while steering needed growth into existing communities.
A rendering of a scene in a proposed city planned in Solano County by the group California Forever show workers constructing a home. | Provided by California Forever
Yes, you can make the argument that environmental regulations have been applied in extreme and cynical ways — thwarting the construction of new housing that would have helped prevent the region from becoming a two-tier society where many people can’t afford to live in the communities where they grew up. But to turn back the clock without saying so, just pledging to build “a remarkable place,” is disingenuous and disheartening.
“They’re looking to the past, all the failed approaches that put us in this situation, and doubling down,” Brown-Stevens said.
The lone upside to the elevator pitch is that the people involved are legitimate, with deep pockets and Bay Area roots. The investors include Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Laurene Powell Jobs (the only woman among the 10 investors listed on the website, by the way). The consultants have track records in San Francisco and the region. This isn’t a fly-by-night land grab.
But the way to introduce yourself isn’t with soft-focus renderings and rhetoric and the assurance that California Forever’s top executive has a golden retriever named Bruce.
The Bay Area needs housing and jobs. It also needs honest approaches to making this happen. Let’s hope when California Forever 2.0 launches, there is less fluff and more facts.
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