Sustainable Solano has remained publicly silent until now about California Forever, both as a proposal and a ballot item. But we have spent that time in active discussions as a team and board to weigh the California Forever proposal and the process taken to get it to this point and test it for alignment with Sustainable Solano’s mission and objective to nurture initiatives for the good of the whole. We work to help bring our communities together in a way that connects people with each other, the Earth and something larger than themselves, and we must base our responses upon those values.
We have determined the motives behind California Forever do not align with our values as an organization, even if some parts of the proposed community do reflect measures we would like to see for Solano County’s existing cities.
Sustainable Solano’s work around community resilience, sustainable landscapes and local food all starts at a singular nexus — the interest in giving a voice to the community and building community trust toward the good of the whole. We can say without a doubt that the approach taken to acquire property and establish California Forever does not align with that core value for our organization. Solano County residents are frustrated due to the lack of transparency and absence of trust around the intentions of those behind California Forever. As an organization that is exploring what it means for us to democratically govern ourselves in an open manner, we ask no less of those who are seeking to change the county where we ground our work.
Even in the structure of its proposed community, California Forever does not align with our values. The decision for this community to remain unincorporated will result in residents being denied a locally elected municipal government. The new city will not have a mayor or city council, with many governmental functions relegated to nonprofits established by California Forever, or to the County Board of Supervisors. Consequently, the voices of residents may go unheard, and their ability to participate meaningfully in shaping the future of their community can be hindered. Without a local government, residents are often deprived of the essential mechanisms for representation, decision-making, and resource allocation that are fundamental to democratic governance. Issues such as environmental protection, infrastructure development, and public services become challenging to address without a locally elected centralized authority to coordinate efforts and advocate for community needs.
In the absence of a community-elected municipal government, this unincorporated city may face significant obstacles in achieving the democratic ideals of equitable representation and collective decision-making.
There are other areas where California Forever does not properly align with Sustainable Solano’s mission and values. We promote sustainable land use and the protection of ag land, which this proposal would directly affect as well as removing range land and endangering critically important habitat. We work with communities to lift up residents’ voices around environmental degradation and injustice, and see where creation of a large new city in the county would increase the negative effects on surrounding communities commensurate with increased traffic and strains on water supplies.
California Forever paints a picture of a community that would be built for walkability with good jobs and affordable housing. We appreciate and understand the vital importance of these features of a sustainable city, and would like to see more in our existing cities — cities where people could easily walk, bike or take local transit to jobs that pay a livable wage, have access to grocery stores with healthy seasonal food, can gather in public spaces with urban greening, and use renewable, local energy. We would like to encourage building this vision within our existing cities, and invite you to think about how such changes could be brought to where you live. These strategies would strengthen Solano County and our local communities, but for California Forever they remain only ideas at this point, and there are far too many conflicts with our values for us to support the California Forever proposal as a whole.
MORE . . .
>> Get involved… Solano Together is another local organization opposing California Forever. Between now and November, you can get a yard sign from Solano Together and send Solano Together a much needed donation.
>> Read more… BenIndy coverage of the billionaire land grab, California Forever / East Solano Plan.
June 6, 2024 – In an email today, Solano Land Trust’s Nicole Braddock announced that the Land Trust Board of Directors voted to formally oppose the East Solano Plan, also known as California Forever. The Board urges Solano residents to vote no. Here’s the email:
Dear . . .
Nicole Braddock, Executive Director, Solano Land Trust
Solano Land Trust has also been following developments around the East Solano Plan, also know as California Forever, closely as more information about the details, scope, and size of the project have been made available. We understand our community’s need for housing and jobs and are committed to working with county partners to support inclusive solutions that maintain a healthy, natural environment including clean air, clean water, and open spaces. But a project of this magnitude is not the way to achieve this goal, and runs counter to Solano Land Trust’s mission of protecting and preserving open space for current and future generations.
The Solano Land Trust Board of Directors has voted to take a position and formally oppose the November ballot measure that would allow for the development of the East Solano Plan, also known as California Forever. A development of this magnitude will have a detrimental impact on Solano County water resources, air quality, traffic, farmland, and natural environment, and the associated pollution will be harmful to both our community and environmental health.
The area proposed for development is not a wasteland or landscape of no value. In fact, it is home to self-reliant farmland and ranchland where farmers and ranchers have grown local food for centuries. Most of these lands rely on very little, if any, irrigation, making them some of the most water-efficient farmland in the state. Also, this area is comprised of sensitive habitat and home to rare and endangered plants and animals in the region.
We urge you to join us in voting no on the ballot measure in November and protect these vital open lands.
Together, we can protect our open land for today and save it for tomorrow. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Solano Land Trust.
>> Get involved… Solano Together is another local organization opposing California Forever. Between now and November, you can get a yard sign from Solano Together and send Solano Together a much needed donation.
>> Read more… BenIndy coverage of the billionaire land grab, California Forever / East Solano Plan.
“Big news today. Cal Fever plans to build a facility to please every conceivable sports enthusiast. Next, an apple pie factory and the world’s biggest American flag. And something honoring every Solano mom…”
Later, also from BenIndy’s trustworthy editor emeritus:
“Also in the news: Cal Forever execs plan to give a car to every teenager and a guaranteed anti-aging syrup to every senior. Oh, and I heard they are planning to travel the county giving kisses to every baby. I believe ’em, don’t you?”
Yes, the billionaires behind “California Forever” are at it again, announcing yesterday the creation of yet another vague and legally tenuous “incentive” to boost the company’s increasingly desperate efforts to drive supporters to the polls in November.
Solano could certainly use new sports facilities for youth and adults, although it’s presently unclear how building a single, massive superstructure could reasonably serve the county without adding massive infrastructural and logistical nightmares to what is already a rough situation for families. (Sidenote: Maybe this is a stupid question, but wouldn’t it make more sense to have several smaller facilities spread across several underserved areas, to reduce congestion and serve those communities more equitably through improved access, instead of having one massive megaplex with certainly choked ingress and egress points? Couldn’t those smaller facilities serve as a sort of gravitational pull for those undeserved communities, to prompt deeper neighborhood ties and increased community investments, across generations?)
To its many opponents, this most recent in a series of similar announcements confirmed that California Forever’s communications and marketing teams are locked in a repeating pattern of three steps:
When confronted with community distrust or opposition, invent a committee and stack it with sympathetic locals who may (or may not) have some relevant experience and interest in addressing that problem, to task them to devise the “solution,” all while paying third-party firms and consultants to do the actual work (sometimes out of state);
Declare that California Forever has – through its largesse, beneficence, and access to such firms and consultants – co-developed a community-driven solution, but will fund this solution only once the ballot initiative has passed.
And repeat, and repeat, and repeat…until all that wild shooting in the dark finally takes the target(s) down.
Be wary
Before the full text of the ballot initiative was available in early 2024, California Forever execs begged Solano residents to wait for that full text with an open mind. But those of us who did so remain confused or frustrated.
Now, California Forever is begging Solano residents to simply trust it, and to wait for the ballot measure to pass, whereupon our trust will be rewarded with the full, unconditional delivery of all of our promised incentives, like candy falls freely from a busted piñata.
Except instead of candy, or sports centers, this is actually a discussion about peoples’ lives, and about the material and spiritual future of Solano County. And Solano voters should be very wary.
There is a real and urgent need for affordable housing for Californians yesterday. But this most recent in California Forever’s parade of vague incentives comes with its usual set of weak guardrails and shows us that the company continues to be much more invested in winning at the ballot than than addressing real issues like the business of creating and maintaining positive housing, health, and educational outcomes for present and future Solano residents.
Jepson Prairie Reserve, adjacent to Flannery Associates’ proposed development, hosts one of the few remaining vernal pool habitats and native bunchgrass prairies in California. | Claire Greenburger for Sierra Club.
A plan to develop a new city northeast of San Francisco has been seven years in the making, but until recently, the details were largely kept under wraps. Now that the plans are public—and the proposal has garnered enough signatures to make it onto the November ballot for voter consideration—residents and activists are squaring off to defeat what the developers promise will be a kind of green urban paradise.
Not so, say many of the plan’s opponents. “My fight has all of a sudden started to heat up,” said Joe Feller, chair emeritus of the Solano Group of the Sierra Club’s Redwood Chapter, on the day the proposal made it onto the ballot.
For years, a mysterious LLC known as “Flannery Associates” was quietly buying up vast swaths of Solano County farmland. No one knew who they were or what they were doing. These large real estate plays, it now turns out, were part of a project backed by a who’s who of Silicon Valley billionaires—among them Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of Emerson Collective and widow of Steve Jobs—to build a new city that would house up to 400,000 people. Renderings of the city depict an eco-oasis with dense middle-class housing, solar-powered homes, walkable neighborhoods, open green space, and access to public transportation. The project, the developers claim, will solve the Bay Area’s housing crisis.
But according to Feller and several environmental groups who have banded together to oppose the project, it is not what it seems. Despite its promises, the development would come at a major cost to Solano County’s natural environment. And there has been little community engagement about the proposed project or its potential impacts.
On a Sunday afternoon last February, as rainfall flooded roads across Northern California, hundreds of Solano County residents gathered at a community center in Suisun City to celebrate the launch of Solano Together—a coalition of concerned residents and organizations opposed to Flannery Associates’ plan. The crowd that day included a wide range of community members with varying political views. At the event, impassioned farmers, environmentalists, and local leaders expressed outrage at how Flannery Associates had left them in the dark about their plan, which, they say, was a ploy by the developers to ensure low prices and minimal community resistance. The crowd was fired up, erupting in cheers between each speaker. Unlike the land—of which Flannery now owns nearly 10 percent—“the spirit here is not for sale,” said Princess Washington, mayor pro tem of Suisun City and the chair of the Redwood Chapter’s Solano Group.
In April, months after the launch of Solano Together, Duane Kromm and Marilyn Farley, a retired couple who have been helping lead the coalition, drove a reporter north along Highway 113 to visit the site for the proposed city. Vast fields of hay and barley extended far into the distance. Clusters of sheep and cattle dotted the landscape. Trees were few and far between. “This would all be four, five, six stories tall,” said Kromm, who is a member of the Solano Orderly Growth Committee.
Before Flannery Associates can begin development, a host of barriers stand in its way—the foremost being Solano’s land-use restrictions. At the heart of the county’s development philosophy is “what is urban should be municipal,” Kromm explained. Concurrently, land zoned agricultural cannot be developed, which is what has kept large swaths of the region rural for so long. According to Solano County’s Orderly Growth Initiative, any zoning changes must be voted on, which is why Flannery is seeking voter approval this November.
Though Flannery claims on its website that the farmland poised for development is “non-prime,” only contributing approximately 1.6 percent of Solano County’s total agricultural revenue, Farley believes that Flannery’s plan threatens more than the local economy. This development, she said, would strike at the core of Solano’s identity. “They’ve disrupted a whole farming system. And they’ve disrupted families, many of whom have been on that land since the late 1800s,” Farley said. The loss of US farmland is rampant, she noted, with 2,000 acres of agricultural land being paved over, fragmented, or converted to uses that jeopardize farming every day. [source below]
Under the stewardship of its former owners, the farmland, now owned by Flannery, has been carefully managed. The farmers practice dryland farming, Farley explained, a practice of growing crops without irrigation, done to save water. Typically, farms will have a year growing grain, a year of fallow, and a year of grazing, she said. “It’s very sustainable.”
These grasslands are also “biodiverse ecosystems that are underrepresented in protected areas statewide,” said Nate Huntington, a resilience associate at Greenbelt Alliance, one of the environmental groups that opposes the project. “When they’re well managed, grazing areas can host important biological resources and mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration.” Though the carbon stores on this land have yet to be calculated, intuitively, Kromm said, if you pave it all over, “that’s not going to be good.” Data for the biological resources located on the land is still limited since the developers have yet to conduct an environmental impact statement, which likely won’t take place until after the November elections.
Adjacent to Flannery’s land lies Jepson Prairie, one of the few remaining vernal pool habitats and native bunchgrass prairies in California, owned and managed by the Solano Land Trust. Yellow California goldfields were at peak bloom, drawing yellow stripes around the pool. Farley, who was careful to stay on the narrow trail that winds the reserve to avoid disrupting the habitat, fears what the land would look like if it were to become the backyard of 400,000 new residents. “There’d be a lot of people here,” she said. “Who knows what they’ll do.” The reserve provides habitat for a host of threatened and endangered native wildlife, including burrowing owls, monarch butterflies, California tiger salamanders, and 15 rare and endangered plant species.
The preserve is only a small part of the Jepson Prairie ecosystem, said Carol Witham, a vernal pool specialist. Little by little, that protected area has been expanding. But now, that door has closed. “Flannery has come out and bought a whole bunch of parcels that make it impossible to continue to do that,” she said. In the area surrounding the prairie, Flannery Associates now owns 60 percent of the county’s unprotected freshwater marshes, 50 percent of the high-value vernal pool conservation land, and 34 percent of the region’s priority areas for conservation, which conservationists fear is at risk of destruction.
The San Francisco Bay Area has suffered from one of the worst housing crises in the nation and one that local leaders have largely failed to address. For decades, rising prices have been pushing middle- and low-income residents out of urban centers like San Francisco. Housing experts agree that low-income and middle-class housing must be scaled up to meet the community’s needs, which Flannery’s plan—in theory—would provide.
In response to questions from a reporter, Flannery Associates said that it seeks to negate the harmful impacts of urban sprawl by building a city that is much denser than a typical American suburb. “We have proposed a community where people can live, work, and take care of most of their needs within walkable neighborhoods,” a spokesman said in an email.
The developers claim that building a city from the ground up allows them to incorporate the newest, most efficient technologies. In addition to generating enough renewable energy from wind and solar to power 1.5 million homes—far surpassing the needs of the immediate community—they plan to deploy “ultra-efficient” water recycling and thermal energy systems. “Overall, we are confident that our project will provide one of the best models in the world for drastically reducing per capita greenhouse gas emissions,” the project claims. Developers also promise to create 15,000 local jobs.
“But there are some impacts that are going to be very, very difficult to mitigate. First and foremost is the need for transportation,” said Daniel Rodríguez, professor of city and regional planning and director of the Institute for Transportation at the University of California, Berkeley. He has studied similar “new urbanist” developments that, in their early stages, shared many of Flannery’s aspirations. “Over and over, we found that the transportation claims that the developers made rarely materialized. Residents of these communities traveled as much as residents of any traditional suburb.” Despite Flannery’s plans to create an “employment cluster” in Solano County, the reality is that “jobs don’t cluster because developers would like them to,” Rodríguez said. Flannery’s conception sounds like “magical thinking,” he said. Inevitably, residents will wind up commuting to already existing urban centers.
While the developers advocate for building a transit system to support a more energy-efficient alternative for commuters, existing public transportation in many California cities is nearing collapse and in need of major investment, said Rodríguez. It would be “fiscally irresponsible to even think about investing in a rail system for a city that hasn’t been built,” he said.
While alternative options may require “a little more tinkering,” as Rodríguez put it, better alternatives are possible—and some are already underway. In the East Bay, the Concord Reuse Project, which will be developed on the site of a former naval weapons station, is slated to deliver over 12,000 homes, a quarter of which will be affordable and located adjacent to an existing transit station. In contrast to the project in Solano County, the Reuse Project has been developed across a diverse coalition of labor, environmental, and faith-based organizations. “It’s a climate-friendly and equitable development that is connected to existing communities,” said Sam Tepperman-Gelfant, managing attorney at Public Advocates.
Despite the well-funded campaigns behind Flannery’s plan, Kromm doesn’t feel threatened by their chances. A recent pollshowed that 70 percent of Solano residents oppose the project. But activists expect Flannery’s fight won’t stop there.
What ultimately happens in Solano County “will set a precedent for what’s going to happen in the future with people who have the means to privately purchase land and develop open space,” Washington said. “This is not an isolated incident. It will continue to happen, and we are on the front line of this decision.”
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