Tag: California Forever

California Forever, regional coalition push for federal designation to revive shipbuilding

There is a new push by a coalition of regional stakeholders to revitalize shipbuilding in Solano County and the surrounding area, asking the federal government to designate the California Delta as a “maritime prosperity zone.”

“We’ve seen what happens when jobs go away. It’s going to be great to see if shipbuilding, maritime jobs come back to the region,” said Chris Rico, president and CEO of the Solano Economic Development Corporation.

The effort is backed by the Solano EDC, Cal Poly’s Maritime Academy, the owners of Mare Island, the Nimitz Group, the Bay Area Council, and California Forever, which released the announcement Thursday.

California Forever is the group of tech-billionaires looking to build a new city of more than 400,000 people, an advanced manufacturing park and a shipyard in Solano County. The group is now the county’s largest landowner. Their total acreage is greater than the size of the city of San Francisco.

California Forever CEO Jan Sramek says he supports reviving Mare Island in Vallejo alongside their own efforts to create what they call the Solano Shipyard, proposed for Collinsville.

“The proposal revives Northern California’s contribution to America’s maritime power,” Sramek wrote in a thread on X announcing the coalition’s plans.

The group of regional leaders says their goal is to attract private investment, thousands of jobs and bring back large-scale shipbuilding to the West Coast.

“I think it’s a really good signal to the market that we want to bring those jobs here,” said Rico. “I can tell you that my peers across the water in Contra Costa and Alameda, even folks in Yolo and Sacramento, they know that even though the location is in Solano, the opportunity is for this whole region.”

Proposed California Delta federal “maritime prosperity zone”

California Forever

In response, Rep. John Garamendi, a Democrat representing much of Solano County in Congress, says this aligns with a bipartisan push moving through both houses of Congress right now to build more American ships.

“I’m excited. I’m very, very pleased. This is the first of this in the nation,” said Garamendi.

Garamendi is working to get the SHIPS for America Act signed into law this year, promoting both national security and economic development in bringing back American shipbuilding. It is an effort President Trump has already supported through executive order aimed at ‘restoring American maritime dominance.’

“The United States has maybe 50 deep-water commercial ships. China has over 5,000. We simply are not in a position to support our military using our own American-flag vessels. That was one of the reasons that I got into this a decade ago on the Armed Services Committee,” said Garamendi.

Garamendi has been critical of California Forever. In previous interviews with CBS Sacramento, he has called their vision to build a new city both a “pipe dream” and “dumb growth,” representing the worst of California’s urban sprawl. But on the topic of shipbuilding in Solano, he says they are aligned.

“I am looking for support wherever we can get it. California Forever is motivated for economic reasons, and that’s fine. Other participants who signed the letter have similar motivation, and that’s good,” said Garamendi.

So what is a federal maritime prosperity zone?

Garamendi says the designation does not actually exist now, but it would if the SHIPS Act passes.

It creates tax breaks, incentives and regulatory relief to promote the maritime industry and help streamline the creation of thousands of shipbuilding jobs.

“We will use this support to push the legislation, advance the legislation, and it will undoubtedly cause other regional ports to also participate,” said Garamendi.

The announcement comes on the heels of the Mare Island Dry Dock in Vallejo recently announcing they had to lay off more than 80 workers right at the start of the new year.

Garamendi said he wanted to correct the record and that the dry dock has not closed permanently, as was previously reported by the city of Vallejo to CBS Sacramento.

“The panic was caused by an inappropriate description of the problem. Mare Island Dry Dock did not shut down. It simply lost a bid, laid the folks off for lack of work. They continued to search for work and hopefully will be successful in obtaining additional bids,” said Garamendi.

Garamendi added that they are aggressively working right now alongside the U.S. Coast Guard to secure a new contract that would mean some, if not all, of those laid-off workers would get their jobs back at the dry docks.

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Ashley Sharp

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January 16, 2026
Silicon Valley billionaires put plans for new California city on hold

The tech billionaires backing a proposal to raise a brand-new city on the rolling prairie northeast of San Francisco Bay have agreed to pull their measure off the November ballot and will first fund a full environmental review of the project, officials announced Monday.

The pause — announced in a joint statement from a Solano County supervisor and the chief executive of California Forever, the group backing the development — marks a dramatic shift in what had been a relentless push to build a city from scratch in rural Solano County. Until recently, California Forever, whose roster includes tech giants such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, appeared set 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 registrar announced the measure had qualified for the November ballot, despite opposition from many local elected officials. At the time, Jan Sramek, the former Goldman Sachs trader who is leading the effort, said the measure was nothing less than “a referendum on what do we want the future of California to be.”

Jan Sramek, chief executive of California Forever, stressed that his investment group remains committed to the project.

(Janie Har / Associated Press)

Then, on Monday morning, an about-face: California Forever announced it would withdraw the measure. Instead, the group will follow the normal county process for zoning changes for 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 time and consultants related to the venture, according to the joint statement issued by Sramek and Mitch Mashburn, chair 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 ballot without an environmental review and negotiated development agreement “was a mistake,” he 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 portion of the statement, Sramek, chief executive of California Forever, stressed that his investment group remains committed to the project and feels an urgency to get it done. “For every year we delay, thousands of Solano parents miss more mornings, recitals and bedtime stories because they’re commuting two hours for work. They cannot get those magical moments back.”

“We want to show that it’s possible to move faster in California,” Sramek said. “But we recognize now that it’s possible to reorder these steps without impacting 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 bring the package back to local voters for approval in 2026.

In an interview with The Times, Sramek said the decision to pull the ballot measure was made after it became clear that Solano County residents wanted a thorough environmental review process. He said he was confident the decision to “invert the order of the steps” — putting the environmental review and development agreement before taking the question to voters — would lead to a better outcome.

Proponents of the project used an LLC to buy up land from farmers in a vast swath of the county, stretching from Rio Vista (pictured) to the west, without telling anyone why.

(Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press)

“It’s not going to affect the timeline,” he said. “In fact, it might accelerate it.”

The shift also gives California Forever time to reset with local residents after the group’s rocky introduction to Solano County politics.

The effort, launched under a cloak of secrecy, became ensnared in controversy last year amid unfounded speculation that the land buyers were foreign agents intent on espionage.

That’s because for years before proponents revealed their plans, they used a limited liability company called Flannery Associates to buy up land from farmers in a vast swath of the county, stretching from Rio Vista west toward 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 it might be part of an effort by foreign spies to gain military secrets.

Last year, it was revealed instead as a bold plan to build a model city from the ground up and reinvent how housing is built in California.

In January, Sramek unveiled blueprints of the new community that call for tens of thousands of homes surrounded by open space and trails. California Forever showcased the community’s proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area, vowing the project would convert unused farmland into “middle-class neighborhoods with homes we can afford.” The city would be walkable, socioeconomically integrated and fueled by clean energy.

But the proposal garnered fierce early opposition from some local leaders, concerned the group was making an end run around the planning process, as well as environmental groups concerned about the loss of natural habitat.

Mashburn said his agreement with Sramek came after tough conversations about how the process had gone so far.

“We talked about Solano County, and we talked about the initiative, and we talked about the future, and the way things were going to look, and the processes that we would have to go through, and whether we wanted to do that amicably and have a county where neighbors weren’t fighting with neighbors,” Mashburn said.

In an aerial photo, cattle graze near wind farms in rural Solano County.

(Terry Chea / Associated Press)

“Much to his credit and to their credit, they agreed with that. That’s not an easy thing to do, for a leader to admit that you may have been wrong about something.”

The decision to pull the ballot measure came a day before the Board of Supervisors was scheduled to discuss a consultant’s report, commissioned by the county, on the potential fiscal impacts of the development and to 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 hefty deficits for the county. It estimated the price tag for constructing schools, roads, sewer systems and other infrastructure to support the new community at tens of billions of dollars.

In announcing the new timeline, Mashburn issued a challenge to the California Forever investors, calling on them to show how they would provide water, solve transportation challenges and navigate the “financial engineering that makes it possible to pay for billions of dollars of infrastructure” without increasing taxes.

Asked if he believed Sramek and his backers 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 over from scratch,” he said. “There are some incredible obstacles that have to be overcome.”

Jessica Garrison, Hannah Wiley

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July 22, 2024
EXCLUSIVE: New renderings show California Forever’s plans for new city in Solano County

Officials behind a new city proposed for Solano County shared new renderings of what the community would look like, including residential options and the public transit system.The images, provided exclusively to KCRA 3 by California Forever, show row houses with private backyards. Residents could decide to have a garage and an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard, or they could opt for more open space. In an exclusive interview with KCRA 3’s Orko Manna, California Forever Head of Planning Gabriel Metcalf said the idea is to provide residents with several choices.“It’s up to each homeowner what they want to do. Do they want a private garden? Do they want to have it be grass? They all face onto an alley in the back, and in the alley, you can of course park your car, but it can also be where you put an accessory dwelling unit, so it can be an office, it can be where your mother lives, or you can just have a bigger backyard. So, what we’re showing here is that range of options of very private intimate quiet backyards but also opening up onto an alley where all kinds of different things are going on,” Metcalf said.Metcalf added that the unnamed city, with an estimated residential population of 400,000 people, would have a wide variety of options when it comes to types of housing, including starter homes.“We really are focused on enabling first-time homeownership. We think there’s a really big need for that, it’s a very big market for us to try to serve. The Bay Area has gotten so expensive. We think if we can find a way to provide homeownership at a more affordable price point, it’s going to be really popular,” Metcalf said.Another new rendering given exclusively to KCRA 3 shows the bus rapid transit system that would be available for people to get around the city. Metcalf said the buses would function more like trains.“They have their own right of way in the middle of the street, they have boarding islands and they’re never stuck in traffic,” Metcalf said. “This is going to be a quality of public transit service that people have not seen before in this part of California.”Metcalf said another main goal of the proposed city is to have each resident only about a 5-to-10-minute walk away from schools, parks and shopping streets. Metcalf also said that people would still be able to drive, adding that there would be ample parking throughout the city including communal parking structures for each neighborhood.“What’s different from most of America is in this community, you have a choice. You can drive when you need to drive, but you don’t have to drive for everything. You can also get to things other ways, so this is going to be quite eye-opening for some people to experience that kind of freedom of choice on how they get around,” Metcalf said.But not everyone supports the proposal. In order for the new city to be built, the roughly 17,500 acres of land north of Highway 12 in between Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista would need approval for urban development. Currently, the land is zoned for agriculture. Solano County Farm Bureau President William Brazelton said the bureau wants to keep it that way.“There’s a long, long history of agriculture in this county,” Brazelton said. “We’re not opposed to new housing. There’s a lot of, there’s actually quite a bit of space inside the city limits around the county, and that’s what we will advocate be built out before there’s sprawl, not just planting a brand-new 400,000-member community in the middle of ag land.”The Solano County Farm Bureau is part of a recently formed group called the Solano Together Coalition, which has concerns about what they call “California Forever’s sprawl development plans.”Suisun Mayor Pro Tem Princess Washington is also part of the coalition. She wants more details about the proposal, which she said she has not received from California Forever.“There is opposition to the overall plan, but I think that’s coupled with the lack of transparency when questions are asked. No answer is given. For example, the question of what would be the price point for housing. There has been no direct answer,” Washington said.Washington also said she wants people to understand that while the ideas for the proposed city may look good in renderings, the implementation of the plan would entail going against longstanding agriculture practices that have served Solano County well for years.“Everyone wants a good paying job, everyone wants affordable housing, but I think it’s very dangerous to use that as a carrot to change a policy,” Washington said.In response to the criticism, Metcalf said opponents should trust the process and understand that the new city could be a game-changer in helping solve the region’s housing crisis.“I think we have to look at the state of housing honestly in the Bay Area and in Northern California. What we’re doing right now is not working. Saying ‘no’ is not working. We need to create a place where we can say ‘yes,’” Metcalf said. “I am very hopeful and very cautiously optimistic that as people learn more about how this new community could work, that people are going to be really excited about it.”KCRA 3 confirmed with the Solano County Registrar of Voters office that California Forever has submitted a petition with more than 20,000 signatures, in an effort to allow urban development on the land where they want to build the new city. Election officials are in the process of verifying the signatures to make sure they are from valid Solano County voters. They said they expect to have a final determination by mid-June on if it can be put on the ballot in November.Even if the land-use change gets on the ballot and voters approve it, Solano County officials said a development agreement would need to be reached between the county and California Forever before any construction could begin.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app.

SOLANO COUNTY, Calif. —

Officials behind a new city proposed for Solano County shared new renderings of what the community would look like, including residential options and the public transit system.

East Solano Plan
Exclusive new rendering of examples of residential backyards for the proposed new city in Solano County.

The images, provided exclusively to KCRA 3 by California Forever, show row houses with private backyards. Residents could decide to have a garage and an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard, or they could opt for more open space.

In an exclusive interview with KCRA 3’s Orko Manna, California Forever Head of Planning Gabriel Metcalf said the idea is to provide residents with several choices.

“It’s up to each homeowner what they want to do. Do they want a private garden? Do they want to have it be grass? They all face onto an alley in the back, and in the alley, you can of course park your car, but it can also be where you put an accessory dwelling unit, so it can be an office, it can be where your mother lives, or you can just have a bigger backyard. So, what we’re showing here is that range of options of very private intimate quiet backyards but also opening up onto an alley where all kinds of different things are going on,” Metcalf said.

Metcalf added that the unnamed city, with an estimated residential population of 400,000 people, would have a wide variety of options when it comes to types of housing, including starter homes.

“We really are focused on enabling first-time homeownership. We think there’s a really big need for that, it’s a very big market for us to try to serve. The Bay Area has gotten so expensive. We think if we can find a way to provide homeownership at a more affordable price point, it’s going to be really popular,” Metcalf said.

East Solano Plan
Exclusive new rendering of bus rapid transit system for the proposed new city in Solano County.

Another new rendering given exclusively to KCRA 3 shows the bus rapid transit system that would be available for people to get around the city. Metcalf said the buses would function more like trains.

“They have their own right of way in the middle of the street, they have boarding islands and they’re never stuck in traffic,” Metcalf said. “This is going to be a quality of public transit service that people have not seen before in this part of California.”

East Solano Plan
Exclusive new rendering of a business plaza for the proposed new city in Solano County.

Metcalf said another main goal of the proposed city is to have each resident only about a 5-to-10-minute walk away from schools, parks and shopping streets. Metcalf also said that people would still be able to drive, adding that there would be ample parking throughout the city including communal parking structures for each neighborhood.

“What’s different from most of America is in this community, you have a choice. You can drive when you need to drive, but you don’t have to drive for everything. You can also get to things other ways, so this is going to be quite eye-opening for some people to experience that kind of freedom of choice on how they get around,” Metcalf said.

But not everyone supports the proposal. In order for the new city to be built, the roughly 17,500 acres of land north of Highway 12 in between Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista would need approval for urban development. Currently, the land is zoned for agriculture. Solano County Farm Bureau President William Brazelton said the bureau wants to keep it that way.

“There’s a long, long history of agriculture in this county,” Brazelton said. “We’re not opposed to new housing. There’s a lot of, there’s actually quite a bit of space inside the city limits around the county, and that’s what we will advocate be built out before there’s sprawl, not just planting a brand-new 400,000-member community in the middle of ag land.”

The Solano County Farm Bureau is part of a recently formed group called the Solano Together Coalition, which has concerns about what they call “California Forever’s sprawl development plans.”

Suisun Mayor Pro Tem Princess Washington is also part of the coalition. She wants more details about the proposal, which she said she has not received from California Forever.

“There is opposition to the overall plan, but I think that’s coupled with the lack of transparency when questions are asked. No answer is given. For example, the question of what would be the price point for housing. There has been no direct answer,” Washington said.

Washington also said she wants people to understand that while the ideas for the proposed city may look good in renderings, the implementation of the plan would entail going against longstanding agriculture practices that have served Solano County well for years.

“Everyone wants a good paying job, everyone wants affordable housing, but I think it’s very dangerous to use that as a carrot to change a policy,” Washington said.

In response to the criticism, Metcalf said opponents should trust the process and understand that the new city could be a game-changer in helping solve the region’s housing crisis.

“I think we have to look at the state of housing honestly in the Bay Area and in Northern California. What we’re doing right now is not working. Saying ‘no’ is not working. We need to create a place where we can say ‘yes,’” Metcalf said. “I am very hopeful and very cautiously optimistic that as people learn more about how this new community could work, that people are going to be really excited about it.”

KCRA 3 confirmed with the Solano County Registrar of Voters office that California Forever has submitted a petition with more than 20,000 signatures, in an effort to allow urban development on the land where they want to build the new city. Election officials are in the process of verifying the signatures to make sure they are from valid Solano County voters. They said they expect to have a final determination by mid-June on if it can be put on the ballot in November.

Even if the land-use change gets on the ballot and voters approve it, Solano County officials said a development agreement would need to be reached between the county and California Forever before any construction could begin.

See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app.

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May 16, 2024
A bird’s eye view of proposed Bay Area utopian community

Tech billionaire backers of a sweeping proposal to build an idealistic community from the ground up in the Bay Area released an aerial view of the project’s plans for tens of thousands of homes surrounded by open space, trails and using renewable energy sources.

In the photo and an accompanying ad released Wednesday, California Forever showcased the community’s proximity to the broader Bay Area, while touting that the Solano County project would convert unused farmland into “walkable middle class neighborhoods with homes we can afford.”

The new material comes as California Forever is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative in Solano County that would amend zoning codes to allow the project to be built on agricultural land. With 13,000 valid signatures, the ballot measure titled the East Solano Homes, Jobs, and Clean Energy Initiative would go before voters in November.

Backers of the project include Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who is chief executive of California Forever; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; venture capitalist Marc Andreessen; and Patrick and John Collison, who founded the payment-processing company Stripe.

The new ad and renderings of the proposed utopia attempt to answer some of the questions locals have had about the project, which for years was shrouded in secrecy as tech billionaires quietly bought up farmland.

The proximity of the project to Travis Air Force Base has been one point of contention. California Forever said the new community would be 4.5 miles from the base with a security buffer zone where there would be nothing other than agriculture and solar farms. The community would create an open space of 712 acres featuring sports fields and trails between itself and neighboring city Rio Vista, a town of about 10,000 people on the Sacramento River.

Renderings of the community show picturesque open spaces where families could host birthday parties and go on bike rides, along with tree-lined neighborhoods and a bustling downtown.

In the newly released ad, backers say the project would use unused land “rated among the worst for agriculture in all of Solano County, land where for years and years, nothing much has been able to grow.” The project promises to provide $500 million for down-payment assistance, scholarships and parks for Solano County residents and 15,000 new higher-paying jobs in manufacturing and technology.

The community would be designed to have 50,000 residents at first, then grow to as many as 400,000.

The campaign faces opposition from the Solano County chapter of the Sierra Club, which said housing should not be built on agricultural land. Residents in the area have also expressed concerns about the effect on traffic.

If the ballot measure is approved by voters, other government approvals would then be required. Environmental groups have signaled lawsuits are possible, which could tie up the matter in court.

“A knowledgeable voter is the best kind of voter, and we find that the more Solano County residents learn about our project, the more they like it,” said Matt Rodriguez, campaign manager for the East Solano Homes, Jobs, and Clean Energy Initiative. “We’re excited to be engaging with members of the Solano County community and this is another opportunity for us to continue sharing information about how we plan to bring middle class homes and good paying jobs to Solano County.”

Melody Gutierrez

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March 9, 2024
Tech Billionaires’ Plan for a New City in California Doesn’t Include a Local Government

From the moment I heard about tech billionaires’ weird plans to create a bustling new city in the heart of California’s Solano County, I was preoccupied with one basic question: Who is actually going to run this thing?

Why Bitcoin won’t reach $1,000,000

Libertarian dreams of creating a new community from scratch are all well and good but, at the end of the day, you can’t operate a municipality of any real size without a team of boring, dysfunctional bureaucrats to decide what the local zoning laws are and how to spend the tax dollars. Bulldozers and construction workers could, hypothetically, build a bunch of new buildings, sure, but it wasn’t immediately apparent—at least not from the statements made by the project’s backers—who would be in charge of the city once it was actually built.

Early on, California Forever made it known that they had some pretty radical ideas about how to run a city. Developers let it slip that they wanted to fund the community entirely through private sector money and that the whole urban project was viewed, more or less, as a business opportunity. From these statements, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that the city would be some terrible, dystopian version of Disney’s Storyliving, where a company effectively called the shots and residents were just passive prisoners inside its overly priced walls. The question of how the city would be run was an open one, with more than a few unappealing answers.

Now, however, it appears that this pivotal question has been answered: California Forever’s new city will not have a local government at all. Instead, the developers plan to keep their new urban hub as an unincorporated area and leave the governing to the pre-existing county government that already controls the region. In a recent interview with YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard” ), an online outlet that promotes development in the Bay Area, California Forever’s Head of Planning, Gabriel Metcalf, revealed that there would be no local government to regulate the activity within the city’s borders:

YIMBY: So, there won’t be any kind of local government that runs this city apart from the county government?

Gabriel Metcalf: Yes, our intention is to remain part of unincorporated Solano County. So, the political body that will have jurisdiction is the county board of Supervisors. We’ll have a very close cooperative working relationship with the county to provide police and fire services, all the services, and work on economic development projects together. I expect we’ll be very close partners.

This is interesting—and not unprecedented. There are a lot of unincorporated territories throughout the U.S. Many of them are small, impoverished communities, though there are a number of large and thriving metropolitan areas that are unincorporated and that, similar to California Forever’s hypothetical city, rely on the county government for regulation.

Yet if there is some precedent to the new city’s proposed governmental organization, it does beg a lot of questions about how the project will actually function. If the Solano County government is suddenly beset with vast new responsibilities and has to help regulate every part of a blossoming (and, likely, chaotic) city-building process, how will the extant bureaucracy handle that? And, as the city develops and becomes populated, won’t the county’s resources be stretched thin—particularly in how it relates to essential services, like police and firefighters—with a special preference for the new community?

In his interview with YIMBY, Metcalf revealed another interesting aspect of the project, which is that residents of the new city (and Solano County writ large) don’t really have much of a say in the direction of the new community. When asked about how county voters would be able to maintain some kind of “checks and balances” over the new development, which is expected to take 40 years to effectively mature, Metcalf replied:

There are two primary ways that voters in Solano County maintain democratic oversight. One is the terms of the voter initiative themselves, which are legally binding. Those have been developed through intense consultation with the people and elected leaders in the county. It includes funding commitments, a zoning envelope, and a development footprint. So, all of that is locked in by a vote of the people.

In other words, whatever is inside the ballot initiative (which voters will vote on in November) is what will come to pass. But Metcalf had more to say:

The second main way voters in the count will exert control is through the terms of the development agreement. After our process and the voter initiative, we do a full EIR (Environmental Impact Report) and then negotiate a development agreement with the county board of supervisors. A development agreement is a voluntary contract in which both parties can agree to whatever they choose.

In other words, voters won’t really have that much control over this development at all. If county residents vote for it, they will get whatever is in the ballot initiative. The development agreement, meanwhile, will be hashed out between the county board of supervisors and the company. A lot of the rest of this scenario—and the way everyday people fit into it—remains something of an open question.

Lucas Ropek

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February 13, 2024