Billionaires’ utopia company California Forever scraps plan for ballot initiative in wake of damning report

Days after a Solano County report slammed a plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaires to build a utopian new city from scratch near Fairfield, the company behind the “California Forever” project has scrapped the ballot initiative it was to put to county voters in November.

The report released late last week by Solano County said the new city was likely to cost billions in county funds and create substantial financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”

County supervisors on Tuesday were set to consider the report, then vote on whether to approve California Forever’s contentious plan to rezone 17,500 acres of farmland for the city, or let voters decide in November.

Instead, California Forever, led by CEO Jan Sramek, will withdraw the ballot measure — approved last month for the November election —  and seek approval to amend the county’s general plan and zoning through typical county processes, California Forever said in a website update Monday morning.

California Forever, which spent years buying thousands of acres of farmland near Fairfield, earlier last week issued its own study claiming the new city would create billions of dollars in economic activity and tens of thousands of jobs for the county. Marketing materials have shown utopian scenes of a Mediterranean-style community, with walkable neighborhoods and a mix of businesses from retail shops to technology-company offices.

The proposal — funded by billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs — has been embroiled in controversy since its real estate arm, Flannery Associates, sued holdout landowners for $510 million, claiming they conspired out of “endless greed” to inflate prices. The lawsuit, and at-times combative behavior of California Forever’s CEO Jan Sramek, added to the furor over potential loss of agricultural land and nature areas, and changes to the region’s rural character.

Mitch Mashburn, chair of the Solano County Board of Supervisors, on Monday said it was a “mistake” for California Forever to put its plan to voters without a full environmental impact report and fully negotiated development agreement. “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,” Mashburn said in a Facebook post.

The decision to pull the plug on the ballot initiative signaled that Sramek understood that “while the need for more affordable housing and good paying jobs has merit, the timing has been unrealistic,” Mashburn wrote, adding that Sramek was correct that “we cannot solve our jobs, housing, and energy challenges if every project takes a decade or more to break ground.”

Sramek said California Forever would work with the county on the environmental report and development agreement over the next two years, then seek approval from county supervisors in 2026. “With this process, we can build a shared vision that passes with a decisive majority and creates broad consensus for the future,” Sramek said in a statement on California Forever’s website.

Check back on this developing story.