Silicon Valley-backed voter plan for a new California city won't be on the November ballot after all

A Silicon Valley-backed initiative to build a green city for up to 400,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area on land now zoned for agriculture won’t be on the Nov. 5 ballot after all

New California City (Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

A Silicon Valley-backed initiative to build a green city for up to 400,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area on land now zoned for agriculture won't be on the Nov. 5 ballot after all, officials said Monday.

The California Forever campaign qualified for the ballot in June, but a Solano County report released last week raised questions about the project and concluded it “may not be financially feasible.”

With Solano County supervisors set to consider the report on Tuesday, organizers suddenly withdrew the measure and said they would try again in two years.

The report found the new city — described on the California Forever website as an “opportunity for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space” — was likely to cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production and potentially threatening local water supplies, the Bay Area News Group reported.

California Forever said project organizers would spend the next two years working with the county on an environmental impact report and a development agreement.

Delaying the vote “also creates an opportunity to take a fresh look at the plan and incorporate input from more stakeholders,” said a joint statement Monday by the county and California Forever.

“We are who we are in Solano County because we do things differently here," Mitch Mashburn, chair of the county’s Board of Supervisors, said in the statement. “We take our time to make informed decisions that are best for the current generation and future generations. We want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to be heard and get all the information they need before voting on a General Plan change of this size.”

The measure would have asked voters to allow urban development on 27 square miles (70 square kilometers) of land between Travis Air Force Base and the Sacramento River Delta city of Rio Vista currently zoned for agriculture. The land-use change is necessary to build the homes, jobs and walkable downtown proposed by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who heads up California Forever.

Opposition to the effort includes conservation groups and some local and federal officials who say the plan is a speculative money grab rooted in secrecy. Sramek outraged locals by covertly purchasing more than $800 million in farmland and even suing farmers who refused to sell.

The Solano Land Trust, which protects open lands, said in June that such large-scale development “will have a detrimental impact on Solano County’s water resources, air quality, traffic, farmland, and natural environment.”

Sramek has said he hoped to have 50,000 residents in the new city within the next decade. The proposal included an initial $400 million to help residents buy homes in the community, as well as an initial guarantee of 15,000 local jobs paying a salary of at least $88,000 a year.