by Jim DeKloe, Solano Group Chair
As you likely know, a group of Silicon Valley billionaires now known as California Forever secretly bought up about 100 square miles of Solano County and also sued the family farmers who wouldn’t sell to them. They say that want to build a new city on this unincorporated farmland currently zoned for agriculture. This proposal is big – 175,000 new houses and 400,000 people – it would be an Oakland/ Minneapolis/ Tulsa/ Bakersfield sized bedroom community and bigger than Cleveland, Cincinnati, Honolulu, Anaheim – it’s big. If it existed today it would be the ninth largest city in California and would be larger than the largest city in nineteen states – it’s big. And a giant city has giant environmental impacts.
Last week it became clear that California Forever is using the influence that its money buys to try to gain special treatment from the California government – they are trying to have the Governor’s Office exempt the entire project from CEQA review. And Go-Biz, the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, seems willing to do it. It’s likely that they will accomplish this by adding a rider bill to the state budget like they did last year for the advanced manufacturing exemption.
The California Forever scheme has many moving parts and it isn’t clear which parts a special interest bill would cover. Besides the 175,000 houses, California Forever’s stated plans include an industrial area called “the Solano Foundry” and the proposed Collinsville 7,500 acre boat-building facility. A group out of Texas called Saronic that makes drone boats that deliver explosives to other ships shares investors with CF. It is likely that the “shipbuilding” facility will likely go to Brownsville TX – their Commission voted this week to give Saronic a 20 year 95% tax break. And the City of Rio Vista believes that their unstated plans include a massive data center. Each of these components would have a gigantic impact on the environment, on the quality of life of existing residents, and on the continued operation of Travis Air Force Base.
The area under question contains most of the most precious habitat in Solano County – especially vernal pools and native grasslands. California Forever stresses that it isn’t prime farmland – but that’s just because it isn’t irrigated – it’s dryland farming. In winter the farmland looks like a Wisconsin postcard.
https://baynature.org/magazine/winter2026/underneath-california-forever/
Current Solano County law requires all development to occur within cities and prohibits development on unincorporated County land (without a vote of the people). California Forever initially planned to place an initiative on the November 2024 ballot but their polling showed that they were going to get slaughtered. So they instead found the ambitious City Manager of tiny Suisun City (pop. 29,000) to pursue an annexation; if the land is annexed, then it is within a city, and then that relieves the County’s legal requirement to go to the voters. This is called the “Suisun Expansion plan.”
The problem is that development the land right next to Suisun City is prohibited by the operation of Travis Air Force Base. So the annexation must jump over 7 miles of undevelopable property to grab 23,000 acres – so the proposal is a leap-frog development enabled by a cherry stem annexation. And still, the flight patterns of Travis Air Force Base make one half of the proposed residential neighborhoods unsuitable for schools. The 70 new schools required would have to be concentrated in the bottom half of the development.
The EIR is due out any day – the report is that it’s 20,000 to 25,000 pages long. They currently have a Suisun City Council majority in place that will certainly support the plan. They want a vote before the November election. Then the decision goes to the Local Agency Formation Commission.
So what is the proposed special legislation being crafted behind closed doors? We don’t know.
In a recent meeting the Rio Vista City Council suggested that the California Forever special legislation would exclude the entire “Suisun Expansion Plan” from environmental review. (This disclosure follows a typical pattern – the public often learns about what secretive Suisun City is up to from transparent Rio Vista). In their most recent meeting, Rio Vista stated that lobbyists were working in Sacramento to exempt 19,000 acres of the nearly 23,000 acre Suisun City annexation proposal from the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act. The specificity of the proposal – the number of acres, the location of the exemption, and the exclusion of the area right next to Travis Air Force Base, gave credibility to the truth of their intelligence about this the back-room deal.
Other reports suggest that this last minute legislation would change the law regarding annexation and would remove the authority for Solano County or the Local Agency Formation Commission to make decisions about the proposed annexation. Another rumor suggests that there will be no legislation taken through the normal process – that these provisions will be snuck in by the Governor’s Office as a rider to the budget bill. The Governor’s Office used this mechanism to weaken environmental laws in a major way last year. And they explicitly threatened the County with a similar action in September 2025.
The Solano County Board of Supervisors held a remarkable meeting on September 9, 2025, the last day of last year’s California legislative session. Behind the scenes maneuvering had produced the “Solano Maritime Act” that would have rezoned California Forever lands along the Delta near Collinsville and would have waived environmental review of their proposed boatyard. I called this outrageous piece of legislation “The Delta Destruction Act.” Ultimately this effort to provide a special interest favor failed – but it didn’t die.
At that time, the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (Go-Biz) tried to rush this legislation through the state Senate and Assembly - literally at the last minute – overriding local laws and planning.
OK, let’s get this straight. There are credible analyses that development in this area would cause salt water intrusion which would threatened the drinking water supply of half of the population of the state. Former Benicia Mayor Elizabeth Patterson, who helped found the Delta Protection Commission, says that the Delta’s health is “hanging by a thread.” She and others suggest that the required dredging could turn freshwater ecosystems salty making water supplies unusable for millions of people, devastate agricultural water supplies, and release mercury buried in the sediment from the Gold Rush. And the proposal was to bypass an examination of these credible impacts. And roads and utilities and environmental mitigation would be extensive and must be identified upfront. That bill didn’t go through – for a reason that remains mysterious to the public.
Last week a Public Records Act request pulled back the curtain a bit to reveal the emails between Suisun City, the Governor’s Office, and California Forever that led up to the meeting. These emails revealed that California Forever had developed the strategy and had crafted the language of the legislation. Billionaires, with the backing of the Governor’s Office, pushed legislation to override local laws for their own benefit. In September the County said, “we are not thrilled about the usurping of local authority.” They are facing another threat to their power now.
Why would California Forever pursue this special treatment? By all accounts, the Environmental Impact Report for the project (rumored at between 20,000 and 25,000 pages) is almost complete. They have a compliant Suisun City Council that grants their every request and will likely certify the EIR no matter what it says. Likely they are worried about litigation and would like to armor themselves against this.
If this “Pay for Play” secret special legislation comes it likely will be tacked onto the budget bill by the Governor’s office. Then our local legislators would have a choice whether to betray their constituents by voting for the budget or to hang tough. It will come down to a choice by California: do we follow established and democratic planning process and environmental laws? Or do we follow the Golden Rule?: He who has the gold makes the rules.