The company pursuing a controversial plan to build a new city on bucolic Solano County farmland insists that public approval is crucial to the success of its for-profit utopia. But California Forever’s leaders have been making adversaries from the get-go.
Nearly every step of the Silicon Valley billionaire-backed development has met resistance. In response, California Forever has been picking fights — with landowners, concerned citizens and even the Solano County Land Trust, a high-profile conservation group.
“The first time they encounter a problem, they pull out their sword and they start waving it around — it’s not a good look,” said Sam Singer, a prominent public relations and political consultant who has smoothed the way for other major Bay Area redevelopments, including Treasure Island and the Hunters Point and Mare Island naval shipyards. “Whoever advised them from a political and public relations perspective gave them some of the worst advice we’ve ever seen.”
“Billionaires and bullies is, I think, how people look at them,” said Singer, who described the project — a planned walkable mix of homes, shops, schools, parks, offices and factories — as a “bold,” support-worthy enterprise jeopardized by PR missteps.
Last week, the company released a proposed ballot initiative seeking voters’ approval for the necessary rezoning of 18,600 acres of mostly agricultural land that California Forever’s CEO Jan Sramek said Wednesday is key to the development. “We’re pretty confident it’s going to get approved,” Sramek said at an event in Rio Vista. “You’ve seen the reaction here today.”
That reaction — enthusiastic clapping in response to statements by Sramek and California Forever planning staff — came from a hand-picked group of supporters invited to the event, which was billed as a news conference and brief Q&A session with local residents.
Outside were about two dozen local residents who had not been invited, including Kathy Schmidt, 76, a Rio Vista resident of 25 years who had shown up at the Veterans Memorial Building only to be told it was a private meeting. “It’s not what we were expecting,” she said. “I want to know what the hell’s going on with this new city.”
Rio Vista resident Kathy Schmidt, 76, expresses her frustrations during an interview for not being let inside for a California Forever press conference held for journalists and invited guests at Veterans Memorial Building in Rio Vista, Calif., on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. California Forever unveiled details of its proposed ballot initiative at the press conference. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Schmidt had heard about the meeting from the local TV news and showed up at the location California Forever had announced, only to learn from a passer-by that the company had switched the venue. “Somebody’s playing a game,” Schmidt said tersely.
This was only the latest eruption of discontent.
The initial secrecy of the project raised suspicions and a cloud of mistrust even before its backers — including billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz, and fellow billionaires LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs — were revealed in an August exposé in the New York Times. Who was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy thousands of acres of agricultural land near the Sacramento River and Travis Air Force Base? The Air Force launched a probe, and the U.S. Agriculture Department had questions, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, a Richmond Democrat whose district includes the project area, told this news organization in September that the land purchases near the base raised concerns bad actors could get close enough to wreak havoc, perhaps even bring down military aircraft. State Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Fresno Democrat, said she worried the investors might be conniving to grab California’s water.
Sramek, the 36-year-old CEO, has said the secrecy was necessary to prevent publicity that could lead to property owners jacking up prices. That’s the wrong approach, as outreach to local community and political leaders would have laid positive foundations, even if word got out and land costs rose, Singer said. “It could have conceivably cost them a bit more money, even a good bit more money — but they have the money to spend,” Singer said. “They’d have a lot more public support as opposed to concern and fear and speculation.”
Bad blood started flowing when California Forever’s real estate arm, Flannery Associates, filed a lawsuit last May in Sacramento U.S. District Court claiming some landowners had done just what it had feared: boosted asking prices. The hold-out property owners, many ranchers with generations of family history in the county, had illegally conspired, out of “boundless greed,” to wring as much loot as possible out of Flannery, the lawsuit alleged. Flannery is seeking a half-billion dollars in damages from them. Evidence of such a conspiracy, said Santa Clara University law professor Donald Polden, is weak.
Maryn Anderson, a 34-year-old Rio Vista teacher targeted along with her sister and rancher parents in the legal action, said after her parents declined to sell their land, Flannery bought properties they farmed under lease and refused to renew their leases. “I’m watching my parents age in front of my eyes,” Anderson said earlier this month.
At a December town hall by California Forever, Anderson, 34, asked Sramek to drop the lawsuit. Sramek countered by suggesting the defendant property owners were criminals.
The language in the lawsuit — filed by a notoriously effective and aggressive New York City-based law office — and Flannery’s combative response to reluctant landowners also undermines community and political support for the project, Singer said. The actions so far suggest to anyone expressing opposition that “they’re going to get sued by a powerful real estate developer as well as by an aggressive law firm.”
Singer describes Sramek, a former Wall Street trader, as “super-bright.” Yet the CEO, who has made himself the face of California Forever, embroiled himself recently in a public feud with the executive director of the Solano Land Trust, which has not taken a position on the project.
After Sramek and his wife donated $20,000 to the land trust, California Forever announced the funding at a town hall meeting and on its website, describing the money as a grant. Land trust executive director Nicole Braddock took issue, emailing the nonprofit’s supporters to make clear that her organization does not accept donations that require endorsement or any quid pro quo.
The land trust, she said, was “deeply upset” to be listed as a grantee, a description she described as “self-serving and grossly misleading.” The land trust returned the donation, which she said was “different than a grant.” “It felt like they were using the donation to mischaracterize how the funds happened. Grant funds are requested. We didn’t request those funds,” Braddock said.
In emails to Braddock — which California Forever posted on Facebook — Sramek accused her of trying to “portray what was clearly a company grant as one made by myself and my wife.” Her message to the trust’s email list was “highly misleading, defamatory, and grossly unfairly (sic) to myself, my wife, and to California Forever,” Sramek wrote.
Other donation recipients did not take issue with California Forever’s descriptions of funding as grants and were happy to take the money. Tanya Brownrigg, executive director of VEST Solano, which supports survivors of domestic violence, said California Forever’s $10,000 donation was much needed, and donation and grant are often used interchangeably.
However, Al Medvitz, a holdout rancher not targeted in the lawsuit, who does not want a city to replace farmland, viewed the funding as a “cynical” ploy to curry favor in the community.
Sramek’s open feuding with Braddock seems “unbecoming” of a chief executive, Singer said. “The role of a CEO is to stay out of the fray,” Singer said. “For Jan Sramek to be caught up in a he-said-she-said battle with a beloved local nonprofit is not helpful to him or California Forever. Somebody ought to hand these guys the book ‘How To Win Friends and Influence People.’”
Asked this week about his dispute with Braddock, the lawsuit and California Forever’s approach to disputes over the project, Sramek said, “I don’t think we’ve been adversarial.” The company has “amazing relationships with most of the people,” he said, but there is “a small number of people where there’s been sharp elbows.”
U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, a Napa Democrat whose district includes the project area, said this week in an interview that California Forever “started out on the wrong foot” with secrecy, then compounded problems in the community by suing landowners. “Everyone I talked to is very skeptical,” Thompson said, adding that he personally has found “it’s hard to get a straight answer out of these guys.”
