Plan For California Startup City May Have Found Backdoor Off The Ballot

The billionaire-backed effort to build a massive new city unsaddled from California’s urban problems may have just found a backdoor that saves the group from having to put its deeply unpopular project before Solano County voters.

The council of Suisun City, a small 27,000 town northeast of San Francisco, voted last Tuesday to direct its city manager to discuss growing the size of the city with “regional partners” as a way to resolve long-standing financial challenges faced by the municipality.

“At only four square miles, we are Solano County’s smallest city,” City Manager Bret Prebula said via press release following the council’s decision. “Now is the time to consider what more we can do to creatively grow our community and deliver more economic opportunity.”

Suisun City faces clear economic challenges and is currently only staffing emergency services at 80 percent of recommended levels. A local sales tax ballot measure in 2024 helped ward off further cuts, but will not resolve the deficit. In Prebula’s view, growing the city is a way toward financial stability.

But notably, the only direction the city can expand is east — directly into land owned by California Forever, the group behind the contentious effort to develop a dense, new-urbanist-style city that would double the county's population. Since arriving in Solano County in 2023, the company, led by CEO Jan Sramek, has faced significant local resistance even as it has flooded the county with billboards and mailers advocating for its project.

Solano County residents quickly connected the dots.

A California Forever representative declined to confirm any negotiations, with spokesperson Julia Blystone saying only that the company is “committed to working with all stakeholders to build a stronger Solano County.”

“If we receive an invitation to explore annexation by Suisun City, we would be open to a conversation,” she said.

“The city manager’s verbiage is exactly like California Forever, everything he says sounds like all their stuff,” said Michelle Trippi, an opponent of the project who helped create a local online opposition group called California ForNever. “It's like this has all been systematically set up.”

Just six months ago, facing months of poor polling, California Forever was driven to unceremoniously pull an initiative that asked voters countywide to rezone 17,500 acres of land for construction. Since then, the company’s leaders have tried to reach a development agreement with county officials that would eventually allow them to begin building. But that agreement, too, would have to come before voters.

Partnering with Suisun City would offer a different path to construction, in which a countywide ballot initiative would no longer be necessary. Instead, it would resemble a more traditional municipal land-use process. Should the Suisun City Council choose to move forward, annexation would need only the approval of the Solano County Local Agency Formation Commission, a planning body responsible for regulating the growth of cities and local governments.

“The project would stop being California Forever and it would start being the city of Suisun. That’s what was a total mind trip,” Suisun City Mayor Pro Tem Princess Washington, a vocal critic of the project, told Playbook. “To do this was very cunning. It's diabolical.”

Prior to the meeting, Catherine Moy, the mayor of neighboring Fairfield, alleged that Prebula and Washington “apparently quietly worked the deal out” with California Forever. Sramek personally donated $5,000 to a ballot measure committee aiming to pass a local 2024 sales tax funding public services in Suisun City.

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