California Forever wants a CEQA exemption for their new city

Jim DeKloe, SIERRA CLUB SOLANO GROUP

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.