Delta – Enviro Updates

California Forever plan for new city of 400,000 divides Solano County

March 21, 2026

Glen Martin, BAY CITY NEWS

The two men stood near a rickety barbed wire fence by state Highway 12 between Suisun City and Rio Vista in Solano County, looking east over a vast tract of gently rolling rangeland.

California Forever is located between Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista in Solano County — California Forever location.

In the summer, this sprawling property will be sere and brown. But now, freshened by heavy winter rains, it is intensely green. Wetlands dot the landscape, some supporting Canada geese and mallard ducks dabbling in the water. Northern harriers and red-tailed hawks cruise overhead, seeking mice and voles in the grasses and emerging wildflowers below.

Both men admired the view. But Jim DeKloe, a biology professor at Solano Community College, and John Harter, the owner of Waterfront Comics in Suisun City, have different visions for the property.

To DeKloe, the land is fine just as it is: a spectacular open space burgeoning with wildlife and supporting rare ecosystems such as vernal pools and native grasslands. Harter, on the other hand, shares the dream of Flannery Associates, a group of wealthy investors led by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader. Flannery — and Harter — want to see this 100-square-mile parcel developed. They hope to see a new city rising here, one that will ultimately support 400,000 residents at full build-out.

The project is called California Forever, and for three years it has pitted the residents of Solano County against each other. What started off as an acrimonious flame war between supporters and detractors has now settled into a grinding battle of attrition.

Habitats, Land UseCalifornia Forever, Delta, Solano County

A hunger for answers on California Forever’s environmental impacts

March 4, 2026

Tanvi Dutta Gupta, BAY NATURE

It’s been two and a half years since news emerged of a tech-billionaire-backed idea to put a 400,000-person city in Solano County, and a lot of big questions remain—as indicated by the 616 pages of public comments just on the notice that an environmental impact report was coming.

After California Forever pulled a controversial ballot measure that would have put the development in voters’ hands, the project kept moving forward. Now the project has been reimagined as an expansion of tiny, broke Suisun City, and California Forever has officially begun preparing the environmental impact report people first asked for two years ago. It will be the first comprehensive look at what the massive development could mean for nature in southeastern Solano County.

The public comments, submitted by 38 individuals or groups, offer feedback on the environmental impact report’s notice of preparation, or NOP, a step that lets government agencies and members of the public chime in about what they want to see in the draft report. Project developers must address these comments in the report to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act. But such comments rarely attract much public interest: Jim Bermudez, deputy city manager for Suisun City, says in his 25 years of experience in city permitting, he’s “never really been down that road.”

The area for the proposed urban and industrial development is part of the larger Jepson Prairie ecosystem, home to California’s last remaining claypan vernal pools, and one of the few remaining rural corners of the Bay Area in a state where agricultural land is on the decline. California Forever told Bay Nature over email that its development will be “the most sustainable city in the United States.”

Habitats, Land UseCalifornia Forever, Delta, Jepson Prairie ecosystem

Op-Ed: California is failing its signature salmon

October 12, 2025

Tom Philp, PRESS DEMOCRAT

“Basically, we sit on the edge of extinction,” said Jeffrey Mount, a longtime expert in California rivers who conducts research at the Public Policy Institute of California. There have been successes, most notably the removal of dams on the Klamath River. It is the primary wild population of the Sacramento River watershed with the dangerously dwindling numbers.

California salmon are as central to our historic identity as the symbol on our state flag, the California grizzly. It is a sad and ironic tragedy that the grizzly has been extinct for generations. What does it say about us if salmon may soon follow?

California is known around the globe for its commitment to environmentalism. But the state is struggling. Much is chronicled about how California isn’t on target to meet climate change goals, such as our pioneering plans for “net zero” emissions of global warming gases in just two decades. There is less attention on how the state is equally failing the signature inhabitants of its natural world.

Losing salmon would be an ecological disaster for our freshwater ecosystems, forests, riverbanks and other native species if their links to the salmon were severed. Healthy salmon runs mean jobs for Californians, but the industry generating $1 billion is at risk, as is a historic piece of California’s culture.

Habitats, WildlifeDelta, endangered species, Sacramento River, salmon, salmon habitat

Billionaire backers of new Solano County city reveal map and details of proposed development

January 17, 2024

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires that for years stealthily snapped up more than $800 million worth of rural land for a new walkable, affordable and green city between San Francisco and Sacramento now needs voters to embrace the idea.

Jan Sramek, the former Goldman Sachs trader spearheading the effort, will speak Wednesday about his plans to create a walkable California city flush with affordable housing and jobs on what’s now mostly farmland. His California Forever company needs approval from Solano County voters to bypass protections put in place in 1984 to keep agricultural land from being turned into urban space.

He’ll reveal ballot language that will provide the most detailed look yet of the community envisioned by he and his billionaire backers, like philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. If the group can secure 13,000 signatures from Solano County voters, the measure will go before voters this November.

They picture 20,000 homes for 50,000 residents between Travis Air Force Base and the tiny city of Rio Vista, with rowhouses and apartment buildings within walking distance to jobs, schools, bars, restaurants and grocery stores. Eventually the city could grow to 400,000 people, the group says, but only if it can create at least 15,000 jobs that pay above average wages.

Created in 2017, California Forever has purchased more than 78 square miles (202 square kilometers) of farmland in Solano County. The plan calls for $400 million to help Solano County residents buy homes in the proposed community.

Habitats, Land UseCalifornia Forever, Delta

Op-Ed: New priorities needed for California’s next drought

March 23, 2021

Darius Waiters and Brandon Dawson, CALMATTERS

As California faces another dry year, the state will have to decide whether to allow the violation of water quality standards in the Delta.

A series of key decisions await Gov. Gavin Newsom as the state heads back into a potential drought.

So this seems like the right moment to review what happened last time: Water was prioritized for big agriculture at the expense of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, endangered species and California communities. The State Water Board, in a review of the drought of 2014-15, found operations “not sustainable.”

We hope Newsom will prevent a repeat of that disaster by setting new priorities for a prolonged drought: Protecting the human right to water for drinking and sanitation, protecting public health for those who live adjacent to our rivers, and protecting endangered species.

Sadly, the operation plans for the State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project are starting to look like a repeat of 2014 and 2015. The projects plan to deliver 5 million acre-feet of water – 1 million from the SWP and 4 million from the CVP – from the Delta largely to corporate agribusinesses, regardless of the impacts to the Delta, people, fish and wildlife.

We are now hearing that the California Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation may petition the State Water Resources Control Board to waive water quality standards in the Delta again, as they did in 2014 and 2015.

Sustainable Living, Water, WildlifeDelta, drought, water access, water regulation, water supply

2021: Is this the year that wild delta smelt become extinct?

January 10, 2021

Peter Moyle, Karrigan Börk, John Durand, T-C Hung, and Andrew L. Rypel, CALIFORNIA WATER BLOG

2020 was a bad year for delta smelt. No smelt were found in the standard fish sampling programs (fall midwater trawl, summer townet survey). Surveys designed specifically to catch smelt (Spring Kodiak Trawl, Enhanced Delta Smelt Monitoring Program) caught just two of them despite many long hours of sampling. The program to net adult delta smelt for captive brood stock caught just one smelt in over 151 tries. All signs point to the Delta smelt as disappearing from the wild this year, or, perhaps, 2022. In case you had forgotten, the Delta smelt is an attractive, translucent little fish that eats plankton, has a one-year life cycle, and smells like cucumbers. It was listed as a threatened species in 1993 and has continued to decline since then. Former President Trump made it notorious when he called it a “certain little tiny fish” that was costing farmers millions of gallons of water (not true, of course).
Delta smelt, photo by Matt Young.

As part of the permitting process for Delta water infrastructure, the USFWS issued a Biological Opinion (BO), written by biologists, that found that increased export of water from the big pumps of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project would further endanger the smelt. The BO was then revised by non-biologists to conclude that increased pumping would not hurt the smelt. The reason given was that large-scale habitat improvement efforts, plus the development of a facility for spawning and rearing of domesticated smelt, would save the species. We have written a short, fairly readable, article for a law journal that describes why the revised BO will not save the smelt. We will not write further about the paper in this blog but encourage readers to give the full article a read (it is a free download).

So, is this the year the smelt becomes extinct in the wild? Frankly, we are impressed by its resilience (see previous California WaterBlogs on smelt status) but small populations of endangered pelagic fish in large habitats tend to disappear, no matter what we do, partly the result of random events.

Source: https://californiawaterblog.com/2021/01/10/2021-is-this-the-year-that-wild-delta-smelt-become-extinct/

Habitats, Water, WildlifeDelta, Delta smelt, ecosystems, endangered species, salmonids

Delta on the edge

September 2, 2020

Kurtis Alexander & Santiago Mejia, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

In a California landscape defined — and divided — by water, a single issue unites the people who live here: digging in against the tunnel

In spring and summer, when the skies are warm and the shadows thin, California’s snowy Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades unleash billions of gallons of fresh water each day, a melted bounty that nourishes the state’s mightiest rivers before converging slowly on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

Here, across a sun-baked plain of rickety towns and sprawling countryside, the cool water winds through streams and sloughs. It fills irrigation ditches that feed cornfields and vineyards. It flows through shallow bays flanked by wooden fishing piers and riverside homes. Finally, it’s pumped off to the sinks and showers of two-thirds of Californians, many giving little thought to where the water came from — and just how vulnerable the supply has become.

The delta is an unlikely frontier, and an even more improbable battleground. So close to the Bay Area, but apart. Hidden beyond freeways and tucked beneath the wide open of the Central Valley. Vital to the future, yet wrapped in the past.

This sleepy place, though, is waking, reluctantly and resoundingly, jolted by the state’s modern-day demand for water. Those who live here, where family farms span generations and a postman still delivers mail by boat, fear that looming changes could wipe out this singular slice of California and turn their figurative backwater into a literal one.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Gov. Gavin Newsom, like governors before him, wants to overhaul how water moves through the delta. He’s proposing a 30-mile tunnel that would streamline the delivery of water from the Sacramento River, a bid to halt the ongoing devastation of the delta’s wetlands and wildlife while ensuring its flows continue to provide for the rest of the state.

The pressures of climate change on water supplies have only increased the urgency to act. And the coronavirus pandemic and months of shelter-in-place orders haven’t slowed the planning. A tense situation is unfolding even as California’s attention is elsewhere.

Follow the roads through the delta and you’ll see the signs and stickers, on pickup trucks and bars, at cattle ranches and trailer parks, and next to bridges and boatyards: “No tunnel. Save our delta.”

The starkness of the choice laid out in the slogan is deliberate. Residents here not only see the project as a water grab, but worry the central force in their lives and livelihoods — the movement of fresh water — could be lost as the tunnel allows Silicon Valley, Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley’s vast agricultural industry to satisfy their thirst. President Trump’s insistence on shipping more water to big farms to the south has only added to the anxiety.

“The tunnel just isn’t good for the delta,” said Mark Morais, 70, owner of Giusti’s, a popular roadhouse serving pasta and steaks on checkerboard tablecloths in Walnut Grove, about 30 miles south of Sacramento. “If you divert the water, you’re going to have less for us.”

The communities in the region, which spreads across about 1,100 square miles in parts of five counties, rarely speak with one voice. Local farmers see these watery reaches as meant for agriculture. Those casting for bass and stripers prioritize fish. Boaters want open water. Longtime residents and recent retirees want to sip a cold drink along the waterside and gaze out at their share of California paradise.

Agriculture/Food System, WaterDelta, Delta smelt, delta tunnels, irrigation, water supply