California Forever Chief Executive Officer Jan Sramek, center, gives a presentation during a town hall to get public input on a proposed utopian residential development in Solano County, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023 at the Veterans Memorial Hall in Rio Vista, Calif. (D. Ross Cameron for the Bay Area News Group)
The CEO of a contentious plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaires for a utopia in Solano County refused to back down from a $510 million lawsuit against property owners, as he faced a mistrustful crowd of local residents.
Former Wall Street investor Jan Sramek on Tuesday addressed about 150 ranchers and other locals at the American Legion hall in Rio Vista, a hamlet of 10,000 people on the Sacramento River near Antioch. His company, California Forever, billed the gathering as a town hall to inform the public and gather feedback about the plan to build a new city with tens of thousands of homes in the next 35 to 40 years.
In jeans, scuffed brown dress shoes and an open-necked gray button-up shirt, Sramek highlighted his “blue-collar” background in the Czech Republic — mechanic father, teacher mother — and noted that “a series of scholarships” led to his degrees from the United Kingdom’s prestigious University of Cambridge and London School of Economics. He said he left Goldman Sachs, “where shifting pieces of paper around” was “a really easy way to make money,” after 20 months to co-found an “education company to help people train and acquire new skills.”
California Forever, founded in 2017 and funded by billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz and fellow billionaires LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs, raised hackles in rural Solano County by keeping their plan secret while buying up tens of thousands of acres, much of the land agricultural, then suing dozens of landowners in May for $510 million in damages over claims that through “endless greed” they conspired to jack up the sale prices of their properties.
Questions from the crowd at the town hall revealed deep skepticism and seething anger.
“I fled the Bay Area for a good reason. Are you hoping to populate the city with a bunch of techies that will drive the cost of living through the roof?” said former Berkeley resident Mike Adamkiewicz.
Sramek, who said before the meeting that he hoped to bring in offices of major technology companies along with other businesses, said the many new homes — with downpayment assistance offered — would keep prices down. California Forever, he said, plans “jobs across a whole range of skills and income levels.”
Long-time Rio Vista resident Chandra Drury said Sramek was touting the plan “like you’re doing a big favor for all of us,” but told him, “I know you’re looking for a bottom line.”
Sramek said California Forever is “a for-profit investment,” adding that $900 million has been invested so far. “In these big projects, all of the money is made in the very end — it’s made 20 years, 25 years in the future because you’re recouping all of these billions of dollars in investment,” he said. “If we promise people that it’s going to be walkable and there’s going to be a grocery store and there will be jobs and then it fails and none of it happens, we’ll sell 5,000 homes and then we are stuck holding the bag.”
California Forever has provided little information on why it chose Solano County for a development it touts with imagery evocative of Mediterranean villages and towns. Sramek highlighted long commutes and expensive housing as problems the project is meant to fix.
Toward the end of the public-question period, Maryn Anderson, a 34-year-old local teacher targeted along with her sister and rancher parents in the legal action, stood up. “Will you commit to dropping the lawsuit against the local farmers who are not aligned with your vision, in a goodwill attempt to change the way that you are interacting with our community?” asked Anderson, a sixth-generation Solano County resident.
Sramek was anything but conciliatory, calling the sued landowners’ alleged actions “illegal and criminal.”
His response drew jeers, and a shouted comment from a weathered man in a ball cap that “good neighbors don’t sue their neighbors.”
Anderson’s father Ian Anderson, 67, also took the microphone, telling Sramek he and his wife Margaret, 64, who grow wheat, hay, barley, oats and sheep, had “no interest” in negotiating an end to the case. “We are hardworking farmers. We love what we do,” he said. “We want the lawsuit, as my daughter asked you, to end for our community. It’s been hard on us, physically, mentally — costly, every part.”
Sramek said before the meeting that California Forever had reached settlements with more than half the defendants in the case, filed in Sacramento U.S. District Court by California Forever’s parent firm Flannery Associates
Santa Clara University law professor Donald Polden said the lawsuit would be hard to win because evidence of price fixing appears weak. Still, the legal action could produce a “cautioning effect” among landowners whose land the group wants to buy, he said, “so when Flannery comes calling with an offer, you shouldn’t pick up the phone and talk to three or four of your neighbors about what deals they got and what they think you should be doing.”
If a judge finds sufficient grounds for the case to proceed, the “discovery” process will allow each side to obtain information from the other.
Outside the hall, Maryn Anderson said California Forever bought properties that included 60% of the land her parents farmed under lease — nearly 5,000 acres — and refused to renew the leases after her parents declined to sell their land. “It’s completely changed our world — I’m watching my parents age in front of my eyes,” Anderson, near tears, said of the lawsuit and leases. “What my family does contributing to the global food supply is not only important but it’s dignified.”
Sramek, who repeatedly blamed controversy over the project on a small group of opponents, told the crowd that California Forever had paid for improvements such as wells and fences on some leased land it bought.
Four additional town halls are planned. California Forever will present a full plan of the development in January, and aims to put an initiative on the Solano County ballot next November to change the county general plan and zoning to allow the project, he said. But although he later told the crowd that “in November 2024 every voter in Solano County is going to decide whether they are going to have a better future here with this project or without it,” he said in an interview before the meeting that if the initiative fails, “there are other ways to proceed with the project.” He declined to explain further, saying, “We’ll get to that if it happens.”
Originally published at Ethan Baron