There was nothing on the ballot Tuesday in Solano County about the proposed new town/development that's being proposed by a cabal of Silicon Valley billionaires. But the group, called California Forever, did just release a new rendering.
So far, the renderings of the proposed, shiny happy city in eastern Solano County have been AI-generated-looking propaganda pieces depicting sun-dappled, tree-lined streets of rowhouses and the like. But a main sticking point for local politicians has been the uncomfortable proximity to Travis Air Force Base, and what impacts that may have.
Last month, the group resubmitted its filing with the county registrar of voters after responding to questions about whether the new community could impact radar signals at the base, which is almost immediately to the west.
The new rendering released, as KRON4 notes, attempts to further illsutrate that there is adequate distance between the new town and the base.
As the group's press release puts it, the rendering "illustrates a compact, walkable community surrounded by agriculture, open space, and solar and wind farms."
The map's legend points out that the unnamed New Community will be 4.5 miles from Travis AFB, while Fairfield is right next door, just a half mile to the west, and the edge of Vacaville is just two miles to the north.
The group published a statement of some sort of endorsement of the plan by Travis AFB on February 16, writing, "With Travis AFB protected and its ability to fly its full mission secured, we look forward to building a new economic engine for Solano County."
Also on Wednesday, the group announced its first set of TV ads to air on cable channels in the local market, which will begin buttering up voters who will take a first pass on endorsing, or rejecting, the project in November.
California Forever has the relatively low-bar task of gathering 13,500 signatures to get their ballot initiative on the November ballot, which would carve out an exception to the county's longstanding Orderly Growth ordinance. That ordinance, passed in the 1980s, confines future development of this scale to the urban bounderies of the existing cities of Vallejo, Fairfield, Rio Vista, Vacaville, Suisun City, Dixon and Benicia.
"A knowledgeable voter is the best kind of voter, and we find that the more Solano County residents learn about our project, the more they like it,” says Matt Rodriguez, the campaign manager for the ballot initiative. "We’re excited to be engaging with members of the Solano County community and this is another opportunity for us to continue sharing information about how we plan to bring middle class homes and good paying jobs to Solano County."
It's not clear how well the project went over in a series of town-hall meetings that California Forever held two months ago in each of the county's cities.
But we know there is pretty staunch opposition so far by local politicos, including Congressman John Garamendi [D-Fairfield].
Garimendi noted last month that the plan for the new community, so far, has no proposal for how it would be governed — so, at present, it is a for-profit development and little more, though it's possible the city-government details just haven't been ironed out yet.
"[There's an] inability of the county government to control what goes on in this 400,000-person city," Garimendi told the Chronicle. "No city council, no local government [is planned] to be set up at all."
"It’s easy to make promises, it’s a lot harder to make laws," said former county supervisor Duane Kromm, speaking to the Chronicle. "We don’t know what they are after specifically, but these are rich autocrats who think they can buy whatever they want to buy."
Those rich autocrats include backers Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and Michael Moritz, among others.
