Heh. Four months ahead of the November election, and following a damning report by Solano County staff, California Forever is pulling their ballot initiative to rezone an eastern swath of the county so they can build their utopian "city of yesterday."

The report was prepared for the Solano County Board of Supervisors, which was set to vote on whether to approve California Forever's plans for a new city or let the decision go to the voters. As Bay Area News Group reports, the report concluded that not only would the new city development be a potential huge finanacial drain on the county, it would also likely slash agricultural production and threaten the county's already limited water supply.

The contentious plan for a new city with up to 400,000 residents has been, since the outset, a bit of a moonshot proposal akin to other billionaire pipedreams like sea-steading and colonizing Mars. What all of these plans have in common is a throwing up one's hands about the problems of urban centers like San Francisco, and believing that existing political structures and regulations will make these problems impossible to solve. So, let's just build a new city that we can design and control ourselves, the thinking goes.

The first hurdle to this, in Solano County at least, has been a 40-year-old ordinance that was intended to prevent exactly this type of usurping of farmland. The so-called Orderly Growth Ordinance confined future urbanization to the existing jurisdictions of Vacaville, Vallejo, Dixon, Fairfield, Suisun City, Benicia, and Rio Vista.

California Forever, and its 38-year-old CEO Jan Sramek, was looking to side-step this ordinance and rezone the 60,000 acres of land they've purchased — to the tune of $900,000 — by way of a ballot initiative. It was packaged as the East Solano Homes, Jobs, and Clean Energy Initiative, and the group has been a charm offensive for the last eight months, gathering signatures for the measure, and doing things like opening a new health clinic in Rio Vista to show their good will.

They've also run a series of very vague ads promising thousands of new jobs in the new city — which are far from a foregone conclusion. And, since the spring, the project hasn't been polling well, despite clearing the low hurdle of 13,500 signatures to get on the ballot.

Meanwhile, environmental groups and county officials have been warning that the plan has not adequately studied the water and road infrastructure needs of this new city, or proven that it would not be built at the expense of the county's existing cities.

Now it's back to the drawing boards — or planning boards, as it were. Sramek put out a statement on the East Solano Plan website Monday saying the group is "excited" to announce its new agreement with the county. "Instead of asking for zoning change now, and then completing Environmental Impact Report and Development Agreement later, we will work together to complete the Environmental Impact Report and Development Agreement first, and then bring the full completed package forward."

The completion of said EIR is expected by 2026, but it seems far from assured that the county board of supervisors will leap to any development agreement after that, or that the report won't get further mired in fights with environmental and farming interests. And the development agreement will still, in two or three or five years' time, have to go before voters for final approval.

The story of this new city-from-whole-cloth caught the attention of the New York Times, which was the first to break the story last August of its billionaire backers, which include VCs Michael Moritz and Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. As the Times notes today, Sramek's vision, which he successfully sold to these billionaires, was "a new twist on a planned community, only instead of cul-de-sac subdivisions, he proposed a design to evoke city neighborhoods with row homes, bike lanes and nearby retail where residents could walk to do their grocery shopping."

Previously: Solano Land Trust Tells Voters to Vote 'No' on California Forever Ballot Measure