For ‘California Forever’ CEO, business is personal

CEO Jan Sramek is making good on his company’s promise to Solano County that he would start a conversation. After years of silently buying up over 52,000 acres of land in eastern Solano County, he said he’s spent the last few weeks talking with anyone and everyone who’s interested in what California Forever’s plans are in the region.

Sramek’s name has certainly been in the headlines — both locally and nationally — after initial reporting from The New York Times revealed the investor group’s plans to transform the land into a dense urban environment with affordable housing powered by renewable energy.

Amidst the flood of information that has come out about California Forever since, Sramek wants skeptical Solano County residents to know that for him, the project is personal.

Sramek’s connection with Solano County goes back well past that, however, to fishing trips he has taken on the Sacramento River Delta over the years. From the beginning, he’s been impressed with the area’s natural landscape, industry and people.

“Many of the great things about California come together in Solano County,” he said.

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The former Goldman Sachs investor and London School of Economics graduate is happy to put his money where his mouth is on his love of the area — he’s moving his young family to a home in Solano County this weekend. But he also sees the regional and local challenges the county faces, and hopes the proposed project can help find solutions.

“A lot of these types of projects fail, or they get done badly, because it’s someone sitting in New York or Los Angeles, running a project that’s thousands or hundreds of miles away,” he said. “And so it doesn’t impact them if it doesn’t work.”

Sramek said he wants locals that isn’t the case here, as he has been very committed to the project from the beginning.

“If we create traffic, I’ll be sitting in the traffic,” he said, “and so it’s very personal.”

And while Sramek and his company are excited to make that vision a reality as quickly as possible, he wants Solano County residents to know they’re in this for the long haul, and they’re committed to being good neighbors. California Forever has taken its time to carefully set up this project, he said, and they’re taking the 40-year view rather than the short-term approach to real estate development.

“We have the patience to do it right over 30 or 40 years,” Sramek said, “but then at the same time, we have an eagerness to get started and start building some of the initial things— whether that’s a solar farm or that’s the first homes— in the next few years.”

And that patience on the part of the company and the investors, Sramek said, means they can explore opportunities to make larger infrastructure improvements for the entire region in the long term.

“This project, given the scale of it, has the opportunity to be a catalyst to solve some of these things that have been unsolvable for the last 20 years,” he said.

Mending Fences

Following the launch of the project, local leaders voiced their frustration that the company’s intentions had been kept under wraps for so long, and expressed concern about a lack of detail from the company on its long-term plan. Sramek said he has already seen many of those concerns dissipate after having conversations with many area mayors and four of the five county supervisors, but he knows California Forever will have to convince them, and ultimately, Solano County residents, that this plan is beneficial for the county as a whole.

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“We completely understand the skepticism,” he said, “Or at least the kind of neutral position, and people really can’t comment until they know the plan.”

There was good reason to operate quietly up until this summer, he said, but it was not a decision that the company took lightly.

“We were quiet about the project because we felt that the only way that you could design the right project and get to build and design a project that protected Travis, that preserved habitat lands, that generated renewable power and then build that new community, was that you would need a large amount of land that you could be flexible on,” Sramek said. “And if we hadn’t been quiet about the projects, that would have created a speculative land rush. You would’ve had speculators come in, and then it would have resulted in a patchwork of disorderly growth and disorderly projects being proposed, which is exactly what nobody wants.”

Being so quiet, Sramek said, was what California Forever thought was in the best interest of the community at large, and that over time people would come to appreciate it. In meetings so far, he said people have come to understand why it was necessary, although it will take work to build community trust.

And although they were quiet before the plans went public, Sramek said, the goal now is to flip that entirely, being as open and transparent as possible.

“If you have questions, we’ll answer them,” he said. “And for some of them, if we don’t have the answers yet, we will get back to you.”

What’s next?

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and California Forever’s vision for eastern Solano won’t be either. For the next four months and into 2024, the company will have a sole focus on community engagement on all levels, Sramek said, hoping to meet with elected officials, community organizations, and eventually as many locals as possible.

“What we want to do in the next four months is hear from everyone about how we could design it to work for them,” he said.

Having already met with many local politicians, Sramek said, California Forever will meet with the farm bureau, the chamber of commerce, the Rotary Club, environmental groups, and Travis Air Force Base.

Travis, he said, is an excellent example of a stakeholder they will have to work with, as they have already started the conversation and told the base they have no intention of placing any development closer to Travis than the city of Fairfield already sits, or in the Travis reserve area.

“We see many opportunities in which this project could help strengthen Travis,” he said.

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Sramek isn’t shy about the fact that the project will need broad community support, not just because he finds it important to be good neighbors to Rio Vista, Suisun City, Fairfield and the base, but because this issue will have to go on the ballot and be approved by Solano County voters to go forward.

‘We are quite serious about putting this on the November 2024 ballot,” he said, “and we will be putting forward much more specific plans headed into year-end and definitely by January.”

Before pen goes to paper, however, California Forever is also serious about its community engagement project, and it cannot offer more detail until those conversations have been had. They plan to open up storefronts in the coming months where locals will be able to view plans, meet with staff and discuss the ins and outs of what the project will really look like, Sramek said.

The clock is ticking

There’s a certain resignation about housing developments in California, Sramek said, that every project will spend 15 years getting approved before it can even begin. While Sramek is clear that he doesn’t want the project to be rushed, he’s committed to making sure it doesn’t get held up either.

It’s not right, he said, that popular projects that could improve lives take so much time caught up in unnecessary bureaucracy when they could be helping people now. People tend to measure these processes in years, but Sramek said likes to think of in the human cost.

He gave the example of a parent living in Solano County but commuting up to an hour and a half each way every day into the Bay Area. If this project could bring a high-paying job to the area and cut their commute to 10-15 minutes, they could spend more time with their kids. But if the project waits six years, there are six more years of missed breakfasts and missed dinners for that family.

“It’s not right,” he said. “I mean, you only have 365 evenings to tell your 3-year-old a bedtime story. And once that time has gone, it’s gone. You never get it back.”

So there is a sense of urgency, he said, and the company hopes to work with the county and state to accelerate the project if they can get support behind it.

Cutting-edge technology will help solve issues faster and more efficiently as well, he said. The development’s water, for instance, will come from its own sources, since California Forever is committed to not taking away water from existing communities.

And while groundwater and rain capture can provide some freshwater for the area, he said, innovative water infrastructure could help the average household in the new community use half the water a current Solano County household uses.

The devil is in the details

Vacaville Mayor John Carli said he has had the chance to sit down with California Forever, and described the meeting as more of an introduction than anything else. While he’s happy the lines of communication are now open, he said he still has to protect the interests of Vacaville and Solano County more broadly as more becomes known about the project.

And Carli said the details remain too sparse for him to weigh in definitively on the future of the project. He has, however, had the chance to share the interests important to Vacaville in this process, including water, energy, and the long-term viability of Travis.

“They say that they have a common interest,” he said, “but they still have yet to demonstrate it.”

On Travis in particular, the mayor wants to see what California Forever’s plans hold, as the purchased land borders the base. Carli said he has been in conversations about the base’s security with Air Force officials.

Carli likens the company to a new neighbor who has moved into a neighborhood— it’s natural to be curious and maybe a little skeptical, of who the new people on the block are.

And California Forever controls its own future, Carli said, as it has the opportunity to prove to the community that this is a good idea. As of yet, however, there aren’t quite enough specifics on the table for Carli to know for sure what he thinks.

“It’s hard to come to a conclusion,” he said.