Paradise City: Silicon Valley mogul Jan Sramek behind secret plan to create sustainable new city on Solano County ag lands

Not since Jack Nicholson got his nose slashed in Chinatown, has there been such a mystery surrounding the buying up of land.

While the 1974 Roman Polanski movie deals with an Owens Valley water rights swindle back in the 1930s, today’s mystery involves Silicon Valley, secrecy and the pastural lands of Solano County.

It all started quietly. As one local tells it, back in 2018, a neighboring farmer was approached by an agent for a company known as Flannery Associates. The agent offered the farmer “two or three times” the assessed value for his land and the farmer and his wife, surprised, but ready for retirement, happily took the windfall. The agent was reported to be making offers to other farmers—absentee landlords, members of old farming families––turning family members who did want to sell against family members who didn’t.

Neighbors started to wonder: Who was this group? What did they want with the land?

Some farmers, not necessarily wanting to sell, but wanting to see how much they could get for their land if they did, jacked up their prices. Some perhaps did this out of greed, others maybe to get the buyers to back off. The specific reasons became a moot point in May of this year when the group of farmers who raised their prices found themselves with a nuclear response from Flannery: a $510 million lawsuit citing violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The suit claimed that the company—principals at the time still unknown—had suffered losses in profits for land they could not buy and accused “wealthy farmers” of price-fixing. At that point, secrecy, previously having cloaked only the buyer, descended on the farming community, too. Normally vocal in their opinions, members of the farm community retreated from talking about the situation, not just to the press, but “even to each other,” as one person told us, on the condition of anonymity.

The fear of being sued can change your life. As one person explained, “[The buyers] have very deep pockets. They threaten these things. It forces people into a corner. And you have to start going into your life savings and your resources to hire very expensive attorneys to defend yourself. That creates enormous amounts of pain and anger.”

Rep. Mike Thompson, (D-St. Helena) is sympathetic. “I’ve talked to many farmers in and near my district, who have been impacted,” says Thompson. “Some of whom can’t farm anymore because of these purchases.” He explains that the kind of farming done in Solano County––grain, livestock—requires a lot of contiguous land. “You can’t do it on little pieces of land. So, when these guys came in and purchased the land that farmers had been leasing, and then kicked [the tenant farmers] off or put them on a month-to-month lease––you can’t farm with a month-to-month lease––they effectively put some family farmers out of business,” he says. “And that impacts our food security.”

Adds Thompson: “And I don’t think that’s right.”

One comparison we heard to describe Flannery’s approach––and its use of secrecy, requiring non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), playing one family member against another––as being “like a hostile takeover.”

Eventually, the concerns over this unidentified interest purchasing up property around Travis Air Force Base reached a fever pitch. Travis is the largest military air mobility

organization in the U.S. Air Force, sitting on 6,350 acres just outside Fairfield, with 1,270 military housing units and over 7,000 U.S. Air Force military personnel, plus another nearly 10,000 Air Force Reserve and civilians. Security around the base is a matter of national interest.

One senior-level source in the Solano County planning department told NorthBay biz such an aggressive and secretive land grab near a key military site has been a source of concern for years.
“This has been an ongoing mystery for us for the last few years,” the source says. “Flannery LLC has been buying up tens of thousands of acres near the air base at double and triple market value. Lots of fears about a foreign ownership.”

State Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) has his eye on Travis Air Force Base as well.“Protecting that institution, protecting that asset for our country––that to me is foremost,” says Dodd, whose 3^rd district includes Solano County.

Protection of the land is also a priority of Dodd’s, and others, and is the express mission of the Solano Land Trust, a conservation organization which protects over 25,000 acres of natural areas and agricultural lands. So when a group comes in and purchases twice that amount of land—with holdings throughout the prime agricultural areas of eastern Solano County—people take notice. What does it mean for the local agriculture community, whose viability depends on having enough contiguous lands for individual farmers to graze, plant, harvest and manage their seasonal operations?

“We don’t really have a point of view yet,” says Nicole Braddock, executive director of the Land Trust, “because we’re not exactly sure what they’re planning. But we’re paying attention.”

Talk of the town

By late August of this year, Flannery Associates had spent nearly $800 million to purchase approximately 55,000 acres of land––roughly 10% of Solano County, making Flannery Associates, identities at that time still unknown, the largest landowner in Solano County. The story was covered by newspapers from here to New York and even London and speculation was shrill: Who was buying all this land? And so close to Travis Air Force Base? Maybe foreign nationals? Maybe the Chinese!

At the height of the mystery, an Aug. 28 story in the New York Times broke the spell. When the “Associates” were unveiled, the key investors turned out to be deep-pocketed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and founders of various tech companies. Not foreign nationals after all.

The CEO of Flannery Associates—and the “brainchild” of the vision the company hopes to build—is Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old billionaire from the Czech Republic, via London School of Economics, Goldman Sachs and a couple of recent startups of his own. Shortly after the Times story broke, Sramek launched a website under the name California Forever, parent company of Flannery Associates. The website— californiaforever.com—presents an attractive, elaborate vision for the land the company now owns, including building a “city from scratch” and creating tens of thousands of jobs, a million trees, a nature preserve, greenbelt and solar farms. The elegantly designed website is decorated with colorful illustrations of people at leisure and play in picturesque settings (one drawing shows the sun setting in front of a hillside) projecting a radiant, if idealistic, vision.

Ron Kott, mayor of Rio Vista, a town of about 10,000 bordering the Sacramento River, in southeastern Solano County, has probed the website. While the illustrations look resplendent, something about it disturbs him. As he describes it, the vision says: Yes, we want to build a lot of housing; we want to have abundant open space; we want to have a vast solar array; we want to plant a million trees. “And the thing is,” he says, “I didn’t know where they were planning on doing any of this.” That “where” is particularly concerning since they’ve purchased land surrounding Rio Vista. “So, we’re kind of boxed in,” he says. “Whatever they’re going to do, it’s going to affect us in a big way. It’ll change our culture or the whole outlook of the city.”

‘We can do big things in the world’

Solano County is a quiet place, at least at first glance. Driving through on a windy autumn afternoon, one wouldn’t know that America’s largest Air Force transport base is located here. Nor is it apparent that the autumnal landscape of brown, now-dormant land produces a rich menu of agricultural produce—from dairy and grains to tomatoes, wine grapes, sunflower seeds and dry crops like alfalfa; there is livestock, nuts and more. Solano agriculture brings in some $400 million annually. Driving east along State Route 12, toward the Sacramento River, one can’t miss the towering, white windmills slicing through the sky, casting shadows over the rolling hills. Outside cities like Vallejo, Fairfield and Vacaville—which each boast more than 100,000 residents—population centers are sparse. Tourists are few and far between.

With residential and commercial activity largely situated along the Highway 80 urban corridor, thousands of acres in southeast Solano remain largely undeveloped.

On the California Forever website, Sramek presents his grand vision for “a new community” in Solano County, situated within the 55,000 acres Flannery Associates owns, “that attracts new employers, creates good paying local jobs, builds homes in walkable neighborhoods, leads in environment stewardship, and fuels a growing tax base to serve the county at large.”

Via a phone interview with NorthBay biz, Sramek elaborates on the vision and explains that while his group had been “quiet in the past about our plans,” they are now eager to talk and listen and are running a “very, very active program” to engage the public. [Editor’s note: Sramek told the Vacaville Reporter the reason Flannery purchased the land in secrecy was to avoid a “land rush,” in which speculators swooped in and purchased Solano properties in hopes of cashing in on a future development opportunity.]

“I’ve had dozens of meetings with local elected officials and community leaders and nonprofit leaders and residents of Solano County,” Sramek says. “I think it’s a broadly shared perspective that there’s an opportunity to build something really special here.” He says that from what he’s heard, people seem to feel some version of, “I don’t know exactly what’s the configuration of a new community—and clean energy and habitat and open space—but I believe that there is a combination of those things that I would like to see happen in this part of Solano County.”

Given the number and complexity of issues surrounding the creating of any “new community,” the project, yet undefined, will take many years. But Sramek is looking ahead. “Regarding the timeline, we have this kind of dual approach to it,” he says. “On the one hand, we’ve set up our company and operation in a way where we are patient enough to do this right and take the long-term view and spend the next 30 to 40 years building it. We’re not going to be a developer that just puts up a bunch of tract homes, sells them and leaves.” Still, building projects, certainly here in California, he acknowledges, take a long time. “There has been a resignation in California that all of these big projects have to take 15 years to break ground,” he says. “And the result of that is that tens of thousands of California families are leaving for Texas and Florida and Nevada. We just don’t accept that status quo.”

Sramek’s book Racing Towards Excellence: Demystifying the Inside Track to Academic, Career and Financial Outperformance—coauthored by Muzaffar Khan and published in 2009 when Sramek was 22 and still a Goldman Sachs trader. In it, he cited a piece of advice he’d send to his younger self, a bit of counsel inspired by Ayn Rand: “The question isn’t who’s going to help me, but who’s going to stop me.”

Asked today if he still adheres to such brash guidance, he laughs and responds: “I think the optimism of, ‘We can do big things in the world, and we should be trying to make things better,’ is the part I believe.”

He says he is committed to breaking ground in the next few years.

A question of trust

Sramek may face a response to his rhetorical “who’s going to stop me?” question next year at the ballot box. The land Flannery Associates acquired has long been zoned for open space and agriculture, with building and expansion happening in the cities. As county officials state at solanocounty.com:

The voter-approved General Plan and Orderly Growth Ordinance allows only for agricultural uses on the majority of land California Forever has acquired. To change the ag land designation and zoning of the properties to accommodate urban development, a measure would have to be placed on the ballot and approved by a majority of Solano County voters.

Sramek has said he’s determined to bring a measure before voters on the 2024 ballot, a move which wouldn’t surprise Rep. Thompson.

“I presume their next move is to try and go to the ballot and overturn those open space and ag land protections,” says Thompson. “When the developer’s pockets are as deep as these guys’, they have an advantage. They can run a pretty aggressive campaign.”

State Sen. Dodd advises the public to keep informed. “There will be an opportunity to weigh in,” he says, “but I think it’s really critically important not to wait for that, because, you know, sometimes votes of the people don’t go the way we want.”

Meanwhile, given all the secrecy involved in the California Forever plan thus far, Thompson believes Flannery Associates has a more overriding issue to overcome—trust. “The trust issue is something that should concern us all,” says Thompson. “Presumably, these are folks who want to be in the area for a long time, and they want to develop something. I’m not sure exactly what that is, but they’re going to have to have a trustworthy working relationship with local elected officials and county and city bureaucrats to be able to do these things. They’ve told some folks that they have these grand ideas or grand vision, but that’s not how county planning works. You have to put those grand ideas on paper and submit them as a plan. And that’s when the process begins.”

Solano County Administrator Bill Emlen says any plan they put forward would have to be detailed. “They’re talking about residential-industrial-commercial as well as open space,” he says. “And I think they still talk about agriculture as part of the concept. That would all have to be in this initiative.”

Continues Emlen: “But then after that, there’s all the various entitlements that would have to come forward. That would involve the actual details of a proposal” such as water, sewer, roads—all the infrastructure required for a project of this scale.

For Sramek, with the land finally acquired, the process begins now—with an intense “community engagement campaign.” He says his team has already been working on the various elements of what will go into a plan. “We have a pretty good understanding of the constraints of the site and what needs to be improved.” Other than the handful of illustrations on the California Forever website, he says they have not put forward any specific plans because they want to involve the whole community from the start. In his view, to bring people together to ask their needs and preferences and then open a drawer and present them with a project all designed would be against the point of the community engagement process. He is inviting everyone’s views, including voices in the agricultural community.

“Every day we meet with more stakeholders and that includes the [military] community and includes the farming and the ranching community and transportation regulators and agencies locally and at the state level and elected officials and so on,” says Sramek. “Every day we are getting input that we are passing to our planning team that is shifting how we think about where certain components of this could go.”

Sramek says he’s highly interested in input from locals, whether leaders or residents, even those who just want to make sure there will be some place for running and biking. He says they take all the input seriously and bring it back to the planning team. He says he’ll be very excited about putting it all together and coming up with a plan “that we’ll present in the beginning of next year.”

The locals will decide

Whether the California Forever vision comes to fruition is a question with answers many years down the road. At the very least, Flannery Associates has deep pockets and a determination to succeed. Change is not easy, but Sramek hopes people will be pleasantly surprised. As Mayor Ron Kott says of his city, “Rio Vista, is a small town. We don’t have any medical facilities. We don’t have a lot of shopping. I’m open to seeing and working with them on developing a plan that works for both my city and for them.”

At the end of the day, as state Sen. Dodd says, “This is a local-control issue.” He says he’ll be looking to the communities in Solano County and the Solano County Board of Supervisors to make sure they get the appropriate information and their processes are followed.

Rep. Thompson, too, is watchful. “They’re well financed. And they’ve got a plan,” he says. “We haven’t seen the plan yet, but I think they’re going do whatever they think they need to do to get as much of their plan as they can.” Bottom line, for him—and perhaps the rest of the county—“I am going to be insistent that this is decided by locals with input from our communities.”

Adds Thompson: “Solano County needs to make these decisions. Not Silicon Valley.”