The backlash to a plan by tech billionaires to build a new city in rural California is gaining steam.
On Friday, Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy will meet with U.S. Rep. John Garamendi and two members of the Solano County Board of Supervisors to formulate what she terms “a plan for defense” against the secretive investors who spent more than $800 million buying up 55,000 acres on which to build their alternative to San Francisco.
“It’s not our first rodeo,” said Moy, referring to a 1984 plan by a different entity to build a new city in Solano—a project called Manzanita.
ADVERTISEMENT
Moy has already spoken to the grassroots organization that blocked the plan 40 years ago and to a host of constituents alarmed by the more recent proposal by a company called Flannery Associates, which is bankrolled by billionaires like Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs.
Flannery Associates has behaved in such a boneheaded way during its secretive six-year buying spree that it appears that just about everyone in Solano County is opposed to its plans, even before the details have been spelled out.
“The one thing that I’ll say Flannery has done is they brought us together,” Moy told The Daily Beast on Thursday, explaining that 95 percent of the hundreds of messages she has received are against the project.
“And by that I mean, citizens, environmentalists, other builders, politicians—all together to build a wall to stop Flannery.”
A car drives on a dirt road next to a parcel of land that was recently purchased near Travis Air Force Base by Flannery Associates.
Justin Sullivan/GettyGaramendi could not be reached for comment about the meeting with Moy but he has expressed serious doubts that Flannery’s project is even feasible, calling it “pie in the sky.”
Moy first heard of Flannery four years ago, when she was still a city council member. A farmer called and told her, “We’ve got a problem out here.”
“What’s the the problem?’” Moy recalls asking.
“Somebody’s buying land,” the farmer said.
“That doesn’t seem like a problem,” Moy told him.
“It’s a lot of land,’” the farmer said.
Moy started digging and discovered that thousands of acres were being purchased by Flannery, which was registered in Delaware, where investors can form a partnership without putting their names on any public documents. She dug deeper and came across the name Jan Sramek in some papers. She telephoned him numerous times with no luck. She determined he had relatives in Czechoslovakia and tried to contact him there.
“I never received a return phone call,” she said.
When The New York Times identified the investors in Flannery Associates, the company was described as Sramek’s “brainchild.” His failure to return the mayor’s phone call was just the lesser of many more major errors he made in what could have been a straightforward development project.
Moy heard tales of Flannery representatives offering farmers inflated prices and, then going even higher if they were turned down. Flannery upped the pressure on some farmers to sell by naming them in a federal suit alleging that they engaged in illegal price fixing just by discussing among themselves whether they should sell their land and for how much. . Even farmers who were not named in it became fearful that they might be sued if they spoke out. Family members who wanted to sell were turned against those who did not.
“It’s thuggery,” Moy said. “It makes me upset and angry because I know some of these families and I know how they’ve cried and how they’ve farmed together for all these years, and now they can’t talk to each other.”
Moy believes that the Flannery reps failed to understand that many of the farmers had a deep emotional connection to the land their families have been working for generations.
“We love the dirt,” she said.
The Flannery folks seemed to assume that money can pry even the most wholehearted people away from what they hold dear.
“It’s disrespectful and it also reminds me so much of why people get angry about our financial systems in the United States, where you have these billionaires that can come in and just play with us like we’re toys,” she said.
Moy said she read in SFGate that one of the investors, Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, actively opposed construction of what the State of California deemed to be his wealthy community's fair share of affordable housing.
Marc Andreessen is one of the investors behind the land-buying spree.
Kimberly White/GettyMoy is determined to show him and Sramek and the others at Flannery that they cannot not just do whatever they want in Solano.
“We are sophisticated and they’re gonna find that out,” Moy said.
Flannery did not respond to a request for comment.
