Sweeney said he didn’t sell, but he passed the offer to his father-in-law, who did. “At the time, land out here was selling for under $2,000 acre, and they offered $10,000 an acre.” “A real estate agent came to my house on Christmas Day in 2018 with an offer to buy my property,” said John Sweeney, who lives in Denverton, an unincorporated community next to Travis Air Force Base. Theories had ranged from wind farms to a new Disneyland to an imagined plot involving Chinese intelligence and a new port. Some in the area were still reeling from the secrecy that had veiled the land sales. “There’s not a lot of people,” said Ashley Morrill, 40, who works at a sports shooting range in an unincorporated community called Birds Landing. Many were relieved to know the identity of the area’s mystery land buyer but were also fearful about the proposal’s potential impact. On Sunday in Rio Vista, a town of 10,000 people along the Sacramento River, residents were still absorbing the prospect of billionaires turning a stretch of open fields into a new city. Even though representatives from Flannery had reached out to his office for a meeting, he said, he didn’t know who they were or what they were doing until The New York Times revealed it to him last week. and Treasury involved,” John Garamendi, a Democrat and congressman from the area, said in a recent interview. That nobody in the company tried to assuage those fears - most likely because they were worried that revealing themselves would increase the price of land - has created a long line of annoyed elected officials. The purchase of so much land by a company whose business and intentions were unclear had stoked fear throughout the region and prompted two members of Congress to start federal investigations. Over the past five years, the group has used a company called Flannery Associates to spend some $900 million buying tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land throughout Solano County, on the northern eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. Sramek declined to comment on Monday, and a spokesman referred to an earlier statement from the project’s financial backers: “We are excited to start working with Solano County residents and elected officials, as well as with Travis Air Force Base.” “I hope they succeed,” said Mark Friedman, a longtime real estate developer in Sacramento, “but this just seems like a lot of tech guys with a lot of money and a ton of hubris diving into another business that they can’t possibly understand.” Some experienced developers say the project’s chances are so remote that they will be stunned if it comes to fruition. Solano County has a longstanding slow-growth ordinance that county voters would probably have to override before any major building could begin.Īfter that comes a gantlet of environmental rules, inevitable lawsuits and potential tussles with the state’s Air Resources Board, the Water Resources Control Board, Public Utilities Commission and Department of Transportation - not to mention the local planning commission and board of supervisors who oversee land use in Solano County. That kind of timeline will most likely test the patience of investors - including the venture capitalists Michael Moritz, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, as well as Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor, and Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective - who are used to the fast and lightly regulated world of technology.įirst up, in all likelihood, is an election. In a state where land politics are so difficult it can take years to build a duplex, it could be a decade of process before a shovel is even lifted for the project.
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