Tech billionaires backing a plan to build a new city on rolling grasslands northeast of San Francisco Bay have agreed to withdraw the idea from the November ballot and first fund a full environmental review of the project, officials announced Monday.

The pause is Joint statement The proposal, from Solano County supervisors and the CEO of development advocacy group California Forever, would be a dramatic shift in the relentless push to build a city from the ground up in rural Solano County. Until recently, California Forever, whose board includes tech titans such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, seemed intent on taking the proposal directly to local voters this fall.

In June, after the group spent millions on a signature-gathering campaign, the county registrar announced that the measure had qualified for the November ballot, despite opposition from many local elected officials. At the time, Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader leading the effort, said the measure was “nothing less than a referendum on what we want for the future of California.”

Then on Monday morning, California Forever reversed course: It announced it was withdrawing its action. Instead, the group will follow the county's normal process for rezoning the roughly 18,000 acres proposed for development, which includes funding a full environmental impact study and reimbursing the county for staff time and consultant fees related to the project, according to a joint statement from Sramek and Solano County Board of Supervisors Chairman Mitch Mashburn.

“The need for more affordable housing and good-paying jobs is worthy, but the timing was unrealistic,” Mashburn said in a statement. He added that California Forever “was wrong” to rush to a vote without an environmental study or negotiating a development agreement. “This politicized the entire project, made it difficult for us and our staff to work with them, and forced everyone in the community to take sides.”

Sramek, California Forever's CEO, emphasized in a statement that his investment group remains committed to the project and feels a sense of urgency to complete it: “Every year we delay it means thousands of Solano parents who commute two hours to school will miss out on morning lessons, recitals and bedtime stories. They will never get those magical moments back.”

“We want to show that we can move faster in California,” Sramek said, “but we now recognize that it's possible to change the order of these steps without impacting our ambitious timeline.”

He said the group will work with the county to complete environmental studies and development agreements over the next two years, then resubmit the plan for approval by local voters in 2026.

In an interview with The Times, Sramek said the decision to repeal the ballot measure came after it became clear that Solano County residents wanted a thorough environmental review process. He said he believed the decision to “reverse the procedural order” by moving the environmental review and development agreement forward to voters would lead to a better outcome.

“It won't affect the timeline,” he said. “In fact, it may be accelerated.”

The change also gives California Forever time to rebuild relationships with local residents after a rocky experience when it first entered Solano County politics.

The effort, launched in secret, became embroiled in controversy last year amid unfounded speculation that the land buyers were foreign agents intent on espionage.

That's because years before the proponents of the plan were revealed, they had been using a limited liability company called Flannery Associates to buy up vast swathes of land from farmers across the county, stretching from Rio Vista west to Travis Air Force Base, without telling anyone why. News of the mysterious land sales in such close proximity to key military installations led some to speculate that they might be part of an attempt by foreign spies to obtain military secrets.

Last year Instead it was revealed It's a bold plan to build a model city from the ground up and reinvent the way housing is built in California.

In January, Sramek unveiled blueprints for a new community that would build tens of thousands of homes surrounded by plazas and promenades. California Forever touted the community's proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area and vowed the project would transform unused farmland into a “middle-class neighborhood of affordable housing.” The city would be walkable, socioeconomically integrated, and run on clean energy.

But the proposal initially faced fierce opposition from local leaders who feared it was an attempt to circumvent the planning process, and from environmental groups worried about the loss of natural habitat.

Mashburn said the agreement with Sramek came after tough conversations about how the process had progressed thus far.

“We talked about Solano County, we talked about this effort, we talked about the future, how things are going to play out, the process we have to go through, and whether we want to do it amicably and have a county where neighbors aren't fighting each other,” Mashburn said.

“To his and their credit, they agreed to it. It's not easy for a leader to admit that they might have been wrong about something.”

The decision to withdraw the ballot measure came just one day before the Oversight Committee was scheduled to discuss it. Consultant's reportA county-mandated committee will study the potential financial impacts of the development and vote on whether to present the proposal to voters in November.

The report, prepared by Stantec Consulting Services of Walnut Creek, questions the financial feasibility of the proposed new city and predicts construction challenges that could result in huge deficits for the county. The report estimates the cost of building the schools, roads, sewer systems and other infrastructure to support the new community at tens of billions of dollars.

In announcing the new timeline, Mashburn set a challenge to California Forever investors, asking them to show how they could provide water without raising taxes, solve transportation challenges and pull off “financial engineering that would allow us to pay for billions of dollars in infrastructure costs.”

Asked if he believed Sramek and his supporters would ultimately build the city of their dreams in his county, Mashburn said he was skeptical that the city the tech giants envisioned would come to fruition.

“We're starting from scratch and there are some big obstacles we have to overcome,” he said.