California Forever Wants to Build a Manufacturing Town

Updated at 11:35 a.m.

Last year, officials from California Forever pulled an initiative from the ballot box to build a city from scratch in Solano County. Now, it’s back with a plan to build something else there, too: the largest site for advanced manufacturing in North America.

CEO Jan Sramek announced the plans at the Reindustrialize Summit in Detroit on Thursday. The proposed 2,100-acre site, called the “Solano Foundry,” would be located within the mega-development the company is pursuing in southeast Solano County. It includes dedicated manufacturing space for companies focused on robotics, logistics, energy, aerospace and defense, among other fields.

Andreas Lieber, the Foundry’s general manager, said the proposal solves several problems plaguing Silicon Valley — and the United States — right now: a shrinking middle class and a dependence on other countries to build things, among other issues.

“You cannot really operate as a country if you’re only doing service jobs and basically outsource your middle class,” he said. “And then you’re not building anything anymore.”

But opponents of California Forever’s proposed megaproject argue the company doesn’t have to build a whole new city to bring jobs to the county. It could just build factories in existing cities. Nate Huntington, a member of Solano Together, a coalition opposed to the project, said the Foundry announcement could be “just another marketing gimmick.”

“There are sites that can accommodate industries such as this that do not require… the development of an entire new community to make this happen,” he said. “Many of the things that they put out [are] to create hype and potential attraction to this project, but some of those things fade.”

The announcement comes nearly four months after executives expressed interest in building ships in Collinsville, an unincorporated town in Solano County that sits at the mouth of the Sacramento River.

The Foundry would be located just seven miles away and includes space for companies working on advanced transportation systems and supply chain technology, which officials say could help support shipbuilding.

The white paper projected the Foundry could produce about 40,000 jobs — and even more with shipbuilding — adding billions of dollars to the county’s economy.

That’s a significant increase from the 15,000 jobs the company proposed last year, when it announced 12 start-ups would open in its proposed city. The Foundry would be built next to homes, in an area that has been designated for industrial space, according to previous maps the company released. California Forever will work with commercial real estate broker JLL to lease space on the site.

According to a whitepaper JLL published Thursday, several companies expressed interest, including some that had already pledged support last year: aerospace company Hadrian and Serve Robotics. The expressed interest is not legally binding.

Nevertheless, Lieber said these companies realize that the state is at an inflection point. It’s not that manufacturing doesn’t happen at all in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of semiconductors and the microchip, but that it doesn’t happen at a large enough scale. And when companies want to expand their factories, they leave California, often to states with lower tax and regulatory burdens, or to other countries entirely.

According to a recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California, fewer than 2% of the state’s more than 47,000 headquarters left the state between 2011 and 2021. But of those, roughly half were in manufacturing, wholesale trade or business services.

The perception that manufacturing jobs are fleeing California and the country has been echoed by state leaders and the administrations of both Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Earlier this month, Governor Newsom refused to sign the state’s budget unless two bills aimed at streamlining reviews under the state’s landmark environmental law were included. One of those bills included a carve-out to hasten environmental reviews specifically for advanced manufacturing sites.

The burgeoning Abundance movement also highlights this issue as one of the biggest impediments to the country’s economic progress. And, in late June, a company called Frontier Valley proposed building a similar site on the former Naval Air Station in Alameda.

Russell Hancock, president and CEO of think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley, studies economic and social trends of the region and said that, while California Forever might not be well-liked — or even trusted — amongst locals, the company’s premise is realistic.

“They’re going in with a lot of attitude. I call them swashbucklers,” he said. “They need to spend time with the locals. They need to talk it through. Lots of lunches, lots of community meetings. They have to sit there and listen to the public comment. And they’re not doing that very well. But the idea is fairly sound.”

Some leaders, including Trump, have called for consumer products, like smartphones, to be built in the United States. But economists and history have shown those ventures to be economically infeasible for companies to realistically pursue.

Hancock said the factories California Forever wants to build likely won’t be for “stamping out widgets,” but instead for building complicated electronics that require highly-skilled workers.

Manveer Sandhu, a city council member for Fairfield, a city that neighbors California Forever’s proposed development, said he has seen his constituents and friends commute long distances to work in Silicon Valley. Sometimes, they move out of the city entirely.

But if jobs were closer to Fairfield, the city could keep those residents and maybe benefit from the tax revenue, too.

“In order to sustain the future of Fairfield, the future of Solano County, you have to continue to grow your commercial base,” he said. “And the only way to do that, I think, [is] you have to have new industries come in to diversify your economy.”

The company is currently working with nearby Rio Vista and Suisun City to annex most of its proposed development. The Solano Foundry would be included in the development’s master plan.

Chris Rico, head of the Solano Economic Development Corporation, said the opportunity is a great one, but he worried that county offices are not properly staffed to deal with a project of this scale.

Last month, county supervisors requested a pause on annexation talks until it’s further along in updating its general plan — a process that can take years to complete.

“If you have these opportunities, you get up there and say, ‘We’re here to do whatever it takes to get this, and we’ll figure out the details as we go along because we’re gonna have to,’” he said. “[County officials are] gonna have to react and act in a way that they’re not used to acting in order to make this happen.”