State Route 12 cut to the horizon line of Solano County. Somewhere out of sight lay the small town of Rio Vista and the Delta. But about an hour northeast of San Francisco, midway through southern Solano, grasses swayed, wicked dry and golden by months of sun, shimmering in the day’s warmth. Al Medvitz and Jeanne McCormack—a few years married, on summer break from their studies at Harvard University in the late ’70s—drove down the road.
For McCormack, it was a homecoming to the Rio Vista ranch where she grew up, like her father before her, and her grandfather before him. For Medvitz, this was an inaugural visit to his wife’s family’s roots. Looking out the car window, he took in the uniform landscape and thought: It’s kind of barren.
McCormack turned to Medvitz. “Oh, isn’t this so beautiful?”
For Medvitz, something of a city kid who grew up amid Los Angeles’s sprawl, rural Solano County was another world. He had left L.A. to serve in the Peace Corps, then moved to Massachusetts, where he met McCormack when they began work for the same researcher. Within one year they started dating; within two they were engaged; within three they had married in a Harvard chapel. They returned to Africa soon after their first trip to Solano, and together the couple worked for years in science education and international aid.
But in the ’80s it became clear that McCormack—an only child—would soon need to move home to support her aging parents. Medvitz saw it as a chance to apply his academic background to on-the-ground agriculture, although it would be a steep learning curve: He wasn’t even sure he could grow a tomato, let alone raise flocks of sheep. He knew rural west Africa far better than rural California. Still, in 1987, the couple relocated to McCormack’s Rio Vista ranch, where they have lived ever since.
Jeanne McCormack is the third generation of McCormacks to farm this land—3,700 acres in the Montezuma Hills, bordering the Sacramento River—continuing a century-long legacy that began with her grandfather, Dan McCormack. He arrived from Canada to settle the ranch with his brother in the 1890s, right around when Rio Vista formally became a city. Like many farmers in the area, the brothers grew grains that they exported via boat through the Delta to San Francisco. When his son Wallace—also Jeanne’s dad—began running things, the business expanded and the family bought land on islands in the Delta to produce more crops. Determined to cut costs when possible, he limited fertilizer and pesticides. Instead, Wallace raised and grazed sheep judiciously on the hillside ranch: They gobbled down the grain stubble and fertilized the field; then, after the sheep moved elsewhere, the grazed field could be sown with wheat, and the cycle began once more.
This was the mantle Jeanne McCormack and Medvitz took up, and built upon, as they assumed operation of the ranch. They paid careful attention to what lived on the land. A vernal pool—a temporary pond made by the winter rains—glimmered through the winters, so they plowed around it. They noticed where the burrowing owls nested and avoided their burrows. Medvitz watched golden eagles fly by at sunset.
Her father would not have called himself an environmentalist, says Jeanne. She considered herself one, but in Solano, that made her unusual. Most farmers in the county would eschew the label “environmentalist,” even as endangered species thrived on their land. They just liked seeing the animals there, according to Medvitz. And much of that biodiversity lived alongside the region’s approach to farming: Rotational agriculture created a range of habitats, since farmland was used in various ways. The dependence on seasonal rainfall to water the crops meant a lack of intensive irrigation—infrastructure that would have reshaped the landscape. This farming system was, and is, common in the southeastern swath of the county. If you take out the wind turbines, the Solano horizon has remained largely unchanged for more than 150 years. Mark Twain—who passed through the Delta as an itinerant reporter in the 1860s—might recognize it.
Season by season, Solano County has won over Medvitz: the bright green of the winter hills, the golden grain in the wind, the thick silver cords of the Delta. He has spent almost 40 years living and farming here. Now, he calls it beautiful, and worries about what might come next.
The region’s ranchers, and their dry farming traditions that have sustained wildlife, face an unprecedented crisis. A handful of Silicon Valley’s billionaire tech titans have acquired more than 10 percent of Solano County since 2018, largely from ranchers in the southeast. Through their company Flannery Associates, the moguls spent almost $1 billion to purchase 68,000 acres. In 2023, Flannery was revealed to be California Forever, a developer with big plans for the land: a sustainable city built for up to 400,000 people in the heart of the county, alongside “the largest advanced manufacturing park in America.”
California Forever promises its development will “bring back the California Dream.” It says it will revitalize Solano County’s flagging economy, mitigate California’s housing crisis, and model development nevertheless often stymied by environmental advocates. “This will be the most sustainable city in the United States,” wrote a California Forever spokesperson in an email to Bay Nature. And it characterizes the 17,500 acres of land it plans to develop as “the least ecologically diverse and least agriculturally productive land in Solano County,” based on the county’s public habitat and land use maps.
But many disagree. The environmental consultants who gathered that habitat data say California Forever is mischaracterizing it. At least 21 imperiled species depend on the ecosystems where the new city will be built. They’ve survived on ranches, often as a result of careful—though not always intentional—stewardship by farmers like Medvitz, McCormack, and their neighbors; land trusts; and other landowners. Many people have come to value that nature, which often needs careful attention to notice. They fear California Forever’s development could destroy it—threatening rare ecosystems, and a ranching community, found in few parts of the state.
Biodiversity in the Jepson Area
Around the same time Medvitz was raising an eyebrow at the dry landscape on his first visit to Solano County, The Nature Conservancy was angling to buy some of it. In 1980, the conservation organization bought a 1,566-acre parcel that lay about 10 miles northwest, as the Swainson’s hawk flies, from the McCormack ranch. State biologist W. James Barry described the parcel and its surroundings—a 13,000-acre area known as Jepson Prairie—as “the largest and best preserved example of California grasslands.”
The summer’s seemingly endless, flat golden grasses mask biological treasures just beneath the surface. When the winter rains arrive, vernal pools begin to form. These ephemeral pools—shallow depressions in the land where a hard layer in the soil, often clay, traps water—range from a 93-acre lake to tiny puddles. Species, many found nowhere else, have evolved to depend on the pools.
The endangered golden-spotted California tiger salamander can crawl up to a mile through grasslands to find its breeding pool and lay hundreds of eggs attached to submerged vegetation. The salamander’s translucent, yellowish gray larvae later hatch and grow into juveniles in the same water. There, they may swim alongside endangered adult conservancy fairy shrimp and vernal pool tadpole shrimp, whose dried cysts are prompted to hatch by the winter rains, yielding tiny adults whose 100-something-day lifespans are circumscribed by the ephemeral water.
Around each pool, goldfields and Downingias bloom into concentric circles of yellow and purple. The first blossoms emerge when the pools are at their largest, tracing their extent. Next, an inner circle grows, emerging as the rains slow and pools begin to shrink: these plants have adapted to germinate underwater and flower as the water recedes. In the last, warmest days of winter, the metallic-hued Delta green ground beetles emerge from the pools’ edges to lay their eggs.
Since the 1880s, when biologist Willis Linn Jepson spent his youth botanizing the region, species after species have been discovered by Western scientists (and then rediscovered) in this landscape: the Delta green ground beetle, unseen for more than a century before biologists came across it in Jepson Prairie in 1974; the sticky, spiky Solano grass, discovered in Jepson Prairie in 1959; the translucent conservancy fairy shrimp, named after The Nature Conservancy for the conservation efforts to protect it. More than 400 species of plants—including 15 rare and endangered species—can be found in the 1,566-acre Jepson Prairie Preserve.
Above the pools soar threatened Swainson’s hawks and other raptors, scanning for rodents. Burrowing owls forage through the grassland. Migrating shorebirds and waterfowl gather among the pools, taking advantage of the winter bounty. This spectacle has taken millions of years to evolve into a rhythmic, dramatic, seasonal sight.
Even in 1981, Barry called the Jepson Prairie area an “island in time.” The grassland and vernal pool habitat’s survival, until The Nature Conservancy’s land purchase, was a matter of chance and choice. Most of the greater Jepson Prairie area remained in the hands of ranchers, including some whose forebears arrived around the turn of the 20th century, like the McCormacks. But few farmers looked to plow Jepson Prairie to grow crops: Solano County had much better soil elsewhere. So the clay soil layer remained intact, preserving the vernal pools. Instead, settlers raised thousands of sheep and cattle for meat—a cattle lot stood by what would become the new Jepson Prairie Preserve, with cows waiting by vernal pools to be shipped to the slaughterhouse.
The grazing unintentionally helped the ecosystem. European settlers brought invasive grasses with them, and left unchecked, those grasses destabilize vernal pool ecosystems, taking over the landscape in dense, dry growths that push out the small, specialized native species. The grazing animals—themselves European imports—loved eating the invasives. Researchers believe the new grazers may have helped fill the role of native elk and other herbivores long gone from the landscape.
To some of Jepson Prairie Preserve’s new managers at The Nature Conservancy, letting ranchers graze a protected area seemed counterintuitive. Richard Hamilton of the Hamilton Brothers ranch, which neighbored Jepson Prairie Preserve, remembers the resistance to letting the Hamilton sheep onto the preserve. “My father’s response was that we could not be bad land managers, if these sensitive plants were still around after his family had been pasturing this ground for more than 60 years,” Hamilton wrote.
The specter of development seemed to hover everywhere in 1980s Solano. Safeguarding the Jepson Prairie Preserve was all the more important as prospective irrigation projects, BART lines, a PG&E dump site, and a gas pipeline threatened the Jepson Prairie area. Solano’s claypan vernal pools seemed at risk of going the way of California’s other ephemeral ponds, destroyed one by one by the intensive agriculture that had consumed the Central Valley.
In northern Solano County, residential developments were in the works. In 1982, the developer Hiram Woo proposed Manzanita: a 2,000-home community networked with trails, filled with shops and workplaces, and entirely powered by solar energy, according to the Vacaville Reporter. Manzanita would build over almost 900 acres of farmland. It prompted a reckoning.
Some local government officials saw such development on these farmlands as inevitable. In a 1983 article in the Vacaville Reporter, county administrator Richard Watson said, “The question is not whether the area will ever become urbanized, but a question of when . . . and who is going to control it.”
But many ranchers and farmers saw no reason land use had to change. They feared new housing would destroy places critical to feeding California’s growing population and maintaining their way of life. Farmer Craig McNamara (son of former defense secretary Robert McNamara) cofounded the Orderly Growth Committee with the goal of keeping farmland as farmland and came up with Measure A (officially called Proposition A).
The measure forbade new developments outside city boundaries, unless approved by a countywide vote. In 1984, the measure passed narrowly. The Manzanita development died soon after. The committee gave Solano County its oft-repeated mantra: “What shall be urban shall be municipal.” In effect: Outside of cities, what is undeveloped will stay undeveloped. After moving to Solano, Al Medvitz later helped lead the campaign to renew Measure A.
Some ecosystems across Solano benefited from the undeveloped and grazed land, while in 1986, the Orderly Growth Committee sued the city of Fairfield for allowing a housing complex that violated the measure’s intent. As part of the lawsuit’s settlement, the city helped fund and create what would become known as the Solano Land Trust, with the goal of protecting farmland from urbanization and keeping Solano’s cities separated by open space. In 1997, The Nature Conservancy transferred ownership of Jepson Prairie Preserve to the land trust.
What The Orderly Growth Initiative protections have meant for biodiversity and nature in Solano can be difficult to say for sure. What species—especially endangered species—are currently living on the farmlands that still predominate the county? Those questions can rarely be answered without a landowner allowing biological surveys, but in Solano County scientists’ fascination with vernal pools, along with another county initiative, have helped get at an answer.
Jepson Prairie Preserve provides one glimpse: Hundreds of research publications have chronicled the flora and fauna on those 1,566 acres. That biodiversity likely echoes what’s on the surrounding 13,000 acres—nearly all private lands—grazed more or less in the same manner and separated by little more than a cattle fence.
Also, starting in 1999, the Solano County Water Agency began to assess where the good habitat lay in the county to inform its nascent Habitat Conservation Plan. HCPs help developers abide by federal and state endangered species laws, in part by allowing the projects to disrupt threatened and endangered species in exchange for conserving or restoring other habitat.
Using state data and some on-ground observations, by 2012 the environmental consulting firm LSA Associates, hired by the water agency, had assembled a comprehensive picture of what could and did live across Solano County. Where they couldn’t survey, they used aerial imagery to document vernal pools on working ranches. They mapped the surrounding grasslands where California tiger salamanders likely live, largely underground, during three seasons of the year. They continued to update and collect data over the ensuing decade, as new species were proposed for endangered or threatened species listings.
They concluded then, and maintain now, that private lands in southeastern Solano, in the Jepson Prairie area and the Montezuma Hills, support multiple endangered and threatened species, including Swainson’s hawks, California tiger salamanders, burrowing owls, tricolored blackbirds, Contra Costa goldfields, San Joaquin Valley Orcutt grass, Delta green ground beetles, vernal pool fairy shrimp, vernal pool tadpole shrimp, and much, much more.
“Those species are there because [ranchers] did the right thing, and they didn’t know that they did the right thing. They did the right thing because they adhered to good stewardship,” says Steve Kohlmann, senior wildlife biologist at LSA Associates, who has played a critical role in the HCP.
Kohlmann and his colleagues began envisioning a network of protected and connected lands in their 2012 draft. “The HCP . . . has a strategy of where we want to build reserve complexes that are actually helpful for the species, and not little postage stamps somewhere out in nowhere,” he says. The water agency and partners, on the plan’s recommendation, began looking into buying some of that land. But the HCP team realized they were too late: Someone else had purchased the land first.
By 2019, many people had noticed that a lot of land was being sold in Solano County. One of them was Aiden Mayhood, then finishing his senior year of high school in Rio Vista. Mayhood, a seventh-generation Solano resident, grew up on his great-great-great-grandfather’s ranch at the edge of the Delta; it borders the McCormack ranch. Knowing the people around him, he thought anyone selling land was “very rare,” he says. And yet he kept hearing about his neighbors selling their farmland.
Even stranger were the sale prices. The Orderly Growth Initiative meant farmland stayed cheap: Legally, farmland was only likely to be used, after all, for farming. But Mayhood was hearing about sale prices multiple times the value of the land. (Medvitz says Flannery Associates offered him and McCormack more than four times the value of their ranch.)
In his free time, Mayhood started poking around. The name Flannery Associates kept popping up in meeting minutes or county documents, but Mayhood couldn’t uncover much more. Flannery was mostly known as a road in southeastern Solano. He left for college in Los Angeles, with one eye on what was going on back home. By 2023, Flannery Associates, with 52,000 acres under its control, had become the county’s biggest landowner. Still, no one knew who they were and what they wanted to do with the land.
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Speculations mushroomed: Were these Chinese or Russian investors, trying to undermine Solano’s air force base? The U.S. Treasury began investigating. Then, in August 2023, the New York Times broke the story of the investors behind Flannery Associates, whom they described as a “who’s who of Silicon Valley”—Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others.
Less than a week after the New York Times story, Flannery unveiled a website with its master plan for California Forever. Like the Manzanita development in the ’80s, California Forever promises a walkable urban utopia, a close-knit, self-contained community, powered entirely by clean energy. The website claims the city could help meet the region’s growing housing needs. The first phase of construction plans include more than 20,000 new homes. Within months, California Forever launched a more than $2 million campaign to overturn the Orderly Growth Initiative by countywide ballot; the major obstacle between Flannery and its new city was the initiative’s mandate that farmland remained farmland.
Meanwhile, groups as diverse as the Greenbelt Alliance, the Solano County Farm Bureau, United Democrats of Southern Solano County, Solano County Republicans, and others banded together against the proposed ballot measure. The coalition’s surveys found the majority of Solano residents would vote against it.
In July 2024, California Forever pulled its ballot measure, promising to return in the next two years with an environmental impact report for the project. By the end of the year, its FAQ page answered the question “Does this city encroach on protected open space?” with a map from the Habitat Conservation Plan of conservation values across Solano County. Over the map, California Forever pasted an arrow to where the new community would be located, concluding that “the new city [is] located in areas with the lowest ecological value in the county.”
In 2023 and 2024, the environmental consultants at LSA submitted two memorandums to the water agency, analyzing how California Forever would impact the county’s Habitat Conservation Plan. Their data showed at least 52 percent of Flannery’s lands were unprotected vernal pool and valley floor grasslands—nearly half of the potential mitigation land. And LSA contested California Forever’s use of the habitat value map as “misleading.” The “lowest ecological value” areas California Forever pointed to represented mostly places where LSA had less data—because those areas were private lands few could access—and where less diverse grassland habitats predominate. But that diversity, they noted, housed species found nowhere else in the county (and in some cases, California).
The area was likely still important for nature, wrote LSA. Just inside the development’s boundaries, LSA identified potential habitat for 21 out of the 39 species the HCP exists to protect, in addition to at least 12 water bodies where California tiger salamanders might breed. They concluded the current city plans could “sever . . . habitat linkages” and have “significant and unavoidable impacts” on multiple imperiled species.
In a 5,000-word essay on Flannery’s purchases in Solano, Mayhood described how his ancestors each immigrated to the county. “Their historic investment in our communities are a key piece of future public policy,” he wrote. He urged residents to consider local solutions to the problems California Forever aims to solve—more housing, local jobs—instead of “billionaire pet projects,” adding, “If we all work hard to achieve these ends, Solano County’s best days are ahead of us.”
Today, as the winter rains set in, the vernal pools at Jepson Prairie fill again. The conservancy fairy shrimp hatch and the dried seeds of the flowers, which have weathered the summer and fall, take root. Elsewhere, the Montezuma Hills have begun to green. The Sacramento River is swelling by the McCormack ranch.
And a great deal is changing next door. While Medvitz and McCormack refused to sell their land, many of their neighbors have. All in all, California Forever says it purchased parcels from 600 landowners. Some were convinced by the unheard-of sale prices. Others were sued by Flannery, which accused 50 landowners of price-fixing. By February 2025, all but two had settled by selling their land to Flannery. Ian Anderson, whose ranch borders McCormack’s, told reporters he struggled to foot the legal bills to fight the accusations. The defendants’ attorneys described the suit as a “ham-fisted intimidation tactic.”
Already, so much of farming in this region was about running to stay still: commodity prices haven’t changed much for 45 years, says Anderson. Every year, farmers must do more with less to stay afloat. Those who sold largely continue to farm the land they once owned—but they now lease it from Flannery and are mostly under nondisclosure agreements. There is little public knowledge about how long the arrangement will continue.
Meanwhile, California Forever has changed tack. In April 2025, it announced it would work with Suisun City and Rio Vista so the cities could annex and expand into the Flannery acres, building California Forever’s metropolis in the process. In October, it released a completed application for annexation by Suisun City.
The new plans promise some 2,700 acres of the development will be given over to parks and open space, including a “Central Park” that runs through the city’s center. In a thread on X, California Forever founder and CEO Jan Sramek declared Suisun City’s annexation put it “on the way to becoming the best example of California’s Abundance agenda.”
When asked about the current land management and the ecological value of its property, California Forever’s press contact directed Bay Nature to the same map (see left) from the Habitat Conservation Plan; the company declined to make Sramek available for an interview. Following further request for comment, a California Forever spokesperson noted an environmental impact report will be completed before any development begins, and that farming will continue on “many acres.”
“We believe the evidence of the last 25 years has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that California’s attempt to prohibit greenfield development via policy has been a failure,” they wrote. “We will strive to be a responsible land manager, working closely with the farming operations, but our primary impact on the environment will be to demonstrate what a positive, working model of sustainable urban living could look like in the United States . . . It is a city based on walking and biking. All of these factors need to be weighed against the impacts of building on an undeveloped site.”
Suisun City mayor Alma Hernandez views California Forever’s development as a potentially lifesaving trade-off. She’s thinking about how much of State Route 12—which she called “one of the deadliest” in the region—remains two lanes, just as it was when Medvitz and McCormack drove it in 1979. Planners blame environmental pushback for shutting down previous expansions, according to Hernandez. As she weighs California Forever’s plans, she’s searching for a balance that considers biodiversity protection and the economic and climate needs she sees in Suisun City and Solano County. Suisun City is nearly bankrupt. Many residents commute hours every day to work elsewhere. And within decades, sea levels could rise into their backyards, leaving them in search of somewhere else to go. “There is never a development that doesn’t have a trade-off, right? There is never a conservation effort that doesn’t have a trade-off, right?” she says.
California Forever’s website features multiple testimonials from Solano residents talking about the sustainable development they want to see, the jobs they’re excited about, and the housing they hope to own in the new city. “The reality is that they’re here. They’re not leaving,” mayor pro tem Jenalee Dawson told Suisun City residents at a public meeting, as one attendee shouted over her.
All the way down State Route 12, at the McCormack ranch, it’s planting season. For his part, Medvitz is well aware the changes will approach his and McCormack’s life—California Forever’s proposed shipbuilding factory abuts the property—but remain on the horizon. Years ago, before Jeanne McCormack’s parents passed away, they placed the ranch under a conservation easement with the Solano Land Trust. With the land trust’s enforcement, it ensures the ranch will be farmed indefinitely. Medvitz attends local meetings and reads the new documents and watches presentations of the many plans afoot to develop Solano. But on the McCormack ranch, he knows that as the rains soften the soil, wheat, barley, and sorghum will all take root again. Soon, once more, the hills will turn green and beautiful.
This article was supported by the March Conservation Fund.
