To California Forever CEO Jan Sramek, the Solano Shipyard proposal is more than an opportunity to revitalize the area’s maritime industry. It’s also a promise kept.
“We’ve said from the beginning when we came here that we would bring major industries, and we said that the biggest of those would be defense and advanced manufacturing, and so this is us delivering on that promise,” Sramek said. “A year and a half ago, this wasn’t ready.”
A year and a half ago, Solano County residents might have been forgiven for thinking very little was ready about California Forever. The company had yet to publicly propose a site for its new community, and questions abounded about the firm’s principles and intentions.
Sramek, is no stranger to biding his time. though, despite his repeated impatience with California’s permitting pathways. The Czech Republic-born immigrant and former Goldman Sachs investor started turning this project over in his mind in April of 2016, when a fishing trip to Rio Vista got him thinking and reading about Solano County’s land use potential.
In 2013, Sramek took an interest in why California stopped building, reading hundreds of books on the subject. He says he spent about a year considering building in existing cities in 2015 and early 2016. By the late summer of 2016, Sramek said, he had realized a new city might be possible in the area. He spent the better part of the next year scouring documents for a reason this wouldn’t work, but never found a “fatal flaw” with the concept or the area.
Maps from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projecting Bay Area population growth and the Association of Bay Area Governments’ 1970:1990 plan actually confirmed that the intersection of Highway 12 and Highway 113 was ripe for development, Sramek said. He now keeps printed and spiral-bound copies of the ABAG report and a 1989 county report on the Montezuma Hills in California Forever’s offices to hand out, and he has printed and framed the Army maps.
The ABAG report calls for the prevention of small-scale development in open space not marked to be preserved permanently, including the area where the California Forever community is proposed. Instead, it calls for organized, large-scale developments of more than 100,000 people with proportional employment opportunities and rapid transit — all concepts in the East Solano Plan and ones that California Forever continues to work toward, according to Sramek.
In 2017, finally convinced, Sramek tried to raise funds for the project from investors for the first time to no avail. So Sramek borrowed money personally and hired his first consultants, signing contracts on his first property purchases in the county in August of 2017.
The SHIPS Act, authored by Congressman John Garamendi, as well as an Executive Order from President Donald Trump on investing in the United States maritime industry, have sparked public discussion of the issue, but Sramek said he has been considering the possibility for maritime industrial uses since early in this process.
“It’s getting a lot of attention because it is new, but if you look at what is happening with the city, there is the county process, there is Rio Vista, Suisun City is talking about taking portions of that, and so this is adding another component to that,” Sramek said.
For Sramek, it’s clear that the holdup is no longer logistical, but political: Can a Bay Area county avoid the recurring “Not In My Backyard” nightmare of red tape and obstructionism now nationally synonymous with the region’s housing crisis?
Maritime plans in the works for decades
Sramek found the Collinsville Montezuma Hills Area Development Study by 2017, but Solano County staff had a 28-year head start. In 1989, county supervisors called for a report known as the Collinsville Montezuma Hills Development Study, which called for shipyard construction in Collinsville to begin as early as the year 2010.
Regardless, Sramek and his team have spent considerable time and effort vetting the viability of the site for a shipyard with the U.S. Navy, federal government and interested state government entities before bringing the proposal to the county for discussion.
In September of 2023, Sramek contacted maritime analyst Craig Hooper about the possibility of a shipyard on the property. Later that year, Several Solano leaders encouraged the company to identify maritime uses for the land near Collinsville.
In early 2024, California Forever’s Head of Business Development Justin Esch, Hooper, Sramek and consultants began “investing heavily” in validating the opportunity, according to the company. Later in the year, California Forever was asked to respond to a Request for Proposals from the U.S Navy on the property.
In no small part, Sramek said, the rollout of the shipyard complex opportunity offered a chance to show that the company heard feedback on the East Solano Plan, withdrawn months before the ballot initiative would have been voted on in the November election last year.
“We had to do the work,” he said, “and we had to make sure that it was real.”
Now, the shipyard and the company continue to face vehement criticism from a group of now familiar public commenters at local city and county public meetings. Sramek is undeterred by the band of fierce critics, a few of whom have taken to performing full parody songs with jokes at the company’s expense from the pubic comment lecterns.
“We are really encouraged by the response of the community,” Sramek said.
Sramek is clear-eyed that not everyone can be happy with every facet of the plan, and doesn’t think that should preclude its progress. After all, no project receives 100 percent approval.
“There’s always going to be a few people that oppose it,” Sramek acknowledged, “and I think that’s OK.”
The SHIPs Act funding process is not particularly unique, Sramek said. The CHIPS Act, similar legislation signed by Former President Joe Biden aimed at bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States from Taiwan, dispersed billions in funding, but did so mostly to small clusters of companies in New York, Arizona and Oregon.
As county leaders rally to bring federal funds home, he said, the company continues to prepare as well. A full plan and Environmental Impact Report will be available before any decisions need to be made, he said.
“What matters is before anyone has to vote on anything approving a shipyard or a shipyard process of course we are going to have the plan,” he said.
Lessons from history
To Sramek, both the problems the United States faces and the solutions he is proposing are more concrete than abstract.
“To me, this is really real and really personal,” he said. “I mean, I was born two years before the wall came down and four years before the Soviet Union broke up.”
In the former Soviet bloc as a young man, Sramek said, he saw firsthand the devastation that authoritarianism wrought across the USSR.
“People talk about China in abstract terms, to most people it’s like, some place beyond the ocean.”
Sramek said he believes that America’s commitment to industry pulled the nation through the Cold War.
“A big part of what broke the Soviet regime was just the fact that America outproduced the Soviet Union,” he said. “We kept building planes and ships and submarines and computers and everything else and at some point, the planned economy just broke.”
Sramek has long maintained that he was raised on a steady diet of American action movies and American ideals. Now, he said, the United States is on the losing side of that equation with China, which claims the largest shipyards in the world. Sramek said that in the event of a conflict in the Pacific, the United States would run out of munitions in only eight days.
“It’s hard not to be pretty frightened by that,” he said.
Sramek believes California Forever’s work has the chance to become a defining test and ultimately a defining achievement of the agenda laid out in New York Times Columnist Ezra Klein’s new bestselling book with Derek Thompson, Abundance.
“It’s a quintessentially American and Californian story,” he said of the project. “It’s about building big, ambitious things in the physical world, which for a long time defined the state.”
“Abundance” calls for investment in cities, infrastructure, technology and economic growth, particularly calling on liberals to embrace those opportunities. The book directly references the relative decline in the power of existing cities to spark economic growth and social mobility. It also references the housing crisis that has come to define life across California.
“Too many have bought into a perverse inversion of what the city should be,” the book reads. “Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators to the middle class, not just penthouses for the upper class.”
In short, Sramek thinks his company’s proposals offer the state the chance to put up or shut up regarding its plans for economic and residential growth.
“If California, and more broadly the more Democratic part of America, wants to show that it’s not just going to talk about the book at dinner parties, but actually put it to work, then at some point, you need a defining project,” Sramek said. “You need a thing that you can point to and you can stand on the hill and say, ‘hey, California can build something.’”
