California Forever’s vision for a safe, affordable, and sustainable Bay Area community is laudable. Founded by Czech-born Jan Sramek and backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, the company bought vast tracts of Solano County farmland to build a new city under a single master plan, bypassing the region’s usual maze of restrictive zoning, rezoning fights, and neighborhood vetoes.
But as the project’s recent loss of a $3.2 billion shipbuilding contract shows, developing such a pro-growth city in California is impossible as long as the state refuses to repeal its obstructive environmental permitting laws.
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California Forever had been courting Saronic Technologies, a defense startup that manufactures autonomous vessels, to build its proposed Port Alpha shipyard in Solano County. Located in Collinsville with direct access to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, the shipyard would have created more than 10,000 jobs in the Bay Area county, which has the region’s highest unemployment rate.
The company had assembled a coalition of more than a dozen businesses, construction, and housing organizations, including five of the state’s largest private-sector unions. This coalition was even working with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) office on special legislation that would have exempted the shipyard from much of California’s burdensome permitting, including under the California Environmental Quality Act.
But Newsom and the Democrats who control Sacramento did not move fast enough. One of Saronic’s key selection criteria was a permitting framework that guaranteed efficient construction. The legislative delay signaled to Saronic that California was not the regulatory environment in which it wanted to invest.
Instead, the company chose Brownsville, Texas, about 20 miles from Elon Musk’s Starbase launch complex. Last year, Musk moved SpaceX’s headquarters from Southern California to South Texas. Apparently, he is not the only entrepreneur to recognize that wherever the future of manufacturing is happening, that place is not California.
Passed in 1970, the California Environmental Quality Act was founded on the sensible principle that government should identify and mitigate the environmental consequences of major projects before approving them. But CEQA has evolved from a disclosure law into a powerful anti-development weapon. Environmental groups and neighborhood activists use the threat of lengthy litigation to delay or kill housing and infrastructure, while unions have used CEQA challenges to press developers into signing labor agreements that have little to do with protecting the environment. That is what happened with the Port Alpha project.
The Democrats who control California are not unaware of the economic damage CEQA does to their state. In the last five years, Democrats have exempted multiple projects from its burdensome requirements, including their own $1.1 billion Capitol Annex project; the state’s high-speed rail project; the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges; urban infill housing developments; wildfire-prevention projects; water-system repairs; and some food banks, childcare facilities, and farmworker health clinics.
TEACHER UNION POWER ISN’T HELPING STUDENTS
Why don’t California Democrats get tired of constantly passing exemptions for politically favored projects? Because the Democratic Party is not about broad-based growth to create well-paid jobs and affordable housing. It is about rewarding political allies and punishing enemies. There is no better tool to accomplish that than a burdensome permitting process that requires special legislation anytime anyone wants to build something of value for Californians.
California Forever set out to prove that California could still build a city. Instead, the loss of Port Alpha proved why so many builders of the future are leaving. Until Sacramento replaces selective exemptions with wholesale permitting reform that applies to everyone, California will keep exporting jobs, investment, and innovation to states that understand a basic truth that economic growth cannot occur where permission to build is a political privilege.
