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The mystery surrounding a project to convert farmland into a new green city in California is finally being unraveled. The would-be “megacity” is the brainchild of a fledgling developer backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
But despite the heavyweights behind the project, it has already been embroiled in legal wrangling and is being greeted with suspicion by talkative neighbors in and around Fairfield, a town in Solano County about 50 miles ( 80 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that more than 100 unexplained land purchases by an entity called Flannery Associates LLC were made by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader backed with $800 million of some of the largest companies in the technology industry. investors. They include former Sequoia Capital Chairman Mike Moritz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, Laurene Powell Jobs and others.
According to the Times, Moritz proposed a type of urban development that could involve novel methods of design, construction and governance, all within a short drive of San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Sramek did not respond to requests for comment. Investor representatives, including Andreessen and Dixon, declined to comment or did not respond to requests.
“We are proud to partner on a project that aims to provide access to good paying jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, open space and a healthy environment for Solano County residents,” Brian Brokaw, Flannery spokesperson . he said in an emailed statement. “We are excited to start working with residents and elected officials” and that the meetings would begin early next week.
Flannery’s project is far from the first time that a group of wealthy elites have decided to build a city according to their own vision.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person at $221 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has been buying land east of Austin, Texas, to build a city for employees of Tesla Inc., SpaceX and Boring Co. Victoria’s Secret billionaire Les Wexner. he built New Albany, Ohio, from a small community outside Columbus to one of the most elegant addresses in the state. And Larry Ellison, the fourth richest person in the world with a fortune of $129 billion, bought 98% of the island of Lanai and transformed it into a haven for the super-rich.
Read more: Elon Musk’s planned Texas fiefdom is a multi-billion dollar tradition
Now in California, Flannery is coming under close scrutiny after a four-year streak in which he snapped up parcel after parcel of farmland, often at above-market prices.
According to records filed with the California Secretary of State’s office, Flannery listed his business as agriculture and incorporated as a limited liability company in Delaware. Earlier this year, local media reports noted that Flannery had acquired a total of 52,000 acres, making it the largest landowner in Solano County.
Flannery drew further scrutiny in May, when he filed a lawsuit against a group of local landowners, alleging they colluded to price-fix and overcharge the company as it tried to buy property. As part of the lawsuit, Flannery revealed that he has been buying up rangeland properties in Solano County since 2018, collectively spending more than $800 million.
In the lawsuit, Flannery claimed that some of the “conspirators” paid between $470 and $2,800 per acre for their properties, but were not satisfied when Flannery offered $15,000 per acre. Instead, they “countered Flannery’s offers by demanding even larger payments,” according to the complaint.
Lawyers for the owners want the case dismissed, arguing that federal antitrust law does not apply to real estate sales by individual owners.
Among those alarmed is US Rep. John Garamendi, a Democrat whose congressional district includes Travis Air Force Base, which has been nearly surrounded by parcels owned by Flannery. Garamendi asked the Treasury Department, the FBI and the Air Force to investigate whether the buyer was linked to a Chinese company that in 2022 tried to buy land outside Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. That sale was denied after the Air Force deemed the company a national security threat.
Last week, Garamendi said his office was contacted by Solano County residents who received a text and phone survey asking for their views on developing “a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a great solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over ten thousand acres of new parks and open space.”
In an interview Friday, Garamendi said California’s complex zoning and development process makes it unlikely that Flannery could pass a voter-backed initiative required under state law to build thousands of housing units, roads, sanitation water and other infrastructure on land currently used. for agriculture and wind power.
“Any developer with any sense at all would not have spent four years secretly buying land and suing local owners,” he said. “They would have spent four years working with local community interests to develop a proposal that is beneficial to the communities and the state.”
That developer has now been revealed as Sramek. Early in his career, Financial News, a UK-based publication covering finance and banking, named him a “rising star”. At 22, he was then a trader at Goldman Sachs. Sramek was the youngest person to make the list, according to news reports at the time.
Sramek is co-author of a book called running towards excellence, billed as a “concise and accessible manual on how to get more done.” In the book first published in 2009, he describes how she grew up in a one-bedroom house in Moravia, in a town of 1,000 in the Czech Republic, according to a profile in New York magazine’s Intelligencer.
Sramek, an Olympic hopeful in handball, turned down offers from multiple hedge funds to become an emerging markets trader at Goldman Sachs, Insider reported in 2009.
After half a decade founding and running startups in San Francisco, Sramek worked at payment provider Stripe, where he worked on “special projects” as a third-party accountant, according to eFinancialCareers.com.
In running towards excellence, Sramek wrote that he would send an Ayn Rand quote to his “younger self”: “The question is not who will let me; Who is going to stop me?
Solano County residents may have an answer for him.
— With help from Jason Leopold, Joel Rosenblatt, Peter Blumberg, and Biz Carson
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