The team behind Solano County's theoretically marvelous but pragmatically very complicated new city from scratch, known as California Forever, has enlisted some help from two people who can probably whisper in the ear of the governor to help accomplish their agenda.Last we heard, the billionaire-bac ked California Forever crew was working with state and federal agencies to establish a Maritime Prosperity Zone in what is now the tiny unincorporated town of Collinsville, on the Delta. They are hoping that the Trump administration, in its desire to revive the American shipbuilding industry, will look kindly on their plans and add an economic engine to their still unnamed city from whole cloth, the majority of which will actually be about 15 miles north in southeastern Solano County.Also, last fall, California Forever CEO Jan Sramek confirmed the group's plan, which was first reported last June, to become an "extension" of nearby Suisun City — something that, in practice, may end up being complicated, but which theoretically will exempt them from needing to override a county growth ordinance, after a scathing report by county officials caused them to withdraw a ballot measure they'd been pushing in 2024.Now, as the Chronicle reports, California Forever has brought on former state legislative leaders Darrell Steinberg (also a former mayor of Sacramento and a close ally of Governor Gavin Newsom) and Bob Hertzberg (a former Assembly speaker) in the role of special counsel to the project. Both had been working with California forever for free before being added to the payroll in April, the Chronicle reports, and it seems the hope is that they will help get some legislation passed in Sacramento that will help the project get around local opposition and CEQA lawsuits, both of which are inevitable.Rewinding a bit, this project, which seems to largely be Sramek's vision but which has gotten the financial backing of a cabal of local billionaires, including Marc Andreesen, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Michael Moritz, aims to build a new Bay Area city of around 400,000 residents from the ground up, seemingly because the group doesn't believe that existing Bay Area cities can be saved. The billionaires funded the covert purchase of around 50,000 acres of farmland, to the tune of $900 million, near Travis Air Force Base — leading to some intrigue the summer of 2023 before the project was publicly exposed.Similar to other billionaire-backed ideas of the past two decades, like seasteading and Elon Musk's talk (going back a full 20 years) about colonizing Mars, the crux of the project is an elitist belief that the world as we know it is screwed and we need to start fresh, rather than coming up with ideas and funding projects to improve the cities and countries we have.AI-generated renderings that California Forever created to try to sell county voters on their idea depict a sun-dappled, European-styled, walkable village of brownstones and charming plazas, where of course there are none of the ills of real cities like poor people, drugs, or crime. They referred to it, sort of wildly, as a "city of yesterday."The influential environmental group, the Solano Land Trust, weighed in on the project back in June 2024, saying that they opposed it because it "would drastically increase the current population of Solano County... [and] a development of this magnitude will have a detrimental impact on Solano County’s water resources, air quality, traffic, farmland, and natural environment."So that's just a taste of what to come as this "extension" of Suisun City, which will take a fairly sleepy town of 29,000 and add 400,000 new residents as well as industrial and commercial traffic to the area, moves ahead.Previously: California Forever Group Petitions Feds to Turn the Delta Into a Maritime Prosperity Zone ...read more read less