Mayor Hell-Bent on Stopping Tech Billionaires' Utopian City Plan
[Daily Beast] The backlash to a plan by tech billionaires to build a new city in rural California is gaining steam.
On Friday, Fairfield Mayor Catherine Moy will meet with U.S. Rep. John Garamendi and two members of the Solano County Board of Supervisors to formulate what she terms "a plan for defense" the secretive investors who spent more than $800 million buying up 55,000 acres on which to build their alternative to San Francisco.
"It’s not our first rodeo," said Moy, referring to a 1984 plan by a different entity to build a new city in Solano—a project called Manzanita.
Moy has already spoken to the grassroots organization that blocked the plan 40 years ago and to a host of constituents alarmed by the more recent proposal by a company called Flannery Associates, which is bankrolled by billionaires like Reid Hoffman and Laurene Jobs.
Flannery Associates has behaved in such a boneheaded way during its secretive six-year buying spree that it appears that just about everyone in Solano County is opposed to its plans, even before the details have been spelled out.
"The one thing that I'll say Flannery has done is they brought us together," Moy told The Daily Beast on Thursday, explaining that 95 percent of the hundreds of messages she has received are against the project.
"And by that I mean, citizens, environmentalists, other builders, politicians—all together to build a wall to stop Flannery."
Posted by: Besoeker 2023-09-01 |