The Big Green of Money Against the Farmers and Ranchers of Solano

“Money,” said Jesse Unruh famously, “is the mother’s milk of politics,” and if you doubt the truth of this axiom just take a look at the biggest, most contentious land use fight now occurring in California.

This agriculture versus development battle is being waged in the placid farmlands and ranch lands of eastern Solano County near the little Sacramento River town of Rio Vista, about a forty-five minute drive from the corridors of power in our state capital. Sheep and cattle lazily graze in these grasslands now turning brown under the sun. Wind turbines dot the hillsides.

Currently Solano County election officials are in the midst of certifying whether or not the pro-development group, known as California Forever, has gathered enough legitimate signatures to qualify its initiative for the Nov. 5 ballot. The results are expected to be announced sometime around June 12. If the bid is successful, county voters will have a chance to say yea or nay to the proposal come fall.

The scope and size of California Forever’s plans are nothing short of breathtaking. If the East Solano Plan as it is now called comes to pass it will transform rural Solano County—62 percent of its land is devoted to agriculture—into something quite different. At build-out some 400,000 people will live there, almost doubling Solano’s current population. Nearly 18,000 acres of pasture land will become urban or suburban; up will rise a small city of many thousands of new homes, office parks, office buildings, solar installations, new streets, widened highways, and all the infrastructure required to support all that.

Travis Air Force Base is in the neighborhood of this proposed new city-to-be, and many concerns have been raised on how the development will affect it.

Opinion polls suggest that the majority of Solano County residents appear not too keen on all this grand envisioning. Democratic Congressmen John Garamendi and Mike Thompson, whose districts jointly cover the area, oppose it. So does Republican Rudy Recile, who is running against Garamendi in the fall election. The county’s usual political divisions – growth v. no-growth, liberal v. conservative, business v. environmentalists—seem to have largely been set aside for this issue. Organized by the coalition group Solano Together, resistance to California Forever is coming from all sides.

One reason for this unusual harmony among traditional political opponents has to do with that creamy rich mother’s milk beloved by Unruh in his time, and so many others like him in our time. California Forever is putting a ton of money on the table, and much of it is being pushed in from outside the county. Here is a list of a few of the big-time money people who are behind the development plan and its operational business arm, Flannery Associates.

• Reid Hoffman. $2.5 billion net worth. Cofounder Linked In.

• Laurene Powell Jobs. $13.5 billion. Philanthropist and widow of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

• Marc Andressen. $1.8 billion. Venture capitalist. Cofounder Netscape, seed investor Facebook.

• John Doerr. $3.3 billion. Kleiner Perkins VC.

• Michael Moritz. $6 billion. Former Sequoia Capital VC.

Given an investor A-Team such as this, it is fascinating to see where these deep pocket Silicon Valley billionaires put their money. Powell Jobs, for example, has given $3 billion to “organizations addressing climate change through innovative solutions and environmental justice,” according to Forbes. Doerr is another in the group concerned about the environment. lHis $1.1 billion gift to Stanford set up a new school at the university “focused on climate change and sustainability.”

It does seem a logical disconnect, doesn’t it? How do people evidently concerned about climate change and the environment bankroll the building of a city nearly the size of Oakland in open space lands mainly populated by livestock and wind turbines? It is puzzling unless, of course, the logic at work here has to do with simply making more money, at which point everything becomes clear.

Powell Jobs and others in the group give lavishly to political causes and candidates across California and the country, largely favoring Democrats. They are also friends and allies with Gavin Newsom, and Silicon Valley as a whole will surely pour millions into his inevitable bid for the presidency, whenever that comes. When it looked as if for a time that Newsom’s opponents had an actual shot at ousting him as governor three years ago, Jobs alone gave $400,000 to his successful stop-the-recall campaign.

Compare this with the financial clout of Solano Together and its allies. Recently it held a “Sheepdog Trial” fundraiser at a ranch near the proposed development zone. In this competition border collies and their handlers are given a series of tests and are judged on how well they herd sheep in a pasture. A few hundred ranchers and others from around the state showed up to watch the event, paying $35 a head.

Here in this little out-of-the way place where even in Solano County many people have never been, it is the Big Green of Money against the green of the environment, not to mention the continuing widespread attack against the traditions and livelihoods of small farmers and ranchers in California and around the U.S. So many vital issues are involved here. This local fight with big implications will continue through November and beyond.