The Brief

In 2018, a company began quietly buying up some $900 million worth of land from farmers in Solano County, California, an area just north of the Bay Area. As the parcel ballooned to more than 60,000 acres, their motivations remained a mystery — stoking unease and speculation. Then, last year, the news broke: The land was to become a brand-new eco-friendly city, backed by a roster of Silicon Valley billionaires, and built from the top-down by a company called California Forever.

The plan was launched by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader and California Forever’s CEO. He said the project has three main goals: “Help solve the California housing crisis”; create a walkable metropolitan area with a high quality of life and low carbon footprint; and build a new “economic engine” for Solano County. “There’s no playbook here,” Sramek said. “What we are trying to do is really, really different.”

Before California Forever could break ground, their proposal, the East Solano Plan, needed approval from the people who already live in Solano County. Where Sramek envisioned growth, however, others warned of irreversible ecological damage. Despite launching a multimillion-dollar campaign to persuade the public to vote for the proposal in the upcoming November election, concerns continued to grow as elected officials began speaking out in opposition, and a coalition against the project formed. Local mistrust was further deepened by the company’s ongoing lawsuit against landowners who resisted their offers. In April, a poll showed that 70 percent of Solano’s voters would likely reject the measure.

On July 22, the day before the Solano County Board of Supervisors was set to decide whether to put the initiative on the November ballot, Sramek and the board agreed to retract the proposal. According to a joint statement announcing the decision, Sramek said that California Forever will try to get it on the ballot again in two years, after a report assessing the environmental impacts of the project is finished.

Other similarly minded and deep-pocketed projects have been springing up around the world. Masdar, a $20 billion planned zero-carbon city in the United Arab Emirates, has been delayed for decades and scaled back beyond recognition. Neom, the futuristic $500 billion renewable energy dream of Saudi Arabian royals, now anticipates less than a fifth of the 1.5 million residents they originally planned on. Malaysia’s Forest City, which won design awards for sustainability, has been called a ghost town. And the billionaire behind Diapers.com has big plans for Telosa somewhere in the deserts of the American West, a sprawling green energy metropolis.

These projects all seek to fulfill urban dreams of a better, environmentally friendly life by building a city from scratch. But even when the buildings exist, they fail to draw residents and, despite plans that emphasize sustainability, projects struggle to win the support of environmentalists. California Forever hopes to eventually house 400,000 people — goals comparable to those of Masdar or Neom.

“I have not seen one of this size which has been successful so far,” said Alain Bertaud, an urban planning researcher at the Marron Institute, part of New York University. “But that doesn’t mean that they will not be — there are so many in the pipeline now.”

Though Bertaud said he’s normally skeptical of proposals for these new cities, he thought California Forever’s plans looked well designed. One aspect that could help the project find success is its proximity to other Bay Area cities, he said, as the lure of the region’s job market might encourage people to move there.

But when it comes to the project’s environmental promises, he’s unconvinced — if only because it’s difficult to measure benchmarks, like carbon emissions, until a project is up and running. “I don’t doubt the dedication of people who are fighting for sustainability,” he said, “but unless you define it in a very clear way, I’m afraid that ‘sustainability’ is a self-satisfying slogan to put on whatever idea you have.”

The question of sustainability is at the heart of California Forever’s ambition and problems alike. Both backers and skeptics want to tackle the area’s housing crisis. Eye-popping rents and home prices far exceed national averages, with single-family homes going for a median price of $1.4 million. It’s one reason why the region has the third-highest homeless population behind New York City and Los Angeles.

Instead of solving these problems with a new city, California Forever’s critics would like to see more housing built in the seven cities that already exist in Solano County. “Building housing in existing communities is one of our best climate solutions, and paving over 17,000 acres of non-irrigated farmland is not,” said Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research at the Greenbelt Alliance. The nonprofit, along with the Center for Biological Diversity and the California Sierra Club, is one of the 16 groups in Solano Together, the coalition that opposes the project.

Wilson says that the development threatens both the area’s potential for storing carbon in the soil and local biodiversity, and also risks leading to more pollution from people driving to work in nearby cities. And although California Forever holds water rights that could support the first 40,000 residents, Solano Together says that these don’t accurately reflect water availability. Securing a reliable supply, they argue, would be challenging in a region so prone to drought.

By starting from scratch, however, California Forever says their plans could avoid the baggage of urban problems like car-centric design and gas utilities, making it easier to support dense housing and run on renewable power. “Our plan will be the lowest per capita carbon emissions anywhere on the planet. It’s going to be pretty transformational,” said Bronson Johnson, the company’s head of infrastructure and sustainability, who added that he’s spent years grappling with barriers to retrofit existing cities. “I think when we look at the greater good of this project, that far outweighs local impacts,” Johnson said.

But the voters need convincing. After The New York Times named many of the investors behind the project — including Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn cofounder, and Michael Moritz, a prominent venture capitalist — in August 2023, California Forever began working to bring residents over to their side in time for the 2024 election. By May, the company had spent some $2 million on its campaign and gathered enough signatures to qualify their initiative for the ballot.

Cows graze on a parcel of land near Rio Vista located in Solano County.

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Justin Sullivan

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Getty Images

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In weeks leading up to the Solano County board meeting in July, an economic report by the business-backed Bay Area Council touted the potential jobs and housing benefits, saying that the county could increase employment in high-earning sectors by 53 percent. Meanwhile, the company proposed putting a lagoon right in the middle of the new town, “open to everyone from Solano County.”

Five days before the meeting, the county released its own assessment that said the initiative lacked details on key issues, such as infrastructure funding, traffic impacts, and water supply. Many of these unknowns would be clarified by an environmental impact report required under California law, which the company had said it planned to conduct after residents voted. According to county officials, it was this omission, and the lack of a binding development agreement, that ultimately tanked the proposal.

“This politicized the entire project, made it difficult for us and our staff to work with them, and forced everyone in our community to take sides,” said Mitch Mashburn, chair of the Solano County Board of Supervisors, in the statement announcing that the plan would be put on hold. According to the statement, Sramek and Mashburn came to the decision together after agreeing that the timing of the proposal had become unrealistic.

“I want to acknowledge that many Solano residents are excited about Mr. Sramek’s optimism about a California that builds again. He is also right that we cannot solve our jobs, housing, and energy challenges if every project takes a decade or more to break ground,” Mashburn said in the statement.

Solano Together heralded the news as a win. Wilson said that even though an environmental impact report would clear up many of the coalition’s questions, especially around water supply, the location of the development still poses what she considers an intractable environmental problem. “It is a vibrant landscape that supports our food systems, our environment, our water systems,” she said.
Sarah Moser, an urban geography researcher at the University of McGill in Montreal, said it makes sense that sparsely populated agricultural lands and deserts are appealing for mega developments like the proposed East Solano Plan because they’ll encounter less opposition. But by building on undeveloped land, “by definition, you’re going to incur a carbon debt that you may never be able to pay off,” she said.

Although Moser thinks it’s logistically possible to build a city from scratch, she says that such projects are increasingly high risk, with unattainable goals. “You can make affordable housing, or you can make money, but you can’t do both,” Moser said, adding that California Forever’s for-profit model fits into a broader pattern of “rich people getting richer” in the urban mega developments she has studied.

And perhaps the most important ingredient necessary to successfully build a new city is the very thing that stands in the way: people.

The promise of a city built on ideals isn’t enough to fill it with people, Bertaud said. There has to be an existing community of people, culture, entertainment, and jobs that draw people there. It’s a chicken-or-egg problem unique to starting from scratch. “Why would you go to a city where there is nobody?” he said.

Susan Bustamante isn’t giving up.

The formerly incarcerated 71-year-old woman has repeatedly made the long trip from Orange County to Sacramento to urge lawmakers to pass legislation she believes would help her fellow domestic abuse victims facing criminal charges.

Each time, lawmakers seemed supportive — and then killed her bill in secret.

She hopes the fourth year in a row will be different.

Bustamante is again pushing for a measure, which police and prosecutors oppose, that would allow survivors of human trafficking and intimate partner or sexual violence to cite their abuse as a legal defense when facing charges for violent crimes, with the exception of most murder cases.

Those already convicted could also petition a judge to vacate their convictions. If the judge approves, their arrests and convictions would be treated as though they never happened. Their case files would be sealed and destroyed. Any fines and unpaid restitution to victims would be waived.

“I’m willing to fight for those who are not in the position that I am right now to be able to open my mouth and … fight for this,” she told CalMatters in an interview on Friday.

In 1987, Bustamante was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors alleged she hired her brother to kill her husband, Steven Bustamante, and helped dispose of his body for a $100,000 life insurance payout she split with her sibling.

Bustamante said she wasn’t allowed to tell jurors in her two-day trial about how her husband beat her and repeatedly threatened to kill her. She said she only asked her brother for help.

“The idea that he would kill Steven never occurred to me,” she told lawmakers last month. “Later, he called me to say that Steven was dead. He threatened to call the police and say I planned it. He blackmailed me for Steven’s insurance. I was afraid of having my daughters taken from me, so I gave in.”

Former California Gov. Jerry Brown commuted Bustamante’s sentence in 2017 after learning her story and reviewing her spotless prison record. Bustamante was freed the next year after three decades behind bars.

Bustamante said she would not qualify to have her case vacated under the measure.

California law already allows defendants to cite abuse they experienced and call in expert witnesses who can explain how their suffering affected their behavior. Judges also can factor in a defendant’s history with human trafficking and domestic violence during sentencing. This bill takes it further by allowing them to cite their abuse as a legal defense when charged with a violent crime.

California law also allows those charged with or convicted of nonviolent offenses to petition courts for similar legal relief.

Appropriations committees kill bills

In the years since her release, Bustamante got involved with nonprofits that help people such as her navigate their past abuse and incarceration as they seek to reintegrate into life outside of prison.

Bustamante first testified before the Legislature about the need for the bill in 2023.

Since then, each year at least one of the Legislature’s two public safety committees approved similar legislation before an appropriations committee killed it.

Twice a year, the Legislature’s two appropriations committees meet to quickly and with no debate kill hundreds of bills.

As CalMatters has reported, powerful special-interest groups, the governor’s office and state agencies secretly lobby the committees to kill bills. Legislative leaders also use the committees to kill politically touchy measures that lawmakers prefer not to go on record voting against in public hearings.

The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to hear Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s abuse bill next month.

Riverside Democratic Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, the new chairperson of the Senate Appropriations Committee, declined to comment through a spokesperson.

Why DAs and police oppose

Law enforcement officials fear Bonta’s Assembly Bill 910 would allow violent criminals, including rapists, kidnappers and child molesters, to burden California’s backlogged judiciary system with a rash of petitions to vacate their convictions.

They say it’s an especially troubling example of how progressive Democrats keep trying to water down penalties for dangerous criminals, with little thought to their victims.

“To basically allow them to walk away from a violent crime in terms of accountability is just absurd policy,” said Greg Totten, a former Ventura County district attorney who heads the state’s DA association.

Totten noted that defendants already have the right to argue they were abused or trafficked during sentencing hearings.

Bonta didn’t return an interview request, but she told the Senate Public Safety Committee last month that “AB 910 is a second chance bill, a dignity bill.”

“Survivors should not spend their lives paying for abuse they endured,” she said.

At least 17 organizations, including ACLU California Action and the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, support the bill, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database.

Supporters argue hardly anyone convicted of violent crimes actually would qualify under the proposed new law.

For the few who do, advocates say it would be much cheaper to allow abuse victims to reintegrate into society without their felony convictions being used against them as they look for jobs, housing and other support.

“If even one person is granted relief under this bill, it will pay for itself,” said Leigh LaChapelle, director of policy and advocacy at the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A legal nonprofit has released a report to help medical professionals care for the growing number of people who are showing up at hospitals in the custody of federal immigration agents.

Currently, there are about 65,000 people in ICE detention. Since January 2025, dozens of detainees have died, and many have complained about the lack of medical care in the detention centers that dot the country. As the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign continues, the number of detainees is expected to increase.

The report was created by the National Immigration Law Center, a nonprofit that works to defend the rights of immigrants with low incomes. Last week, the report’s authors gathered for a conversation facilitated by Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who focuses on the U.S. immigration system.

Kocher said he held the panel to help people consider how mass deportation touches all kinds of institutions that people might not normally think about, from schools to churches to hospitals.

Geared toward doctors, nurses and hospital administrators, the report provides guidance on how to uphold patients’ rights and the institution’s ability to provide quality care.

In the report, the authors describe the experience of a man who sustained serious injuries during a workplace raid in early 2026. For more than a month, they said, immigration agents stayed in the patient’s hospital room — “day and night.”

The agents also controlled when the patient could speak to his lawyer, his family and his medical team. And although the patient had a broken leg, the officers “insisted on shackling him to his bed.”

Experiences like these raise urgent, practical questions the authors seek to answer for their colleagues, including:

• Can a nurse call the family of a patient in ICE or CBP custody?
• Can a doctor ask an immigration officer to leave the room during a physical examination?
• Can ICE or CBP force a hospital to discharge a patient who is not medically stable?

To this end, the report provides an overview of the laws and policies that pertain to patients in civil detention.

It also includes sample scripts to help doctors, nurses and other staff have legally valid, assertive conversations with federal agents when making requests, including asking for privacy to conduct examinations and the removal of handcuffs and other restraints. Through a summary of law enforcement agencies’ chain of command, medical professionals also learn how to escalate an issue if federal immigration agents refuse to comply.

Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the nonprofit and one of the report’s authors, stressed the importance of approaching the planning without being “unnecessarily combative.”

“The last thing we want with this report going out in the world is to de-incentivize ICE bringing people in for care,” she said.

Through an unnamed spokesperson, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and CBP, said that when federal agents take detainees to the hospital for medical care, "officers accompany them for their monitoring, safety of the staff, and the public."

Navigating a climate of fear

The report also notes that immigrants who have permission to work in the U.S. could be part of hospital staff. This includes people with a green card, visa, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), who have also been subject to detention and even deportation. Authors warn that some people may assume that immigration officers are only interested in undocumented immigrants, but agency practice suggests otherwise.

“When there's an ICE officer who's walking around, oftentimes in plain clothes but armed, that has a chilling effect on everyone in that hospital,” Ibañez Whitlock said.

Theresa Cheng, a civil rights attorney and emergency physician at UCSF who also authored the report, described the dread she’s felt treating detained patients in the company of federal immigration agents — "right next to the pediatric emergency room waiting [area].” For Cheng and her colleagues, the fear of watching others get detained has become part of their working conditions.

As a result, the report also walks medical professionals through the importance of establishing clearly-defined private areas and protocols on how to proceed if an immigration agent arrives with a patient. The authors stress that hospitals should prepare everyone at their respective facilities to interact with immigration officers, including non-medical staff.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

California prisons are increasingly relying on an unusual fire alarm system: humans.

Between 2020 and 2025, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spent nearly $50 million on “fire watch” staffing costs. In recent years, prison employees have spent roughly 270,000 hours monitoring for smoke or fire.

They patrol prisons and visually inspect different areas during their shifts, according to job postings reviewed by CalMatters.

That’s because the majority of California’s 31 prisons have deficient fire alarm systems and it would cost $1.5 billion to replace them all, according to the department’s annual report submitted in January.

In the face of outdated, malfunctioning and inoperable fire alarm systems, the Office of the State Fire Marshal ordered the department to run fire watch coverage until it repairs or replaces its fire alarm systems.

“This process has come at a significant expense to the department in staff costs for fire watch coverage,” corrections officials wrote in a recent $15.2 million budget request to support next year’s coverage.

It’s a drop in the bucket for the department’s $14.6 billion budget, but costs continue to balloon.

The department in June said it was on track to spend roughly $40 million for last year’s fire watch coverage, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. That’s roughly $25 million over its budgeted authority, the office said.

Replacing a single prison’s fire alarm system costs between $3 million and $87 million, according to estimates in the system’s facilities master plan.

Caitlin O’Neil, who monitors the corrections budget as a principal fiscal and policy analyst at the Legislative Analyst’s Office, said the department has historically used correctional officers for fire coverage because the assignment requires keys and access to move about the prison freely. Their fire watch hours are typically coded to overtime.

The base pay for an experienced correctional officer is $9,647 a month, according to a 2024 salary survey.

But O’Neil said the department is exploring whether it can achieve fire watch coverage with a lower cost job classification — recognizing that correctional officers have more capabilities than just looking for fires. According to O’Neil, the department is piloting a fire watch program at Solano State Prison. There, fire watch positions are classified as an “office assistant” and report to a correctional sergeant.

The pay for that position tops out at $4,357 a month, according to a job ad.

Royal Ramey, a formerly incarcerated firefighter who co-founded the nonprofit organization Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program, said fire safety inside correctional institutions is non-negotiable.

“People who are incarcerated, as well as the staff inside these facilities, deserve reliable systems and strong emergency protections that keep everyone safe,” he said. “In situations involving fire emergency response, there can be no gaps in protection. But the priority must also remain protecting lives while continuing to advance permanent and reliable infrastructure solutions.”

But Matt Cate, who was California’s corrections secretary under former Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, said he was skeptical about the spending because people are paid to stand around and look for a problem that doesn’t exist.

“Large-scale fires in prisons are extremely rare because prisons are made of concrete and steel,” he said. “There’s a fire department attached to each prison and there are people throughout the prison who are there all the time. It’s staffed 24-7.”

According to Cate, the state has “very strict” regulations to manage fire risk in prisons. He said that puts the department in a position of either upgrading its fire alarm systems for hundreds of millions of dollars or requesting incremental cash each year to meet those regulations.

“It’s a little like deciding, do we buy the house or do we rent?” Cate said. “It's ultimately the governor's office and the Legislature who have to decide how much to invest versus how much to plug the problem through adding additional staff.”

Kristen Cowan, who studies the impacts of extreme weather disasters in prisons and jails as an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo, said she did not know it was legal for prisons to have inoperable fire alarm systems.

“This is baseline disaster preparedness,” she said. “It’s certainly concerning to know that that (technology) is missing. It makes you wonder what else is missing in the facilities.”

Cowan said the department’s reliance on fire watch positions in lieu of up-to-date technology could create big delays in fire detection, risking more injuries, deaths and detrimental health impacts from smoke exposure.

“We wouldn’t let anyone else live in a place that doesn’t have a smoke detector,” she said.

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Federal prosecutors filed a motion Monday to drop their case against labor leader David Huerta, a year after he was arrested protesting an ICE raid in downtown L.A. last summer. His arrest was one of the most dramatic moments of last summer, sparking a firestorm of criticism.

The federal government had charged Huerta, who leads Service Employees International Union California, with a misdemeanor, accusing him of obstructing, resisting, or opposing a federal officer during the first day of immigration sweeps across the region. Prosecutors had originally charged him with a felony, which carried a maximum sentence of six years in prison.

The charge against Huerta goes back to June 6, 2025, when he showed up at Ambiance Apparel in downtown L.A., a workplace where federal authorities were executing a warrant. He was arrested and held for three nights in the Metropolitan Detention Center Los Angeles.

In the original criminal complaint filed in June, a federal agent described Huerta and others gathering outside of a gate at the workplace "effectively preventing law enforcement vehicles from entering or exiting the premises through the gate to execute the search warrant."

According to SEIU, Huerta was injured during his arrest and treated at a hospital while in federal custody. The union said that he was exercising his First Amendment right to document law enforcement.

"It has been the objective of my attorneys to defend me against an administration that has violated the very foundation of our civil rights as a society and country," Huerta said in a statement provided by SEIU. "Our motions exposed a case that never should have been brought because it violated my constitutional rights."

Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, said in a statement that the criminal case against Huerta should be fully dismissed by the end of the month. McEvoy said Huerta had "been compliant" with the terms of his bond.

"The Department of Justice does not arrest people for peacefully protesting," he said in a statement.