Suisun City Annexation Could Provide "Bargaining Chip" for California Forever
- Josh Stephens
- Feb 22, 2025
- 4 min read
In the two years since plans for a new city of potentially hundreds of thousands of people in Solano County were leaked, the project has already cycled through several names: Flannery Associates, California Forever, and the East Solano Plan.
If the latest suppositions are true, it could gain yet another: East Suisun City.
Last month, the city council of Suisun City — a city of 28,000 in the southwest corner of Solano County — voted 4-1 to study the annexation of potentially all land within its sphere of influence. That would encompass a trapezoidal area east of the city and south of Travis Air Force Base. It includes some of the 60,000 acres owned by Flannery Associates throughout unincorporated portions of the county and would abut a major industrial development planned by the company.
“We gave direction to begin conversations with our local partners like (the Local Agency Formation Commission),” said Suisun City Mayor Alma Hernandez, who sits on the LAFCO board and brought the item to council. Those conversations will cover “all the areas within our sphere of influence.”
She insisted that the city and Flannery Associates have had essentially no contact with each other, with Flannery collaborating more closely with cities such as Fairfield and Vallejo in their ballot measure campaign, including promised investments in those cities.
Suisun City is financially distressed with little infill opportunity. Annexation could enable the city to gain jurisdiction over a portion of the East Solano Plan, which has, thus far, failed to receive support from the county Board of Supervisors or and has not yet been submitted to county voters (California Forever’s backers pulled a proposed ballot measure a few months ago; see related CP&DR coverage). The move could enable a portion of the plan to go forward purely through municipal action. The East Solano Plan envisions a mixed-use, New Urbanist-style city to the east of its proposed industrial zone.
