Jan Sramek, the CEO behind the controversial California Forever Project, appeared Thursday at Bloomberg’s annual tech conference in San Francisco. He was invited into a less-than-friendly discussion with one of the magazine’s reporters, Karen Breslau. For the most part, Sramek tried to keep it together as he was asked a series of pointed questions about his quixotic project.
California Forever is a proposed project in Solano County, California that will build a brand new city on thousands of acres of farmland in the Bay Area. Flannery Associates, the company behind the project, secretly purchased properties for years but revealed its true intentions after scrutiny from the news media. In one case where some longtime landowners initially refused to sell to the company, California Forever accused them of “price fixing.” and sued them. Since then, the lawsuit has been a sore point between the local community and the developers. On Thursday, Breslau brought up the lawsuit and asked Sramek why it was a good idea.
“Then you sued a number of long-time landowners in Solano County – you filed a federal antitrust lawsuit – accusing them of price fixing and collusion… That case is still in federal bankruptcy court. These are your future neighbors. What did you think you were doing?”
“It was a difficult decision, but we have laws that protect against this type of behavior,” Sramek finally responded, calling the farmers the company had sued a “price-fixing ring.”
“What law says you take me to court if you want my property and I don’t want to sell it to you?” Breslau shot back.
“There is no such law,” admitted Sramek. “What we have a law against is that when the six gas stations in town get together and say they’re charging $50 for gas, there’s price fixing against that, and we’ve had real emails and real text messages between landowners.” Hey, we want to sell to these people, but if we all get together and agree on a higher price, we can get more money.”
Breslau later asked Sramek whether the local community supported the project or not. Locals have been particularly vocal at local “town hall” meetings about the project Sramek kept shouting. “There is a lot of discontent in the region [about the project], there is also a lot of curiosity. “It’s very mixed,” Breslau said.
Sramek claimed that many people in Solano County supported the project. “We have so many supporters who are third, fourth and fifth generations living in Solano County. We have nurses, doctors and teachers, we have elected officials now,” Sramek said. “We are now at a point where people are preaching the gospel to their neighbors and dispelling all of this misinformation that the no-growth or anti-growth forces have spread in the county,” he said.
“Is there anything you would do differently?” asked Breslau towards the end of the conversation.
Sramek said that any time you build something of this magnitude, “of course you’re going to make a lot of mistakes along the way.”