by Ethan Baron : mercurynews – excerpt (includes audio)

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The CEO of a contentious plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaires for a utopia in Solano County refused to back down from a $510 million lawsuit against property owners, as he faced a mistrustful crowd of local residents.

Former Wall Street investor Jan Sramek on Tuesday addressed about 150 ranchers and other locals at the American Legion hall in Rio Vista, a hamlet of 10,000 people on the Sacramento River near Antioch. His company, California Forever, billed the gathering as a town hall to inform the public and gather feedback about the plan to build a new city with tens of thousands of homes in the next 35 to 40 years.

In jeans, scuffed brown dress shoes and an open-necked gray button-up shirt, Sramek highlighted his “blue-collar” background in the Czech Republic — mechanic father, teacher mother — and noted that “a series of scholarships” led to his degrees from the United Kingdom’s prestigious University of Cambridge and London School of Economics. He said he left Goldman Sachs, “where shifting pieces of paper around” was “a really easy way to make money,” after 20 months to co-found an “education company to help people train and acquire new skills.”

California Forever, founded in 2017 and funded by billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz and fellow billionaires LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs, raised hackles in rural Solano County by keeping their plan secret while buying up tens of thousands of acres, much of the land agricultural, then suing dozens of landowners in May for $510 million in damages over claims that through “endless greed” they conspired to jack up the sale prices of their properties…(more)

How do we send the billionaire venture capitalists back to the paper shuffling jobs? Under which laws is the case being filed? Where is the protection for the US Airforce and the public parks? Must the state legislature specify a distance from sensitive areas to protect them from encroachment by millionaires? The Governor is already trying to raid the Bay’s natural water supply that will be needed to keep the salt water flushed out of the Bay. The real question is priorities. Why is the our government that claims to be deeply in debt continuing to spend money against us while begging for more? ourneighborhoodvoices.com should find a lot of fans in Solano County.