| | | | |  | | By Will McCarthy and Emily Schultheis | |  California Forever CEO Jan Sramek argues “the point here was never to win an election; the point was to build something really great with the people of Solano County.” | Janie Har/AP Photo | MOVED QUICKLY AND BROKE THINGS — A week after pulling the East Solano Plan initiative off the county ballot, California Forever CEO Jan Sramek concedes his ambitious, high-spending project to remake the Bay Area exurbs could have benefited from a little patience unfamiliar to its Silicon Valley backers. “We probably went too far in the direction of optimizing for the speed,” Sramek told Playbook in an interview. “The point here was never to win an election; the point was to build something really great with the people of Solano County.” The measure would have rezoned 17,500 acres of land for development so Sramek’s group could begin building a dense, 400,000-person city on what used to be farmland within the next couple of years. Although Sramek believes that timeline is still within reach, he said California Forever was hamstrung by elected officials who attacked the proposal as a “hostile takeover” by wealthy outsiders and left the highly-funded, well-staffed operation fighting an uphill battle to convince voters of a fundamentally logical project. “Solano has this long tradition of directing development into existing areas. We agree with this policy. But why is seven cities the absolutely perfect number — and if you add an eighth city, hell is going to break loose?” Sramek said. “We're trying to solve intractable problems.” The experience represented Sramek’s first introduction to local California politics. A Czech Republic-born entrepreneur and former Goldman Sachs trader, Sramek first envisioned the project nearly a decade ago and over several years coordinated real-estate purchases through a front company that intentionally obscured its backers’ ambitions. As a result, many Solano residents first learned about the plans for a new community through rumors of foreign spies and lawsuits aimed at holdout landowners. "I think the secrecy didn’t help,” he said. “If we could have purchased the property otherwise we would have … But when I was buying my house I didn’t go to the town square and start yelling about how it’s a good deal and everyone should buy it." By the time Sramek and his fellow investors (tech-sector luminaries including the co-founders of LinkedIn and Netscape) revealed the vision behind the land purchases, a formidable grassroots opposition was emerging to fight the project. The decision to pull it from the November ballot represents a simple reordering of steps, according to California Forever officials, who pledge to conduct an environmental impact report and enter into a development agreement with the county before returning to the ballot in 2026. “I completely understand people being skeptical and wanting to be shown it’s a good plan,” Sramek said. “I don’t understand the vitriol from day one.” NEWS BREAK: Magnitude 4.9 earthquake shakes Southern California … Borel Fire destroys historic mining town …Weather conditions for the 370,000-acre Park Fire are expected to worsen this week. Welcome to Ballot Measure Weekly, a special edition of Playbook PM every Monday focused on California’s lively realm of ballot measure campaigns. Drop us a line at eschultheis@politico.com and wmccarthy@politico.com, or find us on X — @emilyrs and @wrmccart.
|  | TOP OF THE TICKET | | A highly subjective ranking of the ballot measures getting our attention this week. 1. PROP 5: The Yes on 5 campaign for the public-housing constitutional amendment rolls out its campaign team today, Playbook has learned exclusively. Veteran ballot-measure hand Ned Wigglesworth will take charge, alongside a large chunk of Newsomworld: the governor’s longtime “Swiss-army knife” adviser Jason Elliott; pollster David Binder; former press staffer Amelia Matier; and campaign strategists Ace Smith, Sean Clegg and Juan Rodriguez of Bearstar Strategies. The campaign says it kicks off with $5 million in the bank. 2. PROP 4: The team behind a bond that would invest billions into wildfire prevention, water and flood control, plus coastal resilience is expected to begin making its first major hires this week as the campaign pledging to fortify California against climate change gets into gear. 3. RICHMOND OIL TAX: The energy giant Chevron began to push back on a proposed initiative that would tax the company $1 for every barrel of oil refined within Richmond city limits. Speaking to reporters last Thursday, a company spokesperson said the “unfair” tax would put a large percentage of the city’s revenue stream at risk. 4. PROP 36: Vice President Kamala Harris will share the California ballot this year with the tough-on-crime initiative to roll back parts of 2014’s Prop 47. The two already have some history: As state attorney general, Harris refused to take a stand on both Props 47 and 57, which in 2016 facilitated early release for prisoners. As our own Jeremy B. White and Emily report today, Harris may have a harder time keeping criminal justice debates at arm’s length as a presidential candidate than she did as AG. 5. PROP 33: The AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s rent control campaign known as “Housing is a Human Right” is making an effort to tie its opponents to former President Donald Trump. Last week, the group released a report on the Blackstone Group, whose CEO Stephen Schwarzman backs Trump’s reelection, alleging that the company circuitously funds efforts to defeat AHF’s political initiatives with the goal of protecting its real-estate investments. 6. ABORTION PROTECTIONS (San Francisco): Abortion will be on the ballot for at least some California voters this fall. A San Francisco initiative backed by Mayor London Breed will ask the city’s voters for support to set up a fund to promote abortion-access services and prohibit the use of city dollars to assist prosecutions by other states that have criminalized their residents traveling for abortion procedures elsewhere. 7. BOARD OF SUPERVISORS EXPANSION (L.A. County): Leaders in the state’s most populous county will vote Tuesday on whether to advance a proposed charter amendment that would drastically change the structure of local government, expanding the all-powerful Board of Supervisors from five to nine members.
| | DOWN BALLOT | | ON OTHER BALLOTS: Backers of an abortion-rights measure in Montana said they have enough signatures to qualify the issue for the ballot … Republicans in Arizona plan to appeal after a judge rejected their effort to include the phrase “unborn human being” in the voter guide description of an abortion-rights constitutional amendment … Voters in Amarillo, Texas, will weigh in on a measure to designate the city a “sanctuary city for the unborn,” which bans helping patients travel through the city to get an abortion. Election officials in Nevada announced that a proposed constitutional amendment requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls has been certified for November’s ballot … A proposal to end ranked-choice voting in Alaska still has enough signatures to appear on the ballot after a judge disqualified some of the signature booklets.
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| … SAN BENITO COUNTY: Mary and Andrew Hsia-Coron wish their rolling, pastoral county would be more like Napa, Sonoma and Ventura. The key to that success, the married pair of retired educators believe, is taking development decisions away from politicians and handing them to citizens. The couple’s Campaign to Protect San Benito is returning to the ballot this November with an initiative that would require voters to approve any rezoning of agricultural, rural or range land for development. It is modeled on similar slow-growth laws in other California counties that the Hsia-Corons celebrate for leveraging their sprawling open space into agricultural and eco-tourism opportunities. San Benito has been one of the fastest-growing counties in California in the last half-decade, even as other parts of the Bay Area have lost population. The ballot initiative lays blame for San Benito’s overcrowded schools and deteriorating roads on county supervisors, who the initiative says have ignored voters' wishes regarding land use and growth. “We’ve done this as a way for the people to have some serious say about how development affects their lives,” Andrew Hsia-Coron said. “Our supervisors have said we don’t care what you want and don’t want.” The Campaign to Protect San Benito, which had previously organized to ban fracking, has spent years tweaking its slow-growth proposal, which elected officials say would starve the county of sustainable revenue and make it more difficult to fund services. In 2022, a similar initiative was rejected by county voters after being significantly outspent by an opposition funded primarily by Newport Pacific Land Company, a Southern California-based real estate developer. Since then, the campaign has adjusted the initiative’s wording to prevent opponents from claiming it would block all new commercial development. It’s unclear if those changes will lead to a different outcome at the ballot box this year. “If anyone is not listening to the voters, it's this initiative group,” said Supervisor Angela Curro.
| | BLAST FROM THE PAST | | This year Proposition 6 is a constitutional amendment referred to the ballot by lawmakers to ban slavery and involuntary servitude in California, including prison labor. In the past, the same number has been used for measures that would … Prohibit vaccine requirements for schools and jobs (1920, failed) … Require police officers to take an oath promising not to overthrow the government (1952, passed) … Make all meetings of the Legislature public (1974, passed) … Authorize school boards to fire teachers suspected of being gay or lesbian (1978, failed) … Ban killing horses for human consumption (1998, passed).
| | THE Q&A | | WITH TOM HILTACHK: We just got our first look at how the 10 ballot measures will be packaged for voters this fall. The secretary of state released the first version of the voter information guide last week, including the ballot title and label generated by the attorney general and fiscal analysis prepared by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Campaigns now have until Aug. 12 to challenge aspects of that before the Voter Information Guide is finalized. We spoke with attorney Tom Hiltachk, a ballot-measure specialist who has counted Prop 36 and Taxpayer Protection Act backers among this year’s clients, about when and why disagreements over these elements end up in court. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) How do you make a decision about whether to sue over ballot language? There is a legal standard written in the law, so that is really the formula for this. The way I think about it is: If it’s factually wrong, then you sue, because wrong is wrong. And there are many examples where the AG’s office just got it wrong. It could be super important, it could be hyper-technical, but wrong is wrong. “Wrong” is often a matter of interpretation, right? Yes: About the legal aspects of what the initiative does or doesn’t do, or how it relates to existing law or doesn't relate to existing law. But if it's a coin toss, you know, maybe you want to litigate to make it clear for the future that that interpretation is the interpretation that was intended. There's a good example: Prop 25 [in 2010] changed the voting threshold to enact the budget from two-thirds to a majority vote. There was legal concern or confusion about whether that would affect taxes that were enacted as part of the budget. Clarity on that in the ballot materials was actually important to the proponents of Prop 25 and the opponents. Everybody wanted it to be clear that we weren't changing the vote thresholds to enact taxes. Is there ever a reason to go to court over this even if you think it’s unlikely you can win? I don't think there's much voter benefit to suing the AG just to make a point. But look, if it means a difference between winning or not winning — or $50 million versus $20 million — then a lawsuit that takes a week to start and finish might be worth it, even if the odds are long.
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