The annexation route explained, and why Vacaville doesn't get a vote on it either
A Vacaville resident called Mary Heiser told Jan Sramek at a town hall that he needed to work on his soft skills. That line stuck with me, so I went through the Solano County growth rules, the Suisun Expansion application and the CEQA filings to understand what she was actually objecting to. Posting what I found in case it's useful. I made a video about it too, linked at the bottom, but the substance is all here.
The rule everyone knows about
Solano County has had an orderly growth ordinance since 1984, reaffirmed by voters as recently as 2008. It requires a countywide vote before agriculturally zoned land in unincorporated areas converts to urban use. That word is doing a lot of work.
The part that gets left out
The ordinance only reaches unincorporated land. Annex a parcel into an existing city and the county rule stops applying to it. Solano County's own administrator, Bill Emlen, has said on the record that if a city successfully annexed the land, California Forever would not be required to present its plan to Solano voters.
So in late 2025 the company applied to annex roughly 22,873 acres into Suisun City. The decision would ultimately go to LAFCO, the Local Agency Formation Commission, under the Cortese-Knox-Hertzberg Act.
The safety valve, and why it's narrow here
Residents of an annexed area can force a protest hearing. But California Forever owns nearly all of the land in question, which makes organising objections difficult in practice. LAFCO's own deputy executive has described protest hearings as usually not a big deal, because developers either work with the property owners or already own the land.
What this doesn't mean
It does not mean review disappears. The environmental impact report is still coming, Suisun City still has to approve, revenue-sharing still has to be negotiated, and LAFCO still has to sign off. What changes is which body decides, and which electorate — if any — gets a vote.
The bit I keep coming back to
The 2024 ballot measure qualified, and was then withdrawn on 22 July 2024, one day before the county supervisors were due to vote on it. Everyone remembers that as a defeat at the polls. It wasn't. No Solano County voter has ever cast a ballot on this project, and under the current route none will.
Polling on it is contested and worth treating carefully. A January 2026 poll of 400 likely Suisun City voters, commissioned by an opposition group, found 58% opposed, rising to 65% after hearing arguments from both sides. California Forever's own countywide poll of 800 voters, run in April, found 51% support rising to 59%. Each poll favoured the side that commissioned it, which is normal and not an accusation. Neither is binding.
Where it stands
The draft EIR still hasn't been released. Suisun expects to finish annexation and EIR processing by the end of 2026, followed by a 60-day comment period. That comment period is the realistic window for public input, and it's worth knowing it's coming.
I made a documentary going through the whole sequence from 2018 onward if you want the longer version, but the above is the part I thought was most worth having on its own: https://youtu.be/NkXKp6zTGV8